Last Week Of Lecture Phase

WEEK 12!!!
This is officially my very last week of lecture phase. Only 3 days till we leave for outreach! I can't get my head around this, I mean all the anticipation for going on outreach has been building and building over the last 3 months and that was built on the excitement I had before I came here! Next week at this time, I will be in Kolkata, India!

Every week on DTS we have had journals that we had to write with a bunch of questions in relevance to the week. Which is fantastic because it gets us thinking of how we can actually apply the weeks teaching to our lives. Last week (week 11) we had our last journal entry to complete and one of the questions was 'Why do you think God brought you to DTS?' That question man! My answer was very lengthy... CRAZY! (You may have noticed I use the word crazy a lot, It's just emphasizing my enthusiasm haha).  I have learned so much about myself, God and I didn't think I will be saying this but I learned a lot about the devil too. Man oh man have I learned about him and his evil schemes... but I also experienced what It's like to really be victorious and defeat him, of course I could not do it on my own, I have also learned that I cannot do anything without Jesus. There is nothing I can do in my own strength! I am completely dependent on Him. It will not work any other way, I have to keep putting myself in a position of complete surrender because I can't do any of it in my own strength. It is so discouraging when we look at ourselves... so small and insignificant! But when we fix our eyes on Him we all of a sudden have no limits, nothing is to great for Him, nothing is to big for my God, In Him I am more than a conquer!

It's going to be difficult on outreach, I'm not expecting an easy time. It's going to be really hard, however I belong to the King of Kings, My Father in heaven is far greater than any problem or circumstance. My heart is going to break I know that full well, but I also know that, the Lords heart breaks and hurts so much more over the brokenness in the world than anyone could ever comprehend, I'll only be sharing in the smallest fraction of His pain over His lost people. This guy that spoke a few weeks on evangelism made a really good comparison of what it is like when we go out and share the gospel. He compared it to someone really close to you that has children... now one of those children go missing... so you drop everything you are doing to help that person find their lost child, and you will not stop searching until that child is found. We should have the same mindset in our lives when we think of God's children. God's children are lost and we need to help God in finding them and bringing them home to Jesus. I really liked that comparison! Our main purpose in life as Christians is to tell people about Jesus, and to let our life be a testimony of His goodness. Whether we are in full time ministry, in the workplace, school or at home all of us have the same purpose, and that is to make Jesus famous.

I had wonderful weekend last weekend. It was very relaxing and I went shopping for a few outreach things, I almost have everything I need!I had a lovely pancake breakfast on Saturday morning with my awesome small group! Ahh the people in my small group are so cool!! They are so much fun to be around!  I then went to a cafe on Saturday with a friend who is doing a second level school (Birth Attendant School) and we finished our last journal entry for the lecture phase. That was really nice, just to reflect on the time that we have been here and talk about all the things we have learned and all the areas we have grown in! Then on Sunday I went shopping for outreach stuff at an outlet mall in a place called water town!

Here's a few pictures of a trip to the beach we went on:






Last night was commissioning night and we all dressed up and got lots of pictures together. We were commissioned to go out preach the gospel to the nations! All the Discipleship Training Schools of the July quarter and one second level school all got together and shared a bit about what we have learned and the about the transformation that has taken place over the last three months, then we prayed for each other and our leaders. We have 5 Discipleship Training Schools in our quarter - The Music DTS, Sports DTS, Adventure DTS, Priceless DTS, and the Medical DTS. We also have the Birth Attendent School which is a secondary level school that trains up midwives for developing nations, theres a huge need for trained midwives in these nations! Most importantly God fearing midwives. Anyways, here is a photo of commissioning night!







