the kingdom

So, we have been learning this week all about the kingdom of God, what that even means, and what our role is in "kingdom living". To do this we've looked at the parables that describe the kingdom (lots in Matthew), and if I had to write my own parable right now, it would go something like this:

The kingdom of God is like Thanksgiving with no turkey, but plenty of love & thankfulness to make up for it.

or

The kingdom of God is like a pie maker, who when finding that there's no canned pumpkin in New Zealand, gathered his friends and celebrated anyway.

Yes, it's true, we didn't have a Thanksgiving meal (for various reasons), which broke my little American heart, but somehow I have survived, drowning my sorrows in cappuccinos and carrot cake (the most fall-ish item on the menu). We had a great time though, all gave thanks for various things in our lives, not the least of which were our families and friends back home that love and support us, especially now.

So, I just wanted to write and say how thankful I am for all of you - your support, your love, your taking the time to write me, your prayers -- just your being in my life. You'll never know what an impact it has, and how much gratitude I have in my heart for you guys!

Happy Thanksgiving!

new pictures to enjoy

i just put up a bunch of new pictures that i got from my friend robert (he takes LOTS of pictures!) from the whole time we've been here - our city lights project, piha beach, and our dessert night.

http://picasaweb.google.com/chelsea.alanna.nielsen

enjoy!

lordship & lambs

This past week was such a blur – the days go slowly but the weeks just go so fast. Our topic was Lordship and our speaker was Mark Parker, and he’s maybe the craziest man I’ve ever met. I mean he was just wild – yelling things, jumping around the room, just so animated and full of energy – and he’s 55! But all the craziness aside, he is one of those people who just makes you want to love Jesus more, and that’s the thing I’ll remember most.

He started the week out by saying, “Lordship is not about proving or explaining how Jesus is Lord – he already is! Whether you want to believe it or not! HA – HA! So Lordship is about making Jesus your Lord. And that’s what we’re going to talk about.”

For the rest of the week, we mostly talked about what happens when you become a Christian, and what the process looks like after that. He separated the self into body (physical), soul (mind, will, emotions), and spirit (intuition, communion, conscience, connection to God). When you are “re-born”, your spirit is made new, but your soul is not. Thus, it is a process of renewing your mind so that your spirit and mind are in order and your body follows suit (Thus, Romans 12:2 “be transformed by the renewing of your mind”)

So the most memorable thing we did this week was on Friday. We essentially re-created the steps that the Jews used to take in the Old Testament to enter the temple, but re-vamped them to reflect New Testament living. The steps were (based on the books of Leviticus/Hebrews):

1. Gate of the Court / Jesus, Thanksgiving

2. Outer Court / Praise

3. The Brazen Altar / The Cross (burnt offering, sin offering)

4. The Brazen Laver / The Word

5. The Golden Candlestick / Holy Spirit

6. The Table of Showbread / Communion

7. The Altar of Incense / Prayer

8. Tearing of the Veil / Absence of alienation

9. Ark of the Covenant / Holy Spirit

10. Cloud of Glory / Worship

It sounds a little crazy, but I found that this is a really similar pattern to the way that liturgical churches structure their services. We give thanks & praise, we confess our sins, we are “washed with the word” (readings), we receive communion, we pray, and we worship. The only difference with this was that we did everything (thanks, praise, confession, etc) out loud and individually instead of collectively as one body or silently in our minds. But it is a biblical way that we truly enter into God’s presence, with no hindrances. And it lasted for 14 hours. Yeah! It was a crazy day, but it was really good. There was a real sense of God’s presence in the room.

