Hello bloggers!!

I am going to post something before we get to crazy with all the festivities of anniversaries. I am sitting in my room in Africa, finishing up last minute packing and trying to allow the reality of us leaving set in. I am afraid it won’t hit me until I am on the plane. This place has been such an amazing example of God’s love, hope, and presence. I can’t believe it has been 3 1/2 months! 

I wanted to post something before it was to late. After our two weeks in Perth, I will be headed to India. We will be spending two months working in a hospital there. After that time we have been invited to join a new health care opportunity being launched by ywam perth. It is called simple health care. It consists of teams of mission workers that target a country and send groups to teach simple health care to different towns in that country. SO a team goes into a town, they stay for three weeks. They gather all the local health care workers, missionaries, and Jesus following leaders of the community and spend three weeks equipping them with teaching plans and material to teach simple health. Simple health would consist of basic hygienic, sanitation, wound care, common tropical diseases, and nutritional education that most third world nations don’t have. The goal of the program is to impact the country through the workers that are already living there by educating the local people. If you raise up people within the community that are making the changes then you really start to change death rates, health standards, and lives in that community. The best part is all the people that will be educating these communities LOVE JESUS!!! 

So why am I telling you, well because this opportunity in India is open to any Indian in the whole country to come and also going to be open for a few African to come. It is expensive for there travel and to pay for the three weeks they will be at the seminar. I wanted to give anybody the opportunity to sponsor equipping one of these Indians or Africans to go to this seminar. To tell you how cheap it is, if you sponsor a Indian to attend the seminar it is only 54 US Dollars!!!!! I used to spend that in a week on fast food, I am ashamed to say! So for 50 bucks you could greatly impact a nation and be apart of God’s kingdom coming to India! I don’t know how much it would be to sponsor an African, but if God put that on your heart then I could get that information for you. 

If God is speaking to you about this, you can spend the money to YWAM Perth (address below) with a note saying that it is to sponsor an India to go to India. 

Well we are starting a very busy week. I had a wonderful time with my family and will hopefully write more about it later! 

You are blessed to be a blessing.

PO Box 8501 Perth Business Centre, Western Australia, 6849, Australia

Wrapping up....

Hello ...

I feel like it has been so long I am not even sure where to start. Well we are finishing up our last week here in Tanzania. I can’t believe how fast time flies! We are coming to the end, starting to say goodbye to people, and trying to wrap our heads around the fact that we are really leaving. There is a huge part of me that just dives into the African culture and will have a hard time leaving. The beauty of the people, the land, and their hearts is inspiring. There is defiantly a hope and childlike faith that this culture so easily grasps that teaches me how easy trusting in Jesus can really be.

We finish up our last week at the hospital this week. We will work three days this week, saying our goodbyes on Wednesday. I wish I could say that these last few weeks have been easy, full of health, and not as much warfare. I think that is the opposite of what has happened. It is a battle until the end, and even after we leave it will still be a battle. One that God is never done with. He spoke words to our group about the virgins waiting for their bridegroom.(Matthew 25) The wise ones who kept extra oil so there lamps burned all the way through the night and when the bride groom called they were prepared. This was so encouraging for pushing through these last few weeks. It is so easy to give up and coast through these last weeks. Giving up a little bit of the fight so that it is a bit more comfortable or less exhausting in the end. We as a school were commissioned off to prepare the way of the Lord (Isaiah 40), to keep our lamps burning so that we would be prepared for the bridegroom (Jesus). This has brought me a new excitement, and love for this place. The Lord is coming, and is still at work within me to see His kingdom in all the glory, be brought one step closer to becoming reality in this place and hospital.

I had a conversation with a doctor this week about her faith. She pulled out a Bible looking through her purse one day at the desk in the hospital. As I needed to talk to her about a patient, I felt the Holy Spirit prompt me to ask her about her faith. I am become more comfortable these days with plainly asking, do you believe in Jesus. She smiled, a big smile and said “yes”. I told her I saw her Bible and was encouraged. That she was loving these women like Jesus loved her. That He was using her to love and provide for these women. Her smile and the reaction in her spirit and appearance was amazing. God is encouraging, uplifting these workers here that are believers and He is greatly shaking the foundations of the ones that aren’t! It is exciting and it will have lasting impact on this hospital.