Lecture Content:
We are learning about Relationships and unity this week! Which is perfect coming up to outreach. Our speaker is Peter Brownhill who pioneered YWAM Perth and is an amazing man of God. We have just been learning about the different things that can cause disunity in a group and looking at what Jesus' attitude was when serving others. Then we looked at the trinity and how the Father, Son and Holy Spirit operate so perfectly together in complete submission and deep love for one another, and that is how we "the church" and for us "our outreach team" should strive to be like! Theres so many things that can cause disunity, we did a bit of a vote in our class as to what we thought was the biggest things we thought caused disunity in a group was gossip and exclusiveness. There were plenty of other things, however, they were the biggest! We are very blessed as we have an incredible team of people who are very inclusive and love each other very much, however the real test will be on outreach. If the enemy can't get us from the outside he will try come on the inside and cause division, hes tricky like that. Buuuut, theres always lots of Buuuuts when it comes to Jesus, our God is so much bigger! It's hard to submit to one another and lie down our rights, and to serve one another and put others needs above our own, but that's the best way to function as the body of Christ and for us to be most effective! If we look at the life of Jesus we see that he humbled Himself and layed down his rights and selflessly served those around Him. It's a challenge... goodness me YES! However, God never promised easy. He did promise us that He will be our strength and that all things are possible through Him!

Prayer Requests:
SAFETY! I have asked for this in most of my blog posts but it would be really awesome if you could keep praying for God's protection over myself and my team while we are traveling and going to these developing nations. Also it would be awesome if you could pray for unity in our outreach teams and that we will follow Jesus example and be able to stay strong in that. Then maybe you could pray for the people in the nations we will be doing ministry in that their hearts will be softened to hearing the gospel and that each of us would be really in tune with the Holy Spirit and accomplish His purposes for this outreach, and to be lead by Him and only Him.

Thanks so much for all your prayers and support! You probably won't be hearing from me for a while as I mentioned in my last blog post that we will have very limited access to internet.

Bless you!

Fighting the Good fight

WEEK 10
Two weeks away till I'll be leaving for outreach! Weeeeow it's starting to feel real now! We have got a lot more information on out outreach so that was exciting hearing more of the details. The first few weeks we will be learning to set up medical clinics and having training days on specific medical skills and we will also be doing some evangelism and running youth groups, and speaking in churches and all that kinda cool stuff. So lots of different things! I looked into getting a roaming plan over there, but it will cost me about $190 aussie dollars a month to do that, and there's not much point in getting an Indian sim card and another sim card in Bangladesh so I will only be able to get WiFi once a week. Hehe, what an experience... only WiFi once a week! I'm so spoilt in the western world!

 I have a redemption story to tell you all! But first I must tell how I got to that point of redemption (yes the story is about me haha)... I shall be really honest with you, this week has been a real struggle! For about four weeks I have been struggling alot with being anxious and worried about the unknown and ahh you name it I probably worried about it. I was worried about my future and whether I had heard God's voice right in the first place and I was going in the right direction, I was worried that I wasn't being pleasing enough to him, I was worried that I wasn't ever going to live up to the standards that were expected of me as a so called "good christian". I was worried about being in Gods will for me. I was worried also that God might ask me to leave my family forever and do something that would make me miserable. I was worried about what It would be like on outreach and whether I could handle it and fear of the unknown there. All this fear keep building up over the last four weeks and this week I couldn't handle it, It became far to much for me. I couldn't eat properly I felt so burdened and on top of all that I was intensely homesick. I felt as if I was in a pit and I couldn't get out. I was then worried about going on outreach and I said to Jesus that I couldn't possibly go on outreach when I was in this place of sadness and despair. I was also so frustrated that all these fears were robbing me of precious time I had in Perth and distracting me from my teachings and everything as I am only here for three months! Anyways last night I was at the end of my rope, and for our Friday night meeting a performing arts DTS from Kona Hawaii did a performance on the prodical son, it displayed the fathers love so incredibly! At the end of the service they asked everyone to bow their heads and close their eyes so that the people that hadn't experienced Jesus' love before could raise their hands and would get prayer. Anyways so during this time I had this vision kinda thing. Jesus came and knelt before me and said "Natalie, I haven't overlooked you, I love you just as much as all the rest of the people here and I want to show you my love just as much as I want to show the people that haven't experienced my love before, I'm not going to let you go on outreach feeling like this." Then he put His hand on my heart and I felt the love of the father so greatly, He then took my dream of becoming a nurse and my family and said "I am not taking these from you, but I am taking all your worry and stress over them, I will carry them for you, it wasn't meant for you to have to carry alone." Then he held them close to his heart and said that he was going to always keep them close to his heart. Then he stood to his feet and put his hand on my head and said "I cast out all fear and replace it with my perfect peace." After that I felt him so close to me and he showed me a picture of me walking down a street in India and he was standing right next to me, He then reassured me that this closeness that I felt now is what its going to feel like that whole time I was in India and that he would never leave my side and he would protect me. How incredible is that??? God is so amazing!!!!

