Serving A Complicated World

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I recently posted an article from Christianity Today in our Campus’ Facebook group and I wanted to follow up on that. You can only throw so much out through a Facebook post, you know.

The article took a quick look at Myanmar, the government landscape, the religious landscape, several people groups, and shared about how all of those in the country and out of the country interact. There are refugees involved, the chances of persecution, the Pope is also mentioned, but realistically his part in the article is just a part of a much bigger story.

You an read that article here – Can Pope Francis Help Myanmar’s Muslims Without Hurting Its Christians?

One thing of note about the article, for me, is that this story isn’t new. It’s not even a little bit new. Yes, the people are different and the arguments only sound similar to me, not exact, but this a human story.

The day after sharing the article I sat down to keep reading through Acts and I started in chapter 22. What Paul experiences sounds very similar to the article.

There is the question of religious nationalism, something that we may as well point out. It is increasing around the world and people (both Christians and just about everyone else) are becoming refugees of it. The people group mentioned by name in the article is Rohingya – Muslim refugees. You can read more about their plight here in CT. About half of their total population remain as refugees in neighboring Bangladesh. You also see pressure from different places. In Acts you have the Roman officials – some trying to figure out how to act rightly in the situation and others hoping to profit from it, trading favors with the other parties. It would make for great fiction, but its not. This is what we are like when we get together without respect and honor for one another.

This is the world that Jesus walked into when He came so long ago. This is the world He prepared His disciples for. This is the world that He died for. And, this is the world He sent Holy Spirit into.

In the chapters following 22 Paul gives a defense for the charges brought against him.

Paul shares that everyone back home knew what he was like, strictly following the rules and persecuting the believers of Jesus. Then, he met Jesus on the road to persecute more of Jesus followers. This Jesus called Paul follow Him and share His good news. Now, everyone knows that Paul does this.

As Paul declares his faith in the resurrection to King Agrippa, the same faith he says the prophets and Moses speaks of being fulfilled in Jesus, the Roman Governor interrupts him, yelling, “Paul, you are out of your mind!”

Paul responds in respect and kindness, sharing his intent that he would have everyone hearing this be the same as he is – except for the chains.

Once again, this would be beautiful fiction, filled with intrigue, repeated characters, back story, etc., only, it is all those things and true.

We see this story repeated throughout the history of the church and those who follow Jesus. The irony of it is that this apparently powerless citizen is looking at the powerful authorities before him. Neither of them created their respective powers, they were both present in another’s achievement. For Agrippa and Festus this is the great Roman empire. For Paul this is Jesus and His resurrection.

Only one of those movements still stands and moves today, and is no less miraculous. Rome is not known for an emperor of great military might, but a Pope seeking mercy on behalf of others.

Likewise,  as followers of Jesus, we can all seek after God and do so on behalf of others. We can pray, we can learn, we can go. The Rohingya is one group of refugees among many and Myanmar is one country among many.

May God’s favor and miraculous grace rest on those seeking to help, those in need, and all of those present and watching from afar. May God bless the Rohingya and Myanmar.

About Discipleship Training School

This January and in the coming years we are offering the DTS in Ogden, UT. What God did through the DTS changed me from a person who only cared about his own state and country to a person who cares about the nations.

You can read more about that here – Utah Discipleship Training School.

Humble and Open

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Here is an invitation to prayer!

This winter we are offering the DTS in Ogden. Now, I would love to be the guy that jumps up and down about every detail with great charisma, but that is really not who I am. I approach an impossible world with faith. Some days, the impossibility of this world is a real challenge to faith. And, it is a challenge worth answering.

Running a DTS in Utah is one such challenge!

Our prayer is that we have students, additional staff, and community housing by January 8th!

The reality of this is that it is a huge ask on behalf of many people. The faith part about it is that we’ve seen God provide in situations just like this. I believe in a God that can move people to grow in faith with Him and do things that should, by all rights and sense, be impossible. If it doesn’t happen this year we are going to trust God to do it in the future, and if there are more setbacks, we keep on going. Don’t give up.

This was a lesson Grandpa taught us on the farm. While our Dad got to do cool things like us a skid-loader to dig up post holes we were following behind with posts for the holes. Tamping the posts was slow and boring. Hit the ground over and over again with the small end of your stick. Eventually, it will pack down, make a good foundation for the post, throw in rocks and dirt and keep tamping. Slow work, but work that puts a post down for years to come.

As we do this work in Utah it can certainly feel like tamping, but we are trusting God to do the impossible – make a good foundation for YWAM in Utah for years to come.

Do you want to learn more about the DTS?

Learn more about the school at our page, Utah Discipleship Training School.

The short version.

The Discipleship Training School is focused on helping people join YWAM, find God’s call on their life, live a life that champions others, and grow in relationship with the God who created them. Not only that, there is a ton of teaching focused on sharing your relationship with God with others who need to grow in their relationship with God too.

