Today we started our lessons on 'Identity', and carried on with our daily 'community care' duties, as well as having a good sung worship session this evening. We started off the day with our usual Quiet Times, except they were pleasantly longer than normal today, is it was the first Monday of the month (when the Monday worship session is held in the evening instead of the morning). We concemtrated on the story in the book of John, chapter 4 about the Samaritan woman Jesus talked to at a well. I like this account as it tells us a lot about Jesus, and therefor God. Jesus knew when and where he should be. He chose to speek to A) a woman - not the done thing for someone is Jesus position, B) a Samaritan - also not the best of ideas for a Jew, C) someone who had been rejected/tossed aside by several men, and now living with someone who didn't even respect her enough to marry her, D) someone who he knew was desperate and needing someone to speak to. It is frustrating to know there are people who think that they need to have everything sorted in their life before they could come close to God. This story shows that God chose to come close to the woman, despite how she felt about herself, and what others would have thought about her. You don't need to have your life sorted to seek and find Jesus. He'll do the sorting for you when you let Him in to your life! Our week's lecture series on 'Identity' is being presented by a nice lady from the Netherlands called Ada. She started off today by concentrating on the word 'intimacy'. She wrote this word on the board, and underneath it wrote 'in to me see'. She asked us to think about how this made us feel. For me it was quite encouraging: I saw it as God asking us to see in to Him. I think the idea is that we need to be intimate with God, as we should get our identity from Him - not from our achievements, our job, our family or our failures - so we need to know His authentic voice so we can recognise when it is Him talking to us (through circumstances/friends/other means). It was quite a remarkable session over all, and I look forward to the coming week. It is as if each of the topics we are covering could have their own 5 month programme, unlike the week each they have to get on this YWAM DTS course I am on at the moment. After lunch we performed our 'community care' duties (our team did a mixture of our jobs today - cleaning the toilets, mirrors and floors in the bathrooms). After that, we listened to a talk about Evangelism, focusing on it's history. It was quite interesting to hear how 'conventional' evangelical big meetings came about, as well as hearing about 8th century monks and holy men of today. The key messages were: we should go without having an agenda, and obedience is more important than 'results'. I never realised how much I liked Branston Pickle till I saw it on the dinner table tonight. It is ironic: i'm now back living in the county I grew up in, but sometimes I feel I could be in some part of America, with all the Americans on base here. Just to see something as simple and typically British as Branston Pickle available to eat was a surprising treat. Maybe you had to be here to understand (though most of those around me didn't seemto understand either, and thought it was a bit odd to be eating small black blocks in a black sauce). They didn't seem to understand: that was a taste of home for me, despite being closer to home than I've been for 8 years! In the evening we had a sung worship time. As it is the 1st Monday of the month, we had it in the evening and had guests from the local area join us. This was quite a good time, though honestly, for most of it I was just thinking about my girlfriend! I could have gone on about her all day too, but the other students might want me to shut up eventually. God is so good to have brought us together in the way He has. It's just hard though, with her where she is, and me miles away. It has got to be god training for the future though - not least when I go on the outreach phase of this course for 2 months. We still do not have the list of possible locations, by the way. If you pray, please could you ask God that I manage to stay focused on the course, and not get distracted by thoughts of the future (or the past), and that I remember the God has a plan for my life, so I don't have to worry about thinking of a plan for myself. Thanks for reading. Please feel free to add a comment below. Have a great week.