On Saturday, we decided we needed to do something really restful, since Friday was such a long day. We went to a sheep farm and saw lots of animals, watched a sheep get sheared, and I even got to feed a baby lamb! That was definitely the highlight! I should be able to put some pictures up soon! J

over the hill with hope

So, it's official, we are on the downhill slide of lecture phase. Just finished with week 7, so we only have 5 more teaching weeks! It seems to hard to believe - - on the one hand I feel like it has flown by and it seems like just yesterday that we were in week one and thinking it would never end... but at the same time it feels like I have been here SO long and am SO far from home and my life there. It's a strange push and pull that I feel when I think about how time is passing. Anyway, there are a lot of "things" we have done since the last update that I wrote - went to a black sand beach (Piha), had teaching on "biblical worldview" (meaning the perspective we have of the world as Christians), talked about work and what it looks like to work for the kingdom in "secular" jobs - please let me know if you want any info about that - I have a great bible study type activity that we did, and there is a different one for Accounting, Administration, Agriculture, Art, Business, Communication, Development, Education, Engineering, Government, Health Care, Motherhood, and Relief Work. I just have different scriptures for each one that show what the bible says about those professions and how they are related to different aspects of God's character. I did the one for Business (although I'll probably go back and do Art, Motherhood, Development...) and I found it really good to go through and give myself some perspective about the work I'll be doing some day.

We watched 2 Justice movies last week - War Dance, and Mugabe and the White African, which were really illuminating to me about the situation in Northern Uganda of child soldiers and war children, and then about Zimbabwe and the situation there with white farmers and all of the economic turmoil and "reverse" racism that's going on. These were 2 subjects that I really knew nothing about and really moved me to compassion. I urge you to at least watch the you tube videos I linked on here, and if you are more interested, to buy the films (both available on Amazon)

This week our teaching was on "The Father Heart of God", and our speaker was a guy named Etienne Pieterse. He's actually from Cape Town, so it was cool to get some perspective from a South African about the place where I'll be starting in January. His story alone is incredible - he was in gangs, he was a Satan-worshipper, he was just "bad" in every way you can imagine, and God turned his life around completely. He has been working with YWAM for a long time now, and as you can imagine, he just has a wealth of knowledge to share. The thing that I loved the most about him was that he just didn't walk in any kind of judgment. He didn't put anyone down for anything, he didn't let his preferences for things cloud his enjoyment of things that he didn't prefer, and he just was generally happy about whatever was going on.

Today, our Justice Friday topic was "Children at Risk", and our speaker was a woman named Erin Lucas, who told her story about how she got involved with being an advocate especially for underage prostitutes in Auckland. Erin is a (young) mother, and actually the first mother that we've had speak to us on the school, which to me was really valuable and refreshing (I miss you, mom!).

The thing that I really enjoyed most about her was a story that she told us about when she and her husband were trying to have their first child. It took them two and a half years to get pregnant, and she just talked about how she went through this journey of grief, over and over again each month learning that she still wasn't pregnant. And she said one day she was reading Romans 5:5, "and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us", and she just was so confused... she said her version read "hope does not disappoint us" - and she just kept thinking, 'it is the HOPE that makes me disappointed each month. If I could just stop HOPING that I'd get pregnant, then I could move on and it wouldn't bother me'. So she got into this personal bible study of hope, because she wanted to figure out how that verse could possibly be true. What she told us that she finally came to realize was that hope is a confident expectation of something good..and the reason that hope can't disappoint is that it opens up our hearts to God's love and goodness, and it is in that openness that he fills us with his Holy Spirit. True, hope can stretch us to the point that it hurts but ultimately it WON'T put us to shame because in the process, we just learn more of who God is, and it starts not to matter so much what your situation is at the moment, but rather that you are able to move past your situation because God fills you up to live for more than just that circumstance.