I was very much under attack from the enemy over the last little while but I know that I am more than a conquer in Christ. His perfect love drives out all fear. He didn't give me a spirit of fear but of Love power and a sound mind. There is no condemnation for those that are in Christ Jesus. The scripture is so powerful! One scripture that really stood out to me this week was Genesis 3:1 - (Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, "Did God really say, 'You must not eat from any tree in the garden'?") It made me realize just another way Satan attacks... recently he was constantly questioning my every move... "Does God actually want you to do that? are you sure you heard right?", "Maybe you heard wrong." I'm not falling for it anymore! Nope, Jesus has already won the battle! I am on the winning side!
This video by Jefferson Bethke really helped me with this!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=klhh2o88jAs

Jesus is so loving in all his ways, he loves us more than we could ever imagine we must never loose sight of that!

I am so thankful for all my friends here at DTS, they have all been so good for me, all praying for me and taking me out for coffee dates and dinner dates trying to get my mind of things and missing my family. I am so blessed to be surrounded by such amazing people!

This week my dear friend Anette from Norway got engaged! It was so exciting! She is one of my fellow DTS classmates and her boyfriend came over from Norway because he was really missing her and popped the question! Oh it's so nice to have something to celebrate and be excited about! Totally lifted my spirits! Heres a photo of Her and I!



Another one of my friends Kassie and I decided to make the most of this weekend and to do some fun things! So yesterday morning we went out for brunch and went to see the movie War Room in the evening! It was so amazing! It was a movie done by the same directors as Fire Proof and Facing the Giants! I would totally recommend you to see it. It portrayed just how powerful prayer is and how we are in a battle and we need to fight the good fight! Our fight is not against flesh but of the powers of darkness, we are more than conquers in Christ! Jesus promises to fight for us, He is for us completely and he has already won it all! We just need to commit to letting him fight for us and surrendering our worries and everything to Him, we cannot do anything in our own strength. That is something I'm learning more and more!



We got our visa photos this week and these photos made me laugh so much, I just had to share them, Embarrassing as they may be.


We have also had quite a few nice days this week! Getting up to 30 degrees :D So nice for spring time!


Lecture Content:
This weeks topic was on Evangelism! Which was very good! I was really looking forward to this week. Just learning the importance of sharing the gospel with others and not keeping our incredible God to ourselves but to share him with as many people as we possibly can. That can look different how we share Him depending on what we are doing and who we are sharing Him with! It might not always look like going up to people on the streets and asking them if they know Jesus, there are many different ways of evangelizing to people. I feel much more confident in talking to people about my faith now and I'm sure I will just get more confident in it as we will be doing a lot of evangelism on outreach. It can be quite awkward at times and it feels very un-natural but we came to the conclusion in class that the worse thing that could possibly happen in evangelism is that we get rejected and we can deal with that I mean Jesus was rejected, he understands and can help us get over that haha. It's better that we try than not try right! Because we don't know, that person that we didn't go up to because we were afraid of rejection could have accepted Christ or was wanting to know more or had ask God to send someone. We don't really know what the outcome will be unless we try. It also takes the pressure off to know that God is the one that does all the work, we just have to be obedient to His promptings and to deliver the message of Christs love. We could talk to someone until we are blue in the face but they aren't going to believe if they haven't experienced Christs love right.

Prayer Requests:
This week it would be really cool if you could pray for me to get the most out of my last two weeks of lecture phase and to not be fearful of anything haha. Also just for protection as my team and I go to India and for the spiritual warfare that we will be up against.

Thank you for reading my blog! Bless you!

He is a Good Good God

It's blog time again! Ending week 9 only a little over three weeks till we will be leaving for Kolkata, India, and we just completed our Visa applicaions and purchased our tickets! Super exciting! The anticipation is building every day!


