Walking By Faith

Dear friends and family, After three months of lectures and fundraising, and weeks of preparation, today our Atlanta DTS is off to Argentina for our two-month outreach! Please pray today for our travels, safety and team unity. Our thirteen member team is currently split up. Three members left on a separate flight this morning, and the other 10 of us will meet up with them in the Mexico City airport  this evening. From there, we will all fly together to Buenos Aires, Argentina. We should arrive  at 11am  on New Year's Eve and local YWAM staff will meet us at the airport.  We look forward to celebrating the New Year with the YWAM base that will be hosting us there! I cannot emphasize enough how valuable your prayer support is to our team. Thank you for blessing us so! We are so excited for what God is doing on this trip. We look forward to sharing the journey with you. Many many thanks from all of us!

Fun illustration for sharing your faith!  It is hard to believe just 3 months ago I was sitting here in my living room getting ready to start a whole new adventure.  And what an amazing 3 months it has been!  Last week we had a guy named Bob Felder come speak to us on evangelism.  This was such a refreshing week because many people (including myself) think of it in a negative light but he brought a whole new perspective to it.  Evangelism is all about sharing the good news!  We as Christians have the best news ever to share so evangelism just means us as Christians sharing the good news!  Our good news is priceless and God's plan!  The best part of all is God goes with us and He wants people saved more than we do!  People don't share their faith because of fear! However we tend to think fear is bad but in reality it is good.  Fear is an emotion that can be overcame!  It gives us the opportunity to be courageous!  We were taught a pretty easy way to share our faith called Th

 I know it has been a while since I posted last and so much has happened since then!   Things have been very crazy as we are trying to prepare for our two-month outreach to Argentina.   We are in our last week of lecture phase and we will be all heading home for Christmas and then returning to head out to Argentina.   Since I last posted we had a week of teaching on Inductive Bible Study... Highly Recommend! In this week we learned all about how to get the most we can out of our Bibles.   The lady teaching on it was a South African lady named Retha.   It was so amazing to hear her read and talk about the Bible because she truly made it come alive.   She told stories from it as if they were from personal experience.   I know for me sometimes I forget that the Bible is a book of history about people just like you and me.   The people who wrote it were just like you and me.   This is something kind of hard for me to wrap my head around but she really showed me

There is so much to talk about from this past week!   We had a wonderful lady, Sarah Lanier, come and talk to us Monday-Wednesday on engaging cross culturally!   I found this topic very intriguing because I plan on visiting many different cultures in my lifetime!   She had so many great thought provoking things to say but I only will be able to mention a couple things here!   One big thing from her teaching was unity!   In John 17 starting in verse 20 Jesus talks about how we are suppose to be one with each other as Jesus is one with God.   It was really interesting because she was saying one of the biggest ways people get burned out of something is when they have a team that argues.   Strife in the Bible is listed along side murder.   God does not like it and there is no grace/presence of God when a team is fighting.   We must constantly die to ourselves and put others first!    Another big thing that struck me was when she was talking about people’s values.   Ever

Talk about one intense week! How about the topic of Spiritual Warfare!  This is probably one of the least favorite topics for most Christians but when in reality it is such an uplifting subject!!  A crazy fact is that we all are living in spiritual warfare whether we want to admit it or not.  There really is a devil and demons.  People really can be possessed and attacked! BUT, THE POWER OF GOD IS SO MUCH GREATER!!! Half the battle of spiritual warfare is realizing it exists! We watched Dean Sherman's videos on this topic and when all was said and done I ended the week with 13 pages of notes!  My mind was blown after every teaching!  It was a great encouragement to me to have spiritual warfare put into perspective!  Since I have been here I have developed a real hatred towards the devil!  I knew going into this week that I wanted God to work through me to save people from the lies and bondage from the devil but I was a little fearful about what it was going to consist of.  So the

Getting ready to worship!! I am finding it really hard to believe that we are already over half way down with our lecture phase of DTS!  The time here is flying by!  We just arrived back at our base today after spending the week in Talladega, Alabama for the YWAM Southeast Conference!  It was a really great week!  There were about 10 different bases there equally about 400 people total!  The teaching of the week was lead by a guy named Paul Hawkins and he spoke on the Nature and Character of God!  (If you ever get the chance to hear him speak live or from an audio...DO IT!)  My mind was literally blown after every teaching!!!! (The week was recorded and I will get a copy if anyone is interested in hearing it I would be happy to pass it along!) I want to share some key points that he spoke on this week: - First thing he pointed out is that, what you believe about God determines what you believe about   everything else.   - Cool thing is God awakes us every morning!  He knows o

Last week we had a wonderful couple come to our base and teach on Destiny!  They are such an inspirational couple of God!  Their ministry is called Streams of Mercy where they sponsor orphanages and medical clinics all over the world!  They not only sponsor these places but they build relationships with these places and the children!  It was very awesome for me to know that God creates ministries like theirs that provide financial need to orphanages!  So if I have my own orphanage one day then I could possible partner up with a ministry like this and not have to necessary deal with the financial part of it!  Visit their website:  http://www.streamsofmercy.org/ Something to think about: There are 143 Million orphans in this world but there are more Christian families.  If every Christian family adopted 1 orphan there would be no more orphans in this world!  Them just coming was great but the teaching was also so wonderful too!  Destiny is a pretty fun thing to talk about when you kn

"Intimacy with God" was the topic for this week and what a great week it was!  It blows my mind how many Christians are in this world but don't have an intimate relationship with the Lord!  We had our own base leader teaching on this topic, which made it even better!  She has an amazing love for the Lord, which was very inspiring!  Through the first couple of days of the week I was feeling a little down and felt I needed to really take time to spend with the Lord.  So, Wednesday afternoon I felt that I needed to stay home from going to tutor the kids in Clarkston and just spend that time with God!  I spent around 3 hours that day reading my Bible and praying to God.  I felt so refreshed and so excited!  I actually enjoyed the time so much and couldn’t wait to make that a more regular thing!  Thursday afternoon I didn’t feel so much as I need to read but that I needed to worship!  I wanted to be able to sing but not have anyone hear me so I thought ab

As many of you may have heard on the news there is a bunch of unrest in the Middle East!  In my groups intercessory prayer this morning we really felt God calling us to pray for these countries!  My home church back in Missouri has some missionaries in this area, one family being located in Beruit, Lebanon where only one mile away from their home there has been out of hand protests!  I just want to send out a prayer request for this family and the whole Middle East!  I know God can do amazing things to stop this but we need to intercede to make this happen!  It can be so easy for us Americans to just blow these problems off but there is a real problem in this area now and we have the power to do something about it!  Send your prayers to the Middle East! Here is an article by the New York Times that talks about some of the devastation: Middle East Unrest

DTS students and staff with out guest speakers! This has been a crazy but very fun week!  The week started off on Tuesday for us and flew by!  I really felt God stirring my passion for my orphanage in Africa one day!  We started it off with a couple talking about sexual identity!  This was an interesting topic in which the couple talked a lot about how different factors from childhood can really affect you as you grow up.  Even things from the time you were in the womb can affect you, such as smoking, being an unwanted pregnancy, and being the opposite gender your parents wanted.  I found myself really thinking about my possible future orphans during this teaching!  I realized that with all children coming from broken backgrounds that this would definitely be an issue that I would see.  I started to take notes on different things she was saying on how to deal with this kind of stuff and I got super excited that one day I will really be able to help kids out!!!  This was just the be