It is bitter sweet getting ready to leave. I am sad but I am super excited to head to our next locations. We are having an unusually break in our outreach. Usually the BAS outreach goes for nine months and does not return home (to Perth) until the end. (Random side note - I just realized out outreach is nine months, that is how long it takes to have a baby. haha.) Anyways, this year, it is YWAM’s 50th year anniversary and YWAM Perth’s 25th year anniversary. So we will be heading back to Perth in 7 days. God is amazing and has provided a way for my mom and little brother to head over to Perth to come see me!! SO in 9 days I get to see my family who I haven’t seen for a year!!! I am so excited and anticipating a really good 10 days with them! God is amazing and speaks crazy dreams that can come into existence when He is apart of them!

SO I hope everyone’s new year is starting with God’s dreams and hopes for this new year. Throw New Year’s resolutions out the window and ask God what He has for you this year. I think you will have a lot better hope of seeing that come to be than trying to loss ten pounds! =)

You are blessed to be a blessing!

Mary and the Manger

One of my leaders, Paula, started the day off with this amazing revelation that really brings me joy. She is reading this commentary on the book of Luke and she was talking about the birth of Jesus. That when Mary and Joseph came to Bethlehem they stay in an inn. The inn was for passing through shepherds and flock keepers. So as we all know there were no beds and they stayed where all the animals were, and Jesus was placed in a manger. The point that Paula was making was that the King of Kings who came to save the whole world was born in the worst conditions and on a night where unless an angel came to you, you didn’t even know He was born. No one knew, Jesus was born and the world was oblivious.

I think this really is amazing because I see women every day that give birth in conditions that aren’t acceptable. They are laboring with three women on the same bed, some in the floors, some make it to the laboring table (which still isn’t anything close to what would be used in the western world for delivery). These babies come into this world and no one even knows. They are in the worst conditions and then placed in a modern day manger (a crib with ten other babies). This has begun to wear on me over the last couple of weeks. This revelation though, thinking back and seeing how our King was born into this world. Remembering the impact He made on the world, even if He did have lower standards entering the world. He became our saviour. The most humble servant to the world. I prayed a prayer this week and will continue to pray it, that these little ones that we bring into this world. On the floor, table, or bed, that they would be world changers. That the conditions that they are born in and the lack of awareness of the world to their birth wouldn’t stop them from rising up into the fullness of what God has already placed in them. I am excited to think about the Moses, Abraham, or elijah that we are delivering here in Tanzania.

You are blessed to be a blessing.

MERRY CHRISTMAS

time is flying...

It is getting closer to Christmas. I am definitely not having a white one but it is still
a special one. We have so many different traditions that we are seeing come
through from different members of our team. We have an advent calendar,
stockings up, and even a Hanukkah candles that are being lit every night. It is fun
to see all these traditions shine through and be able to be apart of them all.

Our lives here have been busy and full. We are one week away from being done
with all of our lectures! Next week is our last week. We are officially half way
through this school! I can’t believe it. These amazing women and families have
become my family over these past 6 months. It makes me sad to think that we
only have six more months to go.

I have about four weeks left here in Africa. If there is one thing that I can’t get
over these days it is how God has just brought life to me. I think it has been a
collection of months of growing and letting God do a lot of healing in me, so now I
am starting to see the results. The new joy and life in my spirit. I now enjoy and
desire to soak up everything and live in the moment of today. I still look forward to
the future but I don;t ignore the present. The hardest thing for me in growing
with God, in my relationships, in different cultures, and the travel in these past
couple of months has been that I wasn’t slowing down in my mind or actions to
enjoy and take it all in. I was so busy trying to get to the next thing that I was
missing the opportunities that were right in front of me. I think this was a defense
mechanism that I had built up from my past. If you are always living in the future,
looking to the future for “better life” then you don’t stop and stare at the reality of
how ugly your life is at that moment or how beautiful it is. So these last months I have been stopped and I have stood face to face with today. It hasn’t been fun, most of it hard and painful.
The result though is magnificent. I really don’t know if I can do justice in
explaining the way that my spirit awakens everyday with an excitement and love
for life and today. This new excitement, love, and ability to face today makes me
even more captivated by Jesus. I often think that I need to come up with some
new angle to present Jesus because of all the material that is out in the world
today and with all the different views and theologies. I want to attract every one to
Him, but the truth is i always get back to the basics when i really want to
know or share about what he is doing in my life. Jesus saved me, over and over again. He has been doing this for 23 years and will continue too. He has brought me through a lot. Not very much of it being easy but the process and especially the end result He has brought me so much
healing, joy, love, freedom, life, and excitement.

