I know I only just sent out an update but last week made such an impact on everyone that I had to write about it. Last week was corporate week and we had the team from Circuit Riders come in and teach. It was amazing. The week was about freedom from shame, rejection, fear, unforgiveness, passivity and replacing it with joy, life and vision!! Such a great topic considering we’re all leaving on outreach in a few weeks!

We learned the simple gospel. You’ve sinned, Jesus came to die for you to take your sins away because you couldn’t, if you believe He did that you can be saved, you have peace with God. WE MAKE SHARING JESUS SO COMPLICATED…… ITS NOT. We learned five verses by heart to use as a guide when sharing the gospel with someone, nicknamed the “Roman road to salvation”. 1) Romans 3:23, 2) Romans 6:23, 3) Romans 5:8, 4) Romans 10:9-10 and 5) Romans 5:1. These verses succinctly present the gospel message in a way that you can run through the gospel in the two minutes. So if you’re waiting at a bus stop and the bus is in 3 minutes, jackpot! You’ve got time to include a bit of your testimony too!! The person doesn’t have to bow down on the spot and give their life to God. You’ve planted a seed that God can use. You’ve already succeeded. God doesn’t look at whether or not the person was changed on the spot, He looks at the fact that you’ve said yes to the prompting in your heart to share with them. Interesting perspective shift.

We did many exercises identifying areas of our life that were affected by shame, rejection, fear, unforgiveness and passivity and speaking out the truth (with guidance from bible verses) about who we are as a child of God and as someone who through Jesus sacrifice on the cross, has authority over these feelings because He took them upon himself. We did all these in our outreach teams and as my team dealt with these things, life and vision and joy naturally came as we were able to walk in the full potential of who we were created to be. Our perspective shifted.

Don’t stress, God was speaking to me through the whole week in a number of ways. One revelation was how my (audio) mixing is worship to Him. I was asked to mix the band for the week because we would be having worship every morning that week (go corporate week!) and it meant using a desk I hadn’t used in a few months since I left my old job at Etihad/AVD but I remembered everything really quickly and re conquered the GLD80 (brilliant little desk by the way) but I digress.

I realised that I could worship God in the way that I mixed. I’d always thought that tech was tech and playing/singing was playing/singing but this week I realised that even though I’m not up the front playing piano or guitar I’m still playing an instrument, only instead of one instrument, I have all of them…. God showed me that I have the unique position to highlight to the people not on stage the beauty of each of the instruments as I choose and to combine the textures of each of these instruments as I see fit. I can highlight a great snare roll or a great riff on the guitar, the cymbal roll when the band drops out or the piano all the time (ok so i’m a little biased). I am worshiping God through using my musical gifting along with my technical gifting and creating clean, clear music that creates an atmosphere where people can meet with God. I had a great week worshiping God through mixing the band. The campus even blessed me with a Starbucks gift card! My perspective shifted.

Also just a quick story for you guys. One of our students came the the course with cancer, she’d had several operations to remove various cancers but it was in her brain and her spine too. We had prayed a few times for her to be healed and last week we received word from her doctors that they’d done some tests and that she was completely cancer free!! The whole class went nuts when she made the announcement just praising God for healing her. How’s that for a perspective shift?

I can not wait to see what God does in my life and my team’s life in the next few weeks.

In other news we are leaving for outreach in a few weeks and we didn’t really have a guitar to take along so I found out how much it would cost to ship a guitar I have access to to Hawaii. Turned out if I got a guitar for $100 or less I may as well buy one here. So I jumped on craigslist and searched around, I put up fliers around campus too. I found a guitar that looked pretty good but the problem was it was in Hilo on the other side of the island. So I found out how to get there and called the lady selling it and arranged to meet her.

Got up at 0540 on Saturday morning and sat on a bus for a few hours, talked the lady down to $90 and then had a Starbucks courtesy of my gift card, sat in Starbucks for a few hours, sat on a bus for a few hours and got back to the campus at 1700. After putting new strings on it and tightening the neck up a bit it now sounds really quite amazing. It’s a Jasmine by Takamine S34C and there’s a picture of it at the top. I’ve since bought a case and a spare set of strings. Now I have a cheap guitar that is going to be used for worship both here in Kona and on every outreach I go on as long as it lasts. Here’s some more photos of it. It is going to be used to bless thousands if not tens of thousands of people!

I’ll leave you with my view of corporate week from the mixing console.

PRAYER – for if you’re the praying type…

Answered Prayer

• The healing power of Jesus healing one of our girls!
• Financial provision so far.

Prayer Points

• Monthly supporters that want to join in with the work God is doing through my life and ministry.
• That God would continue to work on me so that I continue to grow in my knowledge of Him and so that I can pour into these students how much He indescribably loves them.
• Panama:
  • Fe, my co-leader.
  • Our team Allie, Rachel-Joy, Sammi, JoJo, Sarah, Wes and Dan.
  • Pray God would continue to give us a heart for Panama and its people.
  • Pray for divine appointments and for the people we will minister to.
• The last bit of money to come in for Panama so that everyone can go!

God bless you!