The school lasts between 5-6 months with phases devoted to learning, outreach, and debrief.

There are no white horses for any of us to ride in on to save the world – lets work together.

Creating through Communication

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Last night we had an awesome time with our life group and as we were closing we had this question to pray through and meditate on – what does total surrender to Jesus look like to you?

We were encouraged to ask God about the season we are in right now.

As I closed my eyes I had a memory of a cave in Indiana. It was the third cave of the trip and it featured a 30′ rappel right into its mouth. I would like to say it was just like the movies, but I haven’t seen any movies where the actor just bounces against the side of the cave and gets scraped up. Others were more successful at rappelling than I was that night. From there we hiked and climbed further down and I got to lead a couple excursions. Being the first light into the darkness is an incredible feeling. The one cavern I headed into dropped another 50′ – 60′ feet to the floor, fallen jagged rocks were every where, at the bottom was another hole going another hundred feet, and the scene would repeat over and over again.

That beauty would have remained hidden had someone not gone there, and it would have remained unknown to the world unless that person opened his mouth and shared what he or she saw in the cave.

That is where I see total surrender worked out in my life.

Some of the scariest things that I can think of aren’t the things that you can’t do anything about, but rather the ones you can do something about when God prompts you to do them. The whole goal may be impossible or outlandish, but the individual steps typically aren’t.

For example, seeing a person’s life transformed from someone living on the streets in despair to a life of gratitude, provision, and helping others in turn on your own is impossible. That said, being obedient to love the guy on the street isn’t impossible, rather, it is very possible.

Part of our call in Utah is doing impossible things through starting on the possible ones. And, when my life is in committed surrender to Jesus, He consistently calls me to impossible things.

The most possible start to almost anything God tells us to do is opening our mouths and sharing what He has told us to do with others. That is one of my greatest points of weakness. It is the point where you throw yourself into what God has said, what He has prompted you to do, and trust that He will be faithful with the rest. It may be the prompting to reach out and talk to the guy laying on the sidewalk (what will the other people think of me?) or call out the person on their morning run (what will this person think of me?), or maybe the person is obviously well out of your league (am I breaking social protocol?), or they are on their tablet siting next to you on the train, on the bus, or standing in a line (this person obviously wants their privacy…) – fear and insecurity can tag us out of obedience.

More often than not, I find that when we do throw ourselves into whatever God has told us to do He does work it out for the best.  A lack of trust on either our part or on the part of the other greatly impacts the effects of our obedience, but God is faithful to back up what He has said.

The only thing that didn’t bounce against those cave walls so many years ago were the bottoms of my feet – face, hands, arms, shoulders, chest, knees all bruised – and that was because I didn’t trust the guy on the other end of the rope. Many of the dreams and hopes God has for this world remained unexplored and unheard of because we are unwilling to really trust Him in committed surrender.

If our trust falters, it gets harder, but God is still willing to take us there.

By the end of our moment of prayer at life group I had a couple of ideas of where God wanted me to go and this principle, trusting Him to communicate what He wants to do, was key to that. It also reminded me of my young heart for making stories and the desire to share those with others. So, that desire and call really has been there since I was a kid. I may go ahead and sign up for National Novel Writing Month as well – there is a project that I’d love to finish and it will be good prep for our creative writing side of the Discipleship Training School.

Looking forward to an awesome season of committed surrender!

 

ACTS: Multiplying YWAM

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Throughout the history of the Church we see it spreading through multiplication – not just addition – it grows where people make sacrifices and give their hearts to Jesus. We read about this in the book of Acts.

The Risk

For my part I felt that God had given me an incredible vision for my home.

Michigan was where my family was,  it was where all my relationships resided. Everything from the roads that we drove on to the kinds of grass that grew along them helped me know who I was. I won’t even get started on the fields and trees. A year before I couldn’t even imagine leaving my county let alone my country for a foreign land – missionaries were the crazy ones. Now, I was one of them.

I was considering leaving all of this again so that I could bring something back. Taking the discipleship training school with YWAM was incredible. I wanted the people in Michigan to experience that too. And, I wanted to be a missionary.

In the back yard of my family’s home I prayed again.

Before me was the opportunity to take a school that would help me become a pioneer – someone who would go where there wasn’t already a YWAM base and start one.

My friends had invited me to come back to India to take the school, it was their second time running it and the first time it would be in India. For twelve weeks we would learn from speakers that had already pioneered. We would work together to build our pioneering projects and then we would head out. It sounded kind of easy, but in reality pioneering something new is at least as difficult as they all said it would be. I didn’t know that yet.

At some point during my night of prayer I felt God say to go for it.

Looking back on that night I can say it changed my life, and I am grateful for that.

The Sacrifice

The Church, in its many forms, has consistently grown when people who love Jesus give up what they know for what they do not. It grows when we take risks. It grows when we hear God say to do something that doesn’t make sense, but in our heart we know it is Him saying it and we do it anyway.

We do not always get to conform to the culture around us, hardly so at times, and we will be considered crazy. That is not a bad thing because so was Jesus, and He turned the world upside down by listening to His Father’s voice and doing what His Father said too.

Now, I am not in my home state of Michigan.

I am in Utah, the home of many other people. I have been setting out on this path for the last nine years to make it back home to do what I headed out to do. During that time God has been faithful. He has shown up in the nick of time and provided for us. He has been faithful to give me time to learn and the time to enjoy the people around me. I have a family that He has given me.

Utah is the home of other people, but I remember my heart for my home and it has multiplied to make room for this place too. It has multiplied to make room for India. It has multiplied to make room for the Syrians who I first started paying attention to five years ago.

As often as I hear His heart break my heart multiplies to make more room for His.

When we make a sacrifice God is faithful to multiply it.

The Response

What is on your heart that you are carrying with God?

How is He telling you to go for it?

There are no small sacrifices in the kingdom of God – He is faithful to see it. If you stay true to His path He will keep showing you where to go next. If this is the life that God has called you to then I challenge you to take that first step with Him – it is worth it, and even more, He is worth it.

Discipleship Training School – Apostolic Catalyst Training School 

Epic Faith – The Start of Your Journey

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On August 22nd we are hoping to start our first YWAM Discipleship Training School (DTS) in Utah! The focus of the school will be on justice, mercy & compassion. Our outreach will be in Hungary and Greece and our debrief will take place in The Netherlands.

Though the starting date is coming close, there is still time to sign up and to start your 5-month journey of faith with us. In fact, if you sign up before August 1st, you will receive a free copy of the book Epic Faith – written by Marty Meyer, the pioneer leader & base director of YWAM Idaho Boise-Cascade!

So, whether you are fresh out of high school or you just retired, if you are ready for a new challenge and you want to grow in relationship with our amazing God – sign up now!

Please don’t hesitate to contact us with any questions or visit our website for more information.

We hope to see you with us in a month!

Blessings,
YWAM Utah Campus DTS staff

The Beauty of Duck Valley

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What do you think of when you hear the words “Indian Reservation”?

Most of the time, I find myself thinking about all the bad things first – racing from experiences to images, words people have spoken, hate and curses, racism, political ideas that were once considered good, people who I have listened to who defended the use of force, and stories from people of what that use of force looked like. A whole legacy of ideas and their consequences.

Mixed throughout all of them, however, are moments of beauty.

Laughter – sweet, rich, and joyous laughter.

Kind faces that show far more hospitality than I deserve.

Story on top of story that shares of God’s unrelenting desire to pursue His loved ones.

These are the memories mixed in with everything that I remember when I hear those words – Indian Reservation. Given the lessons and wisdom that many first nations people have taught me I am indebted to them for the life in Christ that I get to live.

Duck Valley

One of the places close to my heart are the lands of the Shoshone-Paiute people. It is little place, set in the high desert of Idaho and Nevada. The hills are deceivingly tall and distant when coming from central Idaho, where the mountains are much more abrupt, as a friend and I discovered when we tried to go “just a little ways.” Though it is high desert it is also filled with water for irrigation. And yes, there are certainly a lot of ducks.

I have only been there twice – once eight years ago and the second time just a couple of weeks back.

Both were special and this last trip taught me several lessons that I’m taking to heart as we move forward in ministry.

The first was to trust God when He speaks.

I was so stressed out while trying to put things together. I didn’t have anything set up like I wanted to and it felt like I was going to run it all into the ground.

However, God worked in His ways and He led the outreach.

What does that look like?

Favor where you least expect it; divine appointments; relationships; hospitality; and sometimes just saying “yes”. Wherever there is openness to relationship there is an opportunity for God to move in and open doors.

The second was related to that – look for relationships.

Does this sound like common sense?

I mean, it probably should, but I find it so abstract at times.

God Himself relates to us relationally, we relate to others relationally, but as we step forward to move this kingdom of good relationships forward, it can seem tempting to rely on non-relational methods. I doubt that most of those methods are wrong. Though, when we employ a method in the place of relationship our testimony suffers.

An example of this came on the day I headed home from Duck Valley.

The night before, we were enjoying dinner at the local diner when one of the cooks introduced us to one of her relatives. It turns out that Duck Valley is also home to a lot of beef cattle and the annual branding is something to be invited to – and we were invited.

Now, I’ve never gone on an outreach where you could call a branding day a “method” to build relationships, but it certainly was a place of relationships, with lots of hard work, yelling, smiles, and laughter.

Jesus was also getting invited to all sorts of places.

The wedding in Cana was one such event where I’m sure there were a lot of relationships happening. He was often invited into the homes of others and when He showed up to a town it seems like his first place to stop was the home of a friend. We see Jesus focusing on places of relationship. Sometimes there is a method to open up the possibility of relationships (in our case it was baskets filled with supplies, food, and fun things for kids), but our focus needs to be on the relationships opening up – not the methods bringing an opportunity.

So what holds us back?

Is this all common sense or actually countercultural?

I know that in my life it is often countercultural to rely on others, to ask for help – to look at a very good relational moment during ministry and not weigh it in the scales of productivity.

How are we all doing at this?

Are we focussed on relationships or on the methods we are employing?

What is our first thought when we think about sharing Jesus with someone? Is it the amazing relationship that we get to introduce to another person? Is it the little relationship moment that is happening as you greet a person that has been created in the image of God?

Or is it a thought of productivity? Do we think of a system of verses, a certain way of doing it, figuring out the right angle, how long until I get to go home?

These questions might be rough, but both the good and the bad reflect my own heart – I can remember a time for each one of them.

Do we see the beauty that is right there in that person, created in God’s image; do we see the beauty that is there in that moment, a relationship that is humbling itself like Jesus humbled Himself to the point of death?

Relationship or method?

Beauty or an invitation to more beauty?

I know that my own heart will generally choose to shy away from those questions, but as God cares about us He will be the one to ask them eventually. In 2007, I attended the Discipleship Training School and God used that time to ask a lot of those questions.

If you are looking for a time to settle some of the questions I’ve included here or you have more of your own – I would like to invite you to consider that DTS. The next DTS starts on August 22nd.

…

P.S.

I would also invite you to read more about my friends. They are a family committed to relationship and inviting others into relationship with our creator. They have taught me a lot about valuing relationships over methods.

The Red Road

Also, I am sure my friends at Cowboys With A Mission would like to share that working with cattle is a perfect time to build relationships and share the gospel.

Cowboys With A Mission

A Path Appears

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Last week, I listened to an interview with Nicholas Kristof & Sheryl WuDunn who shared on their book: A path appears.

It is a book about hope through giving people the opportunity to step beyond their current circumstances.

Here is a short overview on some of the things they shared:

Inequality is a big problem, bigger than we realize. If we want to address it, we need to address it early. Because poverty goes deeper than a lack of money. It is ultimately, a lack of hope. Hope is like a path in the countryside, when more people walk it, a path appears. We need to help people to dream, because it is their ability to dreams, that gives them hope.

When trying to help people out of poverty, or the results of poverty, we do need to be aware of what methods work. Sometimes our most common way of solving a problem, is not the most effective, or at least not the most cost effective. Often there are some very small and simple solutions, that can change a lot for one person. For example: a parasite treatment, costing only a couple of dollars, can make sure that a child can pay attention in school. This is often more effective than building a school, which does not yet guarantee that the kids will be healthy enough to go there.

Next to the inequality gap, we also see an empathy gap. The poorest 20% of people give proportionately more than the richest 20% of people. Part of this is connected to the fact that poor people are more often surrounded by other people who are suffering. This makes them more willing to give. Whereas it has been tested that the brains of rich people, can be quite unaffected even when they do see suffering.

Helping others is not only good for them, but also for us. We were created to care and volunteering can actually extend our lives. Though helping can be hard and sometimes disappointing, seeing change can also bring a lot of hope and helping one person, affects all who come after him/her. So, though we can’t change it all, we can do some. And for that person, it makes all the difference.

Change has to start with us.

But we have to keep our eyes open. And you might be surprised that often, it is when we start seeing the worst side of humanity, that we also run into some of the very best.

Do you want to help?

There are more ways to help than by giving money. Investigate, find what you like, consider advocacy & get out of your comfort zone. Experience, meet people and it will make a difference not only on them, but on you also.

Our response

A Path Appears is about hope, and about what we can do to give people hope. In September of 2016, we will have our first ever Youth With A Mission – Discipleship Training School in Ogden, Utah. Our focus will be on Compassion and on how we can speak into the suffering that we see in this world.

One of the places where we feel that God is calling us to reach out to, is Eastern Europe. Thirty years ago, this area of Europe was under the control of communism. And though a lot has changed since then, there is still a lot of brokenness that I belief can be traced back to this time of communism. In Budapest for instance, one of the places where we hope to bring God’s Truth, His love and His hope, there are people who have been living on the streets for over 30 years! This is from before the fall of Communism, and yet, it still hasn’t changed.

Do you feel called to speak Hope into people’s lives? Please check out our Utah Compassion DTS page to see how you can join and make a difference in this world!

Want to learn more about a path appears? Click on the link to visit apathappears.org or search for “A Path Appears” on netflix!

Reference: Speaker Broadcast with Nicholas Kristof & Sheryl WuDunn for The National Society of Leadership and Success.