So I am super excited about our last few weeks here but a little nervous that it is
going to fly by because our first two and a half months did. I am looking forward
to being back in Perth. I am blessed because my mom and little brother are
coming to see me when I go back to Australia in January! I am so excited! It will
have been exactly one year from the time that I last saw them that they will be
there!

Christmas is soon... I hope everyone has a wonderful Christmas!


You are blessed to be a blessing.

Merry Christmas

Hey!

Just wanted to throw some pictures up! Hope every one is getting ready to have a great holiday! Merry Christmas!!

So much to be Thankful for....

Happy Thanksgiving! I know it is not exactly thanksgiving yet but my team and I
celebrated thanksgiving yesterday. My first thanksgiving on a beach! Pretty
amazing. The base is full of families and singles from Tanzania. We introduced
them to a little bit of American history yesterday by including them in all our
thanksgiving activities. A nice breakfast, followed by a day at the beach, then a
dinner with dessert! It was a treat for us to have dessert and for all of them to be
able to go to the beach! It was great fun to watch them play, swim, and see there
kids just soak up every minute of play time while we were there. I will try to get
some pictures up soon!


These weeks here seem to be flying by. We are starting on the down hill slope of
our time here. Only seven weeks left. The news this week is extra exciting. There
are many staff at the hospital that have been asking us several questions about
being different, what is different about you they ask. They hear us praying, they
know we believe in Jesus, and they even are starting to let us pray for them!
There is one doctor in particular who has shown extra interest and been asking
extra questions over these past few weeks. This past week one of our teams had
the privilege of being at lunch with him the day he decided to become born again.
This was awesome! Places are changed by one individual. This doctor was
letting God open up His heart and wants to change. He wants and now has
Jesus! We are so excited to be able to continue to disciple him in these next
weeks of being at the hospital and are so eager to see the ripple effect of God
working in this doctors life.


It is hard to top the first testimony of this week but I did experience a view of
Jesus that was beautiful. There are about 30-40, sometimes more, women that
need to have full assessments done every morning in the ward I was working in
this week. This is the antenatal ward, the women are in latent phase of labor
waiting to go into active phase to be moved over to the labor ward. With only two
doctors you can imagine how long these checks take. I was assisting a doctor on
thursday morning with the women’s checks and we were about half way through
the women. It is a series of different checks, one of which is listening to and
counting the fetal heart tones. Most of the time we as students are asked to listen
to the heart of the baby with a pinard. It is a cone shaped piece of equipment that
works like a stethoscope. On this one particular mamma, I could not hear the
heart sounds. Not an uncommon occurrence because the pinard is not as easy
to use or accurate for all mammas. So I reached over to get the doppler machine
to listen to the heart sounds. As I put the machine on the women’s belly, I
immediately found the heart tones. I looked down at my watch to start my
counting when I caught a glimpse of the mamma out of the conner of my eye,
she was crying. There was this short moment when the business, the room, it
was all quiet. This women, possible for the first time was hearing her babies heart
beating. She was experiencing this life that had been growing inside of her. It
was this beautiful moment of love. Later that day as I continued to remember this
mamma and her baby I couldn’t get over the love that was flowing out of her the
moment she knew she could hear the life that was inside of her. It was this
instant picture for me of Jesus. These women endure and go through a lot of
harsh treatment and situations to have these babies. They suffer and have
severe pain. They watch as other women around them go through so many
difficult situations not knowing what is going to happen to them and there baby.
This mamma was fighting for this life. She was enduring and suffering just to hear
that little heart beat. To know that life was coming, to hear that heart beat gave
her hope and a drive to push through to delivery. It was just such a clear picture
of Jesus. He endured, He suffers, He watches in horror as we do things to each
other that are deadly, scary, and painful. He waits for those little moments where
He can hear our heart beat. He is waiting to hear the little heart beats of His
children. The heart beat of one of them walking in a talent that He gave them, or
one of them receiving healing, or one of them coming into His kingdom, like are
doctor friend. We can know that life is coming. Life will be brought forth from
Jesus. He is determined to see our life brought forth into restoration and
completeness. So we may be dragged through, or drag ourselves through, many
unnecessary painful experiences, worry, and fear, but in the end He is
persevering, He is life, and He is determined in His love for us.


You are blessed to be a blessing.

Exciting News.....

These blog posts are getting few and far between. I wish I could write everyday as much as God is doing, I am seeing, and learning. My team and I am working hard in the hospital and at the clinic every week.

