Week 1 of Sports DTS

So I got here on Monday, which was the day before classes actually started as most of you know.  I adjusted really well to the 17 hour difference here and I have also begun adjusting to the hot humid days here and the no air conditioning.  It is amazing that when we serve God we can take all our material possessions away and focus solely on him, which is what I am doing. 

The first week of orientation and lectures is over and I am currently enjoying my first day off.  Our schedule is one that is very busy and hectic.  In the morning we wake up and have to have our breakfast eaten by 8 am because then we have tidy time at 8 to 8:25 am.  Tidy time is the time in the house when all of the missionaries living here pitch in and do a specific job to keep the house clean and organized.  Then after tidy time we go directly into lectures with my Sports DTS team until 1 pm, which is lunch.  Then after lunch at 2 pm we have work duties, these are specifically for the DTS students and they just teach us how to be humble and to work in the name of the Lord to help things run smoothly here.  For my work duties I have been assigned to do housekeeping, this is where I get the rooms ready for the speakers who will be staying here the following week and sometimes even making grocery runs to help out our kitchen staff.  There is a total of four of us on this housekeeping staff and we work from 2 to 4 pm, everyday accept for Saturday, Sunday, and Monday.  Then we have a break until 5:45 pm, which is supper and then at 7 after the assigned people do dishes we have lectures until 9:30.  We then have a little time to write home or get on the internet before curfew at 10:45 pm.

So this week included a lot of orientation to the program and what we are expected to get out of it and also what are goals are for this program.  My leaders are Jeff and Ann, they are a married couple that is about 65 years in age, but they act like they are about 40.  That is very entertaining as they bring a lot of energy to the messages and get us involved in what they are teaching us.  The staff that is leading my school is Zach and Faith; they are both from the states.  The come from Pennsylvania and New Jersey respectively and are both 22 years old.  The age difference in our leaders in staff is one that I think is incredible because we can see how they have a view of God that is different in some issues.  This is encouraging for us to find the best way that God can work in us as they don’t push us to find their way, yet to find our way to let Him work.

The lecture topics that we got to listen to this week were about hearing the voice of God, quiet time with God, and praise and worship.  Each of these was a great introduction into the relationship that we will develop over the next couple months.  Hearing God’s voice can be tough for us at times because we need to take ourselves completely out of the equation and hear what He has to tell us or show us.  God can speak to us in so many ways and they explained to us how to come before God and totally surrender to Him and then in doing that we can hear what he has planned for us.  We also learned about how we need to have our one on one time with God where we tell him our struggles and lay all our worries on Him and ask Him for guidance in how to deal with those particular struggles.  In this time we can also hear God’s voice and we can solely focus on God and hear what he has planned for us.  We also talked about praise and worship and what it means.  This was one topic that was very new to me as praise and worship to me was only something that happened in a church.  Well praise and worship is a time that we can come to God with our love and express our love to him by singing praises to His name.  With this we can also give thanksgiving, which as Christians we seem to ask for thing more often than we thank God for the things that he has provided us with. 

In our praise and worship time however we learned a new form of prayer, which is something that YWAM firmly believes in.  This is prayer called intercession; it is different from normal prayer as intercession is a prayer on the behalf of others as a prayer is typically based upon personal worth.  So as most of you know Queensland has been flooding and that is just north of where we are and we interceded on behalf of those people.  In intercession we are to pray for the Holy Spirit to come into the place, to ask ourselves to be removed from hearing God’s word, to confess our sins, to rebuke Satan in the name of Jesus, and then to thanks God for the things He has given us.  Then we take a moment and pray and listen for God to tell us what He wants us to pray about in regards to the floods in Queensland.  Once God has spoken to us or has spoken to a few we then all pray a prayer in the circle for what God has told us to pray about.  This can be done for anything and is not just specific to one thing.

On Saturday we then had Youth Street, the thing that actually brought me to the Newcastle YWAM base.  Youth Street is for those between the ages of 12 to 17 and we have different activities that they can join in to make it more organized and enjoyable.  They have activities like, dance, skate, scoot, surf, and sports.  I was on the sports team as many of you can imagine and we got to hang out with the crew, that’s what we call the kids who attend, at the swimming pool and then play rugby.  Then we come back and eat supper and then head into Youth Street Live, where we have worship time and then a speaker comes and talks about something that is prevalent in the crew’s lives.  After worship time we have After Hours where the crew can dance, play video games, or chill out in our café.  Then at 8:30 pm the crew leaves and we have tidy time, where we clean the areas of the house in which we used.  This is the longest day of the week as we are continuously going and don’t get any break until 9pm.  However, it is awesome to see how the crew and staff are able to interact and the ways in which you can see the Lord in the crew’s life.