Trees

This past week's topic was on "Sin & the Cross". The thought of the Sin & the Cross felt heavy. I imagined having deep sessions of crying and repenting for hours.... the typical things I've experienced during youth retreats at church. However, it was so much more and different than what I had imagined.The very first thing we did on Monday morning was Scripture Prayer. I didn't know what that was, but as Yolanda explained, it was basically reading verses at a time and re-phrasing those verses to make it my prayer. We learned to proclaim and declare using God's authority. It was some powerful stuff!!As the week progressed in learning about Adam & Eve, the tree of the knowledge of Good & Evil, The Fall, etc. there were many new concepts that I never perceived before. But I continued to question, "So where does the cross come in with all this?"Then Wednesday came and I had the biggest revelation. I believe the church has thought me this before, but the revelation wasn't big enough and it never really sunk in deep enough. The speaker explained that there is a difference between the act of sin(s) and being a sinner. When we accept Christ into our lives, we put our old self on the Cross where Christ died on. We are born again as Saints - meaning we are NO longer sinners. We may still sin, but Christ already died once, so He does not need to die again for us! God knows us from beginning to end. He understands that habits are not easy to break. God is not a condemning God with a clip board and waits us to screw up so He can mark us down. We don't have to try to be good all the time and feel shameful when we do fall short. He understands that it's a journey to be righteous and obedient. When we repent for the acts of sin, he doesn't expect us to change instantly. All He wants is for us to allow Him to be part of the process, part of the journey so we can walk without shame and guilt. Once we are Saints, it becames a journey of growth, not a repeated process of feeling shameful that I let Him down again. After this week, I feel so relieved of many stones I've been carrying with me most of my life. God truly revealed that He is the source of all things. I know that I will continue to make mistakes and make poor choices at times. But, I know that God doesn't stand over my shoulders and says, "You bad girl!" He reaches out His hand, picks me up and says, "Let's try this again." This Friday, we got a day off, so I took a nice long walk down the river to soak all of this in. God is truly amazing... and I'm in awe of His faithfulness... and grateful of His love and grace. I found so much peace during this wonderful walk and spend the rest of the day with lots of quality time with my fellow YWAMers. More exciting stuff next week! Many blessings,Adeline Kim

Relationships

Hey everybody,
This week was about relationships, it was a lot of fun and we learned a lot! The first few days we talked about sexual- and non-sexual-intimacy. We noticed that we (YWAM’ers) go to a very deep level of relationship in a very short time and that sometimes we should spend a bit more time getting to know each other on a more basic level. Further on in the week we talked a lot about SEX, how God made sex so beautiful and how he intended it to be etc etc. Just amazing how everybody opened up and we had really honest conversations about sexuality. Jo is a counsellor so she has this amazing gift of listening to people and we’ve learned a lot from her. Also she had a lot of creative ways to talk about this subject such as group discussions (either small or big groups), games and stories. But the most I’ve learned from here own life story, she was so open and honest about her own struggles in life. This taught me how to be honest and open in relationships and how to accept other people there differences.

Friday Jo left and we went as a group to Scotland, there we went to a Buddhist temple. This was a huge experience for me because I never went to a Buddhist temple before. This place didn’t look like Scotland at all only the bad weather reminded me that we really where in Scotland. We learned a lot on this day about the culture of the people we’re going to meet in Asia and we could experience a little bit of how it is going to be living around people who believe in Buddha. All the monks and nuns wore red robes and they had bold heads, and our guide explained a lot of the symbols behind the traditions and attributes in the temple. Overall this was a great week, we’ve learned a lot and we have become closer as a group. I think we all look forward to the coming weeks and to our outreach! I hope my English made a little bit of sense… and I’m sorry if it didn’t make sense at all. But the key thing is that Gods love you and that he made us to be in a great relationship with Him and with each other!
Gods zegen (God bless),
Vera Arents

WOW WHAT A WEEK! This week has been an amazing week for us all! God Brought us Yan Nicholls and now our lives will never be the same about evangelism ever again. Yan took evangelism to a whole new level. I think I speak for everyone when I say we all have a complete new hunger for evangelism. He shows us how we don't need to miraculously save people every time we go out there. But were getting people closer and closer god every time we step. Yan took the angle scale and just completely explained in a form in which if the angle scale was food we would've been scoffing it down. As were out in botchergate on Friday nights we will attempt to apply what we've learnt and its all about trial and error. You get the abusive people, the nutters, the nice old grandmas and then there's the people who are just hungry for god and need the mud wiped out of their eyes and that is why evangelism is so important! God is good! Amen – Ezra McIntyre

Another week bites the dust.

Week four of the DTS was Abrahamic Covenant weekThe first lecture week of the DTS we spent looking at who God is. The second week was spent looking at who we are. And this third week has been spent looking at what God is up to, and what his unchanging purpose is. Steve Sullivan took us through the Bible to show us that God really is 100% committed to his promise, which he confirmed to Abraham with an oath. God wants to bless us, and he wants us to be a blessing to all peoples! What a wonderful God he is! Going through the Bible confronted those of us that have gone to Sunday school with the fact that we often have ideas about the Bible which are not entirely true. And we found that Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, Joshua, king David, king Solomon, the prophets, Daniel, Nehehiah, Peter, Paul, the writer of Hebrews and Jesus (to name a few), all had the Abrahamic Covenant in their pockets! This week we had quite a few young people turn up to the dry bar we put on in the city centre, on the Friday evening. We’re really enjoying getting to know the youth of Carlisle and hanging out with them.After having done a prayer walk down Botchergate in the morning we set out into the cold on the Friday night more equipped and more aware of what we’re coming up against in our evangelism there. We went out armed with prayer and lots of coffee, and were ready to bless people! It’s great to see people’s faces light up when they see us coming with a warm coffee for them on these cold October nights... and it’s especially nice to get into conversation with people and be able to talk with them about Jesus!Anyway, now that we’ve looked at what the family business is, we’re going to spend next week looking at getting really good at doing being a real blessing to people, and clearly communicating Christ to them!- Emma Wagner