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!