alive & well

I know I haven’t been updating too faithfully this past week – but I think it’s because there’s been a lot of “idea” and “thought” stuff going on, and not so much action. So here’s a little recap of some big things that have happened recently:

Tauranga House of Prayer (THOP): Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday mornings (8-12) of last week were spent in the prayer room at the THOP, where a musician/band would play and you were able to sit and pray for the full four hours. I think the thing I realized most was how little “prayer endurance” I have! But our speaker that week, Aaron Walsh (the founder of THOP), encouraged us that God is even pleased with the 10 minutes of solid prayer we got in if that’s all we could do, and that we should ask him for the grace for 11 minutes the next day. Aaron was at the International House of Prayer in Kansas City, and then pioneered THOP with his wife, so this man essentially has spent the past 10 years of his life in prayer. And being around someone like that is intense. The thing that was most notable to me was just his sheer conviction that God loves him. He repeatedly said, “You just can’t convince me that God doesn’t like me”, which is a certainty that so many people, Christians included, simply lack. Just witnessing his dedication to prayer was astounding (he said he thinks God looked down and said, “ok, who hates prayer the most?” and Aaron raised his hand, so God chose him to live this life of prayer, haha). He talked to us a lot about being authentic – about leaving behind the “me-centered” gospel that we hear so often: “if you become a Christian, you will get everything you need and you will be happy forever etc etc”. Aaron talked a lot about how the gospel is primarily about God and his glory, and that we should stop focusing on what we can get from God and instead focus on WHO he is and his nature and character (which is, ironically, far better than any thing he could give).

Aaron prayed for some of us individually, and when he prayed for me, he said a lot of things that were really awesome (like, things that he felt God saying to me, etc), but some highlights were that he said that God sees me as the “queen of hope” – he said that over and over again, and then the second thing was that he said that it would be a part of my life to share that hope with other people – sort of like my “ministry” or something. Prophecy and that kind of thing is really new and unusual to me (normal to a lot of people here), but at that moment it was really encouraging and real – what it is supposed to be.

Stop Demand: we spent Thursday & Friday of last week with Denise Ritchie, a former YWAMer who is a lawyer in New Zealand. She is the head of an organization called Stop Demand, a nonprofit focused on stopping the demand for sex trafficking. She said that she would go to conferences about sex trafficking, and would always hear about the trafficking victims, how to help them, and the traffickers, how to punish/rehabilitate them, but that she never heard anyone mention the fact that men are fueling the demand for sex trafficking, and without that demand, the industry wouldn’t exist. It’s crazy to call it that – an industry – but it is… it is the 3^rd most profitable criminal activity after drugs & weapons. And it’s growing – because it is a unique crime where you can make a profit over and over again. For instance, with drugs, you sell the drug once and it is consumed and gone, but with people you can sell them over and over again (that sounds cruel but it is what happens all over the world). So we spent a lot of time in group discussions about how to re-educate men all over the world to value women so that this industry, and many other kinds of exploitation (pornography, prostitution) will stop. It’s a huge issue when you look at the big scale, but I think it starts with encouraging the men around you to respect and value women, and having those men then be willing to stand up against any future denigration of women. The largest reason that I can imagine to give a man to value a woman is that God made woman of his own image, that he formed her with his hands, and that she is fearfully and wonderfully made.

Okay! Well I will update again soon. I love you & miss you all.