The half-way mark

Hey everyone,

Hard to believe it but I’m halfway done my S.O.W. already, we’ve finished our sixth week, and time is flying! During DTS it felt like time went pretty slow, but it’s quite the opposite this time around.

These past weeks I feel like I’ve been receiving so much amazing teaching, and not only that, I’m retaining it…woo hoo! During DTS it was almost chaos: living with ten new girls from different countries in one room, trying to retain all the new information you were getting, and just trying to figure out YWAM base living in general…at this point most of that no longer applies so it frees me up to process what I’m learning in class right away.

Our crazy group!

Week four we had the privilege of being taught by Douglas Johnston, who staffs the BCC on base here (Bible Core Course, another secondary school). The topic was humility, which is such an essential part of being a worship leader. You can’t have the fruits of the spirit without first having a base of humility, everything stems from it.  Douglas did such a great job of weaving truth that we needed to hear, but with a background context, that some of the passages I’d read many times suddenly made so much more sense! Another thing I really enjoyed was the mixture of Douglas speaking to us, but also giving us scripture to figure out, and then present what we learned to the class. When you’re not just spoon fed information, you tend to retain it better, so that was super refreshing and good for us.

Last week was spent learning about the Holy Spirit, the part of the Trinity that’s the most forgotten, and least talked about. I was super stoked for this week because for me, the Holy Spirit was a bit of a mystery and something that seemed so foreign. Vanessa Pavely (wife of Spencer who spoke during week one) was our speaker, and it was a total blessing to have her. She’s incredibly knowledgable in all aspects, and her deep relationship with God is obvious and so encouraging. Her ministry is focused on inner healing (repentance, that word sounds so harsh and serious, but it’s not), intercession, prophecy, and just intimacy with God in general. We also had an afternoon where we practiced prophesying over people on base, which was super cool! God gave me some encouraging words for people and I got to pray for many of them. It was a tiring week because I received a lot of information that was totally new to me, but it was an amazing one.

Bruce Hammond from Texas spoke this week about Musicianship and it was an incredible week (they all seem to be). Bruce is an amazing example of what it means to be humble and generous as a worship leader and as a person in general. He poured and poured into us all week, he has so much to offer in terms of his musical talents and as a speaker. He really took the time to get to know all of us, our backgrounds, and what we wanted to learn. He’s one of those people who loves to invest in people, no matter how long he’s with them, and we all appreciated it so much. It was awesome too because he’s so sarcastic and definitely dished it out, which all of the North Americans appreciated (Latinos and Gringos don’t quite have the same sense of humor). By the end of the week though, he had a few of our staff throwing back some sarcasm his way. It was great J.

One event that happens every two weeks in SOW, is something special called ‘Song Café’. Every student has to write their own song, often based off the topic of the week (not always though), and then we hold an event to perform them for the whole base. Our first one was a little nerve-wracking for all of us I’d say. I’d never written my own song, plus I had to be vulnerable and share it with people. We also have to explain our song and where it came from. Afterwards, the audience is supposed to critique our song, which was also another scary aspect. Our second song café was a little better though, we knew what to expect, however we had a MUCH larger audience; two visiting teams who were on outreach, plus a lot of staff and students. It was really fun though. If you want to check out the video of the song I wrote, I posted it on Facebook because it didn't want to load here for some reason. 

So far, I’m chugging along, loving the school, learning so much in every aspect: in the school, just living on base, learning guitar…it’s all great. I honestly thank God every day that I’m here, in Costa Rica, at this YWAM base with amazing people, getting to know Him better. That He had the plan for me to be here during this season learning crazy new things every day, giving me revelation, and teaching me to fall in love with Him and worship. I say thank you, thank you, thank you…

My awesome leaders bought me cake for my birthday....and made me stick my face in it.