Back By Popular Demand...

Okay... so I'm just going to skip the apology for not writing forEVER and get straight to the summary of my life. But I am sorry. :)

The last five or so months have been incredibly full-on. I have been leading a DTS again... this time with 17 students (mostly from America, but a few Canadians, a Spaniard, a German, Korean, Brit, Aussies and Kiwis mixed in!). We were pretty understaffed (just four of us), so there was a lot involved. I had four girls that were my "one-on-ones" (basically the girls that I was specifically mentoring through the program), as well as a lot of other issues that arose during the time, and administration and staff training and all of these things left me without much time for blogging. This group of students were a mixed bag of wanting to follow God no matter what the cost and wanting to follow God but being afraid of what that means. But we're getting there. The whole"he's not safe, but he's good" thing keeps coming to mind. And I learned a lot through it! I learned that I want to be able to make people happy and comfortable and that is not always what God is doing. Because he's not safe. But he's good.

Another thing I learned: it's easy to think you're a good leader if you're leading people who want to be led. And it's easy to think you're a bad leader if you're leading people who don't. But somehow, that can't be the measure of leadership. I think it has a role in how I should do things, but it's not the main thing.

Is this a bit choppy? Did I mention I got home at 3am yesterday after travelling all day and then driving my team for two hours in the middle of the night?

Anyway, after three months of lectures in NZ, I took a team of 8 students to Australia! We have done some amazing things-- worked with a medical ship for 5 weeks, gone to schools and churches and (hopefully) encouraged people, fