This is the first post in 18 days. Overall these past 3 weeks have been life changing and so much fun.
Mission Live Conference rocked. As a base, we organized the conference. It was crazy exciting. Everyone worked together to make it all come together. People decorated. Others were part of the security team. Some made food. People directed parking...It was a group effort for sure. We had speakers who are affiliated with YWAM all around the world. The Directors from YWAM South Africa, Haiti, Amsterdam and Herrnhut, of course, all came to the conference and spoke on Friday, Saturday and Sunday. The goal of the conference was to show people God's calling for their lives. It is the hope of all these bases that the 10/40 Window will dissapate because of missionaries, especially ones from Europe. They are working together to call missionaries out of the world, and the conference was a tool to call missionaries out. It was exciting to not attend the conference for my own good, but to serve others. We got the chance to pray over people, lead small groups, help out with workshops, etc. The times when we sang, always were wonderful, and really pumped the people up. We also got prayed over as Herrnhut before our short term outreaches. Then as a huge group of disciples, we commisioned Eva and Irena to Calcutta. They were base staff at Herrnhut and now are going to Calcutta, India to serve as full time missionaries. It was beautiful. The conference was exhausting because we were serving the whole day. From 6 am when breakfast needed to be prepared, until midnight when the speakers finished speaking. From the conference all the teams dispersed into their outreaches. One team went to Serbia, another to Amsterdam, another to Czech Republic and of course ours went on Trumpet Tour!
Trumpet tour was so cool. We left from Reichenbauch and traveled five hours the first day to a church in Northern Germany. On an average day though, we would spend 5-10 hours on the bus. We made zig-zags all over Germany. every night the program started with a time of singing, lead by our team sometimes and sometimes members from the church. We would introduce what we were doing and why we were at their church. Then we would always do this song "Ask for the Natons" accompanied by a flag dance, yes a flag dance. Sounds cheesy, but it ended up being really rad. I carried the flag of Khazikstan and at one part of our dance we would go into the audience and say "God bless you" in different languages. Phonetically it is "Blagoslavit tebya gespoat". The whole point of Trumpet Tour was similar to Mission Live, to show people the need in the nations and how God wants to use us to build up his kingdom, also to call people out of the churches to go into these nations. At the same time build unity among the churches in Germany so they can support each other and really reach the unreached. All of that to say, the flag dance was our contribution to show people that God wants to give them neighborhoods, cities, states, nations. This was a concept I had never heard of, and it really got me excited. In Psalm 2:8 the Lord says "Ask of me, and I will give YOU the nations for your inheritance, and the ends of the earth for your possesion". When we went into these churches it was consistently our prayer for revival, and that the radical teaching and ideas would rise up an excitement for reaching the lost. After this, Evanne would speak about Terry Snow, and introduce him, then he would go up and speak. Terry is from Texas but now lives in Haiti where he is the YWAM director in St. Mark. Every night he would share the same message, and every night it got better. He would really seek God about how He wanted him to format the message to the church. So each night it had a different twist to it, but for the most part he would share the same message. By the end of the 9 churches visited, any one of us could've told the story.
The biggest thing that happened for me personally during this time was seeing the power of prayer. Every church we went to, we prayed for them from 20 minutes-an hour and a half. At every church we saw God wanted to do something big there. Every church different people from our team had incredible visions for the church as a body. Every church we left, we saw something change. There is power in prayer. I feel like prayer is really where I was lacking in my relationship with the Lord before I came to Germany. I feel so blessed to have gained such a precious tool. This is such an exciting discovery. I feel like I will never be the same because I have been blessed to find this.
After 6 days of Trumpet Tour all the teams met up in Berlin. Terry was our speaker, and spoke about evangelism. In the afternoons we did street evangelism. Oh man, it was awesome. I can't even begin to describe how God rattled Berlin. Those were an amazing 4 days. I also got the chance to see a lot of Berlin, which was such an experience.
Then we left Berlin and continued on Tour. We traveled 30 hours in 3 days. It was exhausting. When we are in our weaknesses, that is the most exciting time to see God move. At each church the Holy Spirit was present like never before. Oh man, I can't even express it...
We got back to Herrnhut on Sunday night at 10 pm. It was great to share memories with all the teams and re-unify everyone together. We didn't have a lot of time in Berlin to share with everyone so Monday on our day off, we all talked each others ears off.
This week we are learning about our Identity in Christ. In order to catch up on lost time we had late night lecture yesterday and early morning today. I am excited to see how this week unfolds...We were warned that it is the most intense week yet...
Thanks for reading guys! I wish I could've shared more, but it is impossible to share every detail. Hopefully it will continue to seep into other posts because I want to share everything that God did!
Please pray for Molly. As many of you know, she is in Uganda right now. She has gotten sick within the past week and they aren't sure what's going on...
