To get you up to speed...

So last year (2010), I started on an amazing adventure with God.
From January til May, I did a Discipleship Training School (DTS) with an international missions organisation called Youth With A Mission (YWAM). In short, my life was radically transformed.

I'm from South Africa, so leaving home and going to Denver, CO was an adventure in and of itself. I really had to trust God with everything, and He totally came through! I was trying to find any excuse not to go, and my last one was visas. Now if you know anything about travelling, you'll know that US visas are really hard to get, and particularly impossible for South Africans to get... So I figured that if God really wanted me to go, He'd make a way. With God's hilarious sense of humour, I was given a 10 year visa with hardly any questions asked, and it arrived within a week. So I headed off to Denver, not really knowing what I was getting myself into.

When I arrived, I was an insecure, self-conscious, scared little girl. I'd believed a whole lot of lies about myself, and God took me through an amazing healing process of opening up. This was hard, because to open up is to be vulnerable to hurt, but also open to love and healing. I grew a lot in confidence, because I learned that being myself was great, because there is no one else like me. We're all made unique in the image of God, so you reflect God in a way that no one else can. So when you stop being yourself, a little bit of God is lost to us forever. I got so much freedom and joy from learning to step out in my identity - a beloved daughter of God.
I had the amazing opportunity to go to Thailand on 'outreach' (a time of applying what we'd learned during DTS). Our focus was to simply love people - no agenda, just love. We went to a village of Burmese refugees, the slums of Bangkok and the bars in Phuket. All these places are full of people who are rejected, shunned and looked down upon by society, so we went and loved them. One of the most amazing things we saw was a 40 year old lady from the slums who had been mute from birth, say her first word "Hallelujah" after we prayed with her. God is so amazing!

This was just the start though... I went back to YWAM Denver at the end of June, this time to do a School of Biblical Foundations (SBF). Talk about having your mind renewed! It was exactly what I needed after DTS, where God broke down so many lies in my life. I was saturated in truth every day, since our main project was to read through the entire Bible chronologically in 10 weeks. It was incredibly challenging, but set such a firm foundation in who I am and who God is in my life. It was incredible to see how God's love and faithfulness are the two things that keep coming up all the way through the Bible. I was reminded of all the times throughout my life that God has continuously been there for me and helped me through extremely hard times (but that's for another post).

I'd been praying a rather dangerous prayer: 'break my heart for what breaks Yours', and so wasn't really surprised that I found myself still at YWAM Denver doing a School of Social Justice (SSJ) in September. It was a heavy school, since we looked at issues like human trafficking, refugees, poverty and community development. It was rough, realizing that we have a responsibility to do something about it, yet also seeing how huge and deeply rooted these issues are. The most important thing we learned was that you need to just do something. Mother Teresa said that if she had known what she was getting herself into before, she would never had done it, but she saw one person in need and helped them, then another one... It starts with helping the one.

God also brought me to a place of trusting Him with everything and really giving it all to Him - not out of obligation, but out of love and in response to His amazing love. I know that I can trust Him, and I would willingly die for Him, if He would be glorified by my death. But more that that, I will strive to live in a way that brings Him glory in every thing I do. This is harder by far, but so much more powerful. Anyone can die, but how many really live?

I then had the amazing opportunity to go on another outreach, this time to Brazil (December-February). We got to help out at Mount Salem Children's Home for about 5 weeks, which was an amazingly hard and beautiful time. There were days when I felt like I had nothing left to give, but then I saw how delighted the kids were to see us, and I couldn't help but love them, because God's love for them is so overwhelmingly powerful. We also got the chance to go down the Amazon for 10 days, and help build a church in the river community. The pastor had been praying for 2 years for a team to come and help them, and we got to be the answer to their prayers, which was such a blessing to them and to us.

So that's a taste of what my life has been like this last year, as I've gone on adventures with God all over the place.
I'm currently spending at least 40 days resting and reflecting on all that God has done, and looking ahead to where He is beckoning me next.
A friend of mine gave me this quote: "I know not what He is about to do with me, but I have given myself entirely into His hands"
This is extremely true of my life right now, and what makes it even more exciting is that God is romancing me. He really is such a romantic - He invented it after all!
Here's what He's said to me:
"Out in the desert I'll teach her to sing, she'll call Me 'Husband' and she'll wear my ring'"
The amazing part about that, is that He has given me a ring - I gave away my ex's promise ring, and God gave me one back - from Him.

May God awaken your heart to sing, and may you hear Him calling you out of the business of life, to be still with Him. Let Him sing over you again. He longs for your presence, and He loves you so much.