We are getting to know the staff better and really having such opportunity to be open with them about what we believe and able to share Jesus with them through action and words. This is amazing! To be open to freely speak about why we are loving the mamma’s, why we have a patience and peace, why we care about the little details that need to be taken care of, why we are concerned with the conditions of the staff being overworked. We love them because Jesus loves us.

There is such big news to write about I don’t know where to begin. Well I will start with my first delivery! We are moving into the part of our course where we are beginning to conduct deliveries with our instructors hands over ours. So we are not completely alone yet but putting what we have learned into practice. My first delivery didn’t look exactly like that. Here is a little bit of a set up. The labor ward is not a quiet, calm place to say the least. There is a room full of mamma’s that are waiting because they are not fully dilated yet then there is another room with delivery beds where the mammas are ready and delivering. My staff, Melisa, was in conducting a delivery of her own when a mamma on the other side of the ward was beginning to scream. Her baby was coming. The nurses were not assisting and I walked by to see what was happening. Before you know it I am putting on sterile gloves welcoming a little one into this world. It was amazing. The baby was beautiful, healthy, and so was the mamma. It was/is such a blessing to be apart of this process and even when walking up in the last minutes of this woman’s delivery having her trust me, seeing her know that I was so concerned and caring about the health of her and her baby. Even without words, this was communicated. That is only possible because Jesus is loving me to love her. He is in me, using me in that place, to shine into that women’s life. It is incredible.

Here is a little bit of a set up for the next story. First I want to share about the power of prayer and proclaiming things that God leads you to pray over people. Before we left on this outreach, one of the leaders of our base Peter Brownhill, was praying for us. He prayed that our words would not be small, to not be anxious about our words, and that we would come before people of power or influence.

So our team was again at the hospital this week. The staff of one of the teams, Robyn, was able to make connection with a group of people that visited the hospital on Monday. This group of people were coming in to get ready for a film shoot that was going to take place on Friday at the hospital. God started to orchestrate His plans. The team told Robyn that Naomi Campbell was coming to visit the hospital and bring awareness to the conditions these mammas are in. Robyn knew that God was speaking to her about meeting Naomi. She had several words to speak to Naomi and felt that she was supposed to share about our school and about God with Naomi. God is amazing in His plans. So on friday Robyn and two other students went to the hospital to work. We as a team don't go to the hospital on fridays so it was a trip that was specifically for the purposes of God. From the minute they got to the hospital God was putting them to work with mamma's that were delivering, several that were having post delivery problems, and providing opportunity for Robyn to not only meet Naomi and share what God told her to share, but also to meet Princes Sara of Jordan that happened to be there also, and then a famous singer from Tanzania. Not to mention reporters from Australia, and Tanzania. She was able to share about what God was doing through are school, who we were, what we were about. As you can see from the pictures above. All of these people were able to see the type of conditions what these mamma's and staff are enduring and being faced with day after day. It is so excited that we were apart of God's plan in bringing awareness, and starting movement of seeing situations change. I think the most exciting part was the staff that day. Our girls had countless opportunities to share about Jesus with the staff. They were asking why the girls had come on a friday because they know we don't normally come on fridays. When our girls responded with because God spoke that we needed too, it blew them away. They immediately had so many questions about us hearing from God, and what kind of lives we live. As Robyn was telling us the stories last night when she came home she was amazed at how God did not only answer the prayer that we would meet Naomi Campbell but that He went above and beyond and she also met a princes of Jordan and so many other people of power and influence. She was so excited to see God use her, to share with these people, she kept saying little old her. But the thing is, she is being obedient and following God and that is providing her opportunity to do big things in God's kingdom!

I wanted to share and I want to continue sharing stories of good news. I read the BBC news and all the other news websites and it is all sad, depressing news. The world is fallen, we live in sin but God is moving. There are so many stories about God doing miraculous things - where are those on six o clock news? I want you to know, we are here in the midst of seeing God move, work, and bring hope to a nation that doesn't have it!

Okay I have to go, Love and miss so many people. Most of the pictures are from me teaching a women's health care time in the village we live in. We teach every week, then at the hospital. Then the one of me with the mamma and her baby is not the first baby I delivered, but the first baby that I saw God bring back to life. We had to resuscitate the baby and as you can see in the picture, mom and baby were great by God's hand. Then us packed in transport bus, and then going to church in our african outfits!

You are blessed to be a blessing!