This message was clearly something that God wanted me to hear, because James's mom brought it up to me last week... James brought it up to me yesterday, and then Erin talked about it today... and I've been dealing with this kind of stuff with my arthritis situation - I have been struggling with how to feel about it, because people have prayed healing over me, and I've seen doctors, I'm on medication... but nothing has really happened and I am still in pain daily. But this message was just so powerful to me, because it gave me this whole new perspective that God is just good, and I don't want to focus on the "why me" questions, I don't even want to go there. He is good, and I know He is and I want that to be my focus. And I say that, not in a naiive way, but in confident expectation. I am hopeful, and it's not a hope for tomorrow or the next day that I'll be healed... it's not a hope that will go away in a week if it hasn't come to fruition... but as James reminded me this week, it is a hope in things unseen. So, that's kind of hard to understand. But I think what I mean is, my hope is not conditional, because God is not conditional.

This was a long and somewhat weighty post but I hope that it was hopeful, because that is what I feel... I love you guys very much!

tough love & city lights

Last weekend, we had an outreach opportunity that was pretty awesome called “City Lights”. It’s been an ongoing project for 4 years, operating a few times per year. Each time, multiple churches from Auckland join together to reach out to the local community in different ways – to be “lights” to the city – thus the name.

On Friday night, there was a kick-off to the day of service where we just heard a little bit about what we would be doing, and a young pastor named Brooke Turner gave a message about service and evangelism and what it looks like in modern times. His message was seriously convicting, in such a good way. Instead of many of the messages we hear these days about how the church is failing and the world is hopeless, he did point out that the church is “missing the mark” (the definition he gave for sin), and that it was our responsibility to do something about it. And that it is TOTALLY possible for us to do that.

He talked about how for so long, the model of evangelism has looked like this:

Where there is this paradigm that we as Christians are separate from non-Christians, yet the cross brings us together... and if they would only walk across that cross to come and meet us on the other side, things would be great! And we’re just so afraid of falling into death and destruction that we wouldn’t dare walk across to meet them. And really – this model is correct from a theological standpoint – the cross DOES bring us together in that we are sinful, desperate people and God is savior of all, but this doesn’t work from a methodological standpoint. We can’t just yell from across the great divide and expect people to come running to join us on Sunday morning. Rather, we create some COMMON GROUND where we can both meet in the middle. And let me be the first to admit that I overthink, overanalyze, and just generally mess this up. That’s what was so great about his message – it confronted me with the fact that I’ve done this and instead of just making me paralyzed with condemnation, it spurred me on to (a) laugh at myself for being so ridiculous and (b) realize that I can stop overthinking it and just be a normal person - don’t make it weird and don’t have an agenda with each non-Christian I meet, but just be their friend. Just ask how their day was. Simple. Not as scary and complicated as it has seemed in my mind sometimes. I don’t know if that makes sense – I have a feeling other people have faced that same issue from time to time, because we are kind of taught to believe in an “US” and “THEM” attitude, which leads to a lot of separation and weirdness.

Anyway, it was a great way to kick off the day of service. On Saturday morning, we got up really early and met at our church. We got into our groups, which went to different places around the city (about 6 places), and my group was going to the United Maori Mission, an organization that seeks to bring in troubled Maori men in need from across New Zealand and give them a place to live and have a safe environment. Our task was to clean, plaster, sand, and paint the hallways of their residence area. There were about 10 of us from YWAM, and one guy, Johnny, our fearless leader who had been a painter one summer a few years back.

We had a great time – it was a lot of hard work, but I realized that I really like doing things like that, like manual labor (which some of you will find hilarious to read because I have been notoriously lazy at times...) but yeah, I think it’s just the signing up part that I don’t like – I actually do like the work and can motivate myself to do it. I even used a power sander for the first time in my life – which I actually didn’t like – I just don’t think I was meant to operate dangerous machinery. Once I realized, “Wow, I could really sand my finger off”, I went back to the old sandpaper and elbow grease method, which worked just fine. And the painting was great too – all that practice of painting with Kendal on her clients’ houses...on my mom’s house when we did renovations... it really paid off. I was giving tips and teaching people about how to cut in on corners, how to roll most effectively, etc. So thank you Kendal for always being so generously willing to tell me I was doing it wrong... tough love pays off sometimes.