I have an amazing story for you all! Soooo our team needed $48,000 for everyone to be able to go on outreach. A lot of us had raised the money before we came including me, however, some people weren't able to raise the money as they didn't know until closer to the time our DTS started that they were to come here so they didn't have enough time to save their outreach fees. So we have been praying and trusting God for Him to bring in all these finances. And this week we saw the last of it come in! How incredible is our God? Philippians 4:19 - And my God will supply every need of yours according to his riches in glory in Christ Jesus. It's been amazing for me to see God providing all this money and the crazy ways He has provided this money. Personally I had all my finances before I got here and during Lordship week the Lord asked me to trust Him with $2000 of my outreach money and give it to someone else in my class who had none of their outreach money. To be very honest with you at first I was like.. I cannot possibly do that! That is so much money, there is no way I will be able to get that money before outreach, I don't have a job or anything. Then I heard a small voice Natalie, do you actually trust me with something as big as this? And I was like of course I trust you but where is the money going to come from? Then He reminded me that faith is believing in something we cannot see. It seemed like such a silly idea, giving the money I had for my outreach away only a few weeks before I needed to pay it in. But the Lord was like you can trust me with this Natalie. So I did it and ahhhh God has provided everything I needed and blessed me with overflow. So our outreach money needed to be payed in this Monday morning in order to secure plane tickets that were a really good price.Monday morning came and some people in my class were praying for me and one of my leaders felt that the money for my outreach was going to all come in that day. So morning tea came and I felt really excited and I went straight up to accounts thinking something miraculous had happened and some anonymous person would have paid my remainder of my outreach fees as you hear in the stories. At this point I didn't have all that much left to pay in as people have been very generous for my walk-a-thon fundraiser and our ticket prices had dropped twice. But I went up and the balance was what I had expected it to be, so I left feeling a little discouraged. THEN in the afternoon our class prayed some more. Now our class has these encouragement cups with our names on it for us to put encouragement notes in them. So we were praying and our leader said that if anyone felt on their heart to give that they could pledge the amounts and put them in the encouragement cups. I thought there was no way anyone would be lead to give to me because my number was much smaller than everyone elses. Behold I had $300 in my cup. Then My leader told me that she would pay the last $146 owing. I also had, had a discussion that morning with God about how I needed to pay a girl in my class back $5 and I didn't have enough money to pay her back... well yes indeed the Lord is a faithful father! There was also a $5 bill in my encouragement cup that day. Ahhh I was so excited to see the Lord provide for me like this! This experience has definitely taught me to lean on Him more and that He really does know what we need and He cares about the little things as well like that $5 I needed to pay back my friend!


The Lord has been challenging me in many different areas. This week I would put an emphasis on His word and Him challenging me through His word. This week He has been highlighting verses to me that I have never understood or kinda skipped over because I didn't like them very much haha so bad I know. But He has challenged me to look deeper into their meanings and making sure everything I read points back to the character and nature of Him and reading the Bible as a whole. Instead of thinking, oh I don't agree with that, or God sounds a bit mean in this verse but to look into it deeper and find out the true meanings and challenge myself. It's been very good! God is so good!


Last weekend some of my dear friends and I went to go see Watoto Children's choir! Oooohmygoodness those Children are so inspiring! They come from such hopeless situations and God has totally restored their lives and brought them so much joy and happiness! It's incredible to see and deeply touched my heart watching those adorable little children singing such heartfelt praises to Jesus! I was so excited to get the opportunity to watch them perform again.

This week we also participated in helping selling chocolates to raise money for new accommodation here in Perth as we are getting more and more people coming to work at youth with a mission and more people attending the schools. So here's a photo of some of my team!


Lecture Content:

Submission and Authority was the topic of this week! Our speaker has just been emphasizing how important it is to submit to God first then to submit to those that are around us and the people of authority over us. He also told us how to politely not submit to leaders who are asking us to do things that are morally wrong and against what we believe in. Also when we are placed under someones leadership we must not only do the task asked of us but to do it wholeheartedly and cheerfully as we would unto the Lord. It was a good week and our speaker was from Bangladesh, which is one of the countries I am going to for my outreach phase. It was cool hearing about what he is doing in Bangladesh and what it is like there.


Prayer Requests:

It would be really cool if you could pray for me. Just for my protection as I am getting quite tired and weary approaching the end of lecture phase and as we all know that's when the devil comes to attack. Also that everything in preparation for outreach phase would go smoothly and well and that I would get the most out of the last three weeks here in Perth!


Thank you for taking the time to read my blog! :D