sorry it's been a while. i have a legit reason for that. i'll explain later in this update, which i'm warning you is gonna be long, so brace yourself.
a lot has happened since my last update. first off, that week we had an AMAZING speaker come. David Terán from another Mexico base came to talk to us about relationships. As part of this though, we have to address our own identity in Christ. this ended up taking the whole week and we didn't actually talk about relationships. but it was SO good! he had us share the biggest dream that God has given us, and i actually felt really embarrassed to tell mine, even though i included it in my testimony when we all shared those at the beginning of our DTS. for those of you who don't know, God called me to missions about six years ago, and has since been giving me a path to follow specifically for that. this path just happens to fit perfectly together with my gifts into a dream that i got from God. it took me a long time to feel confident enough to share this with people, but i know it's of God, and if i will just continue to obey Him, i can do it with the strength and wisdom i receive from Christ. i want to eventually go to Africa and fly myself in an airplane to the areas that are difficult to get to, and where people don't want to go due to political unrest and war, and provide whatever minimal healthcare i can and share the gospel. David was glad that i had such a specific dream, because most of my classmates were either following a vague call to missions or the church, or they claimed they didn't know. then when David asked what i was doing about the healthcare part, and i told him that i'm one year away from graduating nursing school, and then one of my classmates shared how i'm also four hours away from getting my pilot's license, David was very impressed with the fact that i was so actively pursuing this dream. he said that it showed how confident i am in my identity, and that being an identity found in God. it was so good to hear that. because i really do feel confident in who i am and what i am capable of with God's help, but there are so many things that people and the world say to me, telling me who i am, that sometimes i lose that confidence.
i felt very reaffirmed during that week, and has some great quiet time with God asking Him to continue leading me with this dream and helping me along the way with motivation and wisdom. during the week we were also preparing for a fundraiser event we had that saturday. it was called "Ferialuz" or "Fair of Lights". i was one of the leaders for it, and we named it for Isaiah 51:4 about how God's justice will be a light for the nations. the focus was on our outreach to southern Mexico and Guatemala. i was specifically in charge of the drama we were going to do and making a video presenting our team and talking about why we're going and what we're doing on outreach. just a few days before the fair, our team decided that they thought we should do a different drama. i was a little hurt, but i prayed about it and God said that we should do the drama that one of the students knew. it was in spanish and i didn't know it at all, and so i was no longer able to help with the drama, losing that part of my leadership role. but i kept working on my video during the whole week. the day before the event, the four leaders were meeting, and after we prayed for the event and our team as we prepared, Efrain said that he thought i should dance during the program we were going to have. he said how he was really blessed by my dancing, and the God wanted me to perform for everyone. this was kinda funny, because only earlier that week i told one of the other leaders, Dina that while i was praying i thought God was telling me to do a dance at the event. we took this as clear confirmation and so we decided to add that in. that was good for me, because only about an hour before the event started, one of my classmates tripped on the power cord to my computer, breaking it completely. i was still putting the finishing touches on the video at the time, and my battery was really low. but we were planning on playing the video off my computer. so with 20 minutes of battery life left, i frantically had to try and finish the video and save it onto an external memory drive. unfortunately the battery died before i could get the video off my computer and so we weren't able to show it at all. so not only was i upset that my computer was broken (the reason i haven't been able to be on a computer long enough to update this in so long) but we weren't even able to show the video. i felt like between the drama and now that, i was a total failure as a leader. but i still danced during the program. everyone seemed to enjoy it, and i was glad to be able to share a little bit about worshiping with everything you have with the people there. here's a video Courtney took of my dance. and a photo of the three of us all dressed up for our fundraiser.
the next day we had free, and i was able to have a girls day with the other two girls in my school. now that there are only three of us, it's pretty much the three of us together all the time. i love them both so much, and we had a lot of fun together going to Burger King, and then going to see a movie, and just walking around doing some shopping for stuff we're running out of. it was our brother Israel's birthday so Dina and i wrote him a song (which you can watch our video of on my facebook profile), with a chorus of "happy sad birthday, Israelito" because we weren't able to go to his birthday part due to some miscommunication. but it was great to really just relax with my sisters. here's the three of us princesses:
on monday we went back to tijuana for a week with the speaker Tom Bloomer. another DTS was there, as well as the School of Ministry Development from LA. it was fun to get to know all the other people. i made some amazing new friends (one of whom invited me to visit her up in San Diego for my birthday next weekend, and i'm going to try with all my power to make that happen), and had a good time. Tom is the director of the University of Nations which is what all the YWAM schools are through, and it was great to get to hear him speak. we talked about having a world vision, and a lot of people had their ways of thinking adjusted. i again felt very reaffirmed in many of the ways i already thought. he was interesting though because at each lecture he would share some princess story or the like that was an allegory to the gospel. it was a different way to look at it all, and i really enjoyed it. he again talked about how our identity is influenced by what we hear from the world around us, and how we have to take every thought captive and see if it's of God before we identify with it. this all went along really well with the book we're reading right now (and just turned our book report in on) called Making Jesus Lord written by Loren Cunningham, the founder of YWAM.
now we're back in Tecate, and we have the other DTS that was with us in TJ here for the weekend doing Mission Adventures stuff. it's fun because they are a mostly Korean group, so we have more diversity here at our little base. oh and some of you would be proud to know that i've been cooking a few meals here, and i'm doing really well! this afternoon i made lunch with some of the mexicanos, and i was in charge of the rice and salad, and both turned out well! now i'm going to go over to the base and help them make dinner too, because we're having enchiladas and i need to learn to make more mexican food while i'm here in Mexico.
