Okay, to pick up where I left off…

After worship, the York people gathered to share testimonies. All I can say is that without God, we are broken. After lunch, we went out to have a prayer walk through Derby. Basically, we split into pairs, and walked the street and prayed for the people we passed, but quietly. I found this hard to do, because I was distracted by being in such a new place. Not being able to focus has been quite a struggle for me so far. I have to continually ask God to bring me in to the place of worship. Being still and quiet is not my strong suit AT ALL.

The original plans for the evening wound up being cancelled, but we had a great time just being with each other. We had a few competitive rounds of spoons, complete with fighting over spoons and a couple times spoons flung across the room in the mad dash to grab one!

After we cleaned our space in the morning, we were off to the Peak District (don’t ask me where this is in relation to Derby or York, because I have no idea) to hike! I think my ears were about to fall off by the end of that hike. It was SO WINDY. I was almost blown over a few times. We found a standing stone circle called “The Nine Ladies”, and had lunch by the ruins of an old tower. It was pretty awesome. Except that I was so cold, I had my white hat and scarf, and when I pulled up my black hood, I looked rather like a nun. Ah well. After the hike, we grabbed some “chips” in a local pub (where my Coke came with a lemon?) and headed home!

Saturday and Sunday were a bit of a break, and we went into York for the first time! The city center is really impressive, and I will eventually have pictures of it.

Then orientation week began! Let me tell you, so much has been going on it’s hard for me to tell the days apart anymore! I’m looking forward to the weekend and resting.

Monday

We headed to the building that YWAM York is in the process of buying to have worship with Lisa again, which was just as awesome as before. Then Carl Tinnion, the founder of YWAM York and now the national director for YWAM England came to talk about his journey to set up a base in York. His story is very inspiring, but also kind of scary to see how much God wanted Carl to really rely on Him for everything! Jennifer L then talked about where she felt God was taking YWAM York. After lunch, we talked about our DTS expectations with Angharad. Monday was the easiest day!

Tuesday

We got up super early to head in to town and help out at the Carecent, which is basically just like the drop-in in Derby. It’s amazing to see what God can do in places like these. Rob and I had a really good chat with one patron named Tom. God is after Tom!

After that, we went to the building where we talked about evangelism (what is it, how do you feel about it, etc) with Jennifer L. It was interesting to note that our initial reactions to the word “evangelism” weren’t positive at all! When you first say the word, at least for me visions of televangelists and people trying to fill a “saved quota” come to my mind. I hope to change that impression, not just for me but for others we reach out to. After lunch, Angharad talked about intimacy with God and challenged us to go home, and sit still and quiet, without music, without pens and paper, and just meet with God.

This is hard.

We often talk about being still and quiet, but I know that I at least never practice it. And I can see now that being able to do this does take practice, like playing a musical instrument. You can’t just pick up and instrument and play beautifully, it takes work! I want to challenge myself to really and truly practice being still and quiet and just meeting and listening to God.

Wednesday

We headed out to the building, where Jennifer L talked about hearing God. Biblically, even from Genesis God speaks to us. You can’t expect to have an intimate relationship with another person (God included) without communication. We also touched on how, since God made us all unique, it stands to reason that He might speak to us differently, though the best tool for hearing Him is still His Word.

After this, Jennifer P came to talk about intercession and prayer. (She is actually preparing to run a school on the topic!) While we covered the different types of prayer using the original Greek words to differentiate, we talked most about enteuxis—intercession. What really caught my attention about the word is the progression of its meaning. I’ll list out the steps of its “evolution”, so to speak:

It first meant literally, to meet a person.

Then, to meet and converse.

Next to have intimate fellowship with a person,

Then to petition a king,

Then to act or plead on behalf of someone else (often to a king for a condemned man, or to mediate)

What I found so intriguing was that I felt that this might be the progression for me of being intimate with God as Angharad had described the previous day. I feel at first I must learn to really meet with God before I can have intimate fellowship, must first learn not only to meet but to converse before I can plead on behalf of the nations.

After lunch Nan had prepared a prophecy workshop for us. Now, the definition of prophecy for us was not a “telling the future”, but rather hearing from God for another person. If you look at the prophets in the Old Testament, this is what they did. They took a message from God to the person it was meant for.

Nan had cut out pictures from a magazine the day before, and had spread them out on the coffee table in the living room. Our task was to find a picture that represented something that God wanted to say to someone else in the room. I think this was my favorite thing we’ve done so far! It was really amazing to see what God had to say. Everything that I was given was cohesive; they all related to or flowed out of one another!

Later, Stephanie, Jillian, and I were talking about the exercise and it was really interesting to note that we all had thought various pictures were meant for the person that they actually went to!

Thursday

We had an intercession meeting with Jennifer P, which was neat because we got to practice some of what we had been learning about the day before! After, we talked about our family backgrounds and what community means to us. Nan had a small talk about our small groups, and then we did something AWESOME.

We played on the playground! Oh man, I have not laughed so hard at something so innocently fun in a long time. We need some awesome playground equipment like this at home, man! My favorite was the “seesaw” they had—it was in an arc, and you could spin it around, and after you got going it was rather what I imagined a moonwalk to be like. So much fun!

After lunch Lisa came to talk to us about worship, which was great. I guess the key thing I took from that is that worship is a response to being loved, and is therefore involuntary. Because of that, we can always rejoice because God never changes! Amen!

Well, I am now caught up, as today is Friday! Thanks for bearing with me (if you did) through all that! Hopefully, it’ll calm down a little bit when we have our first speaker next week. I’ll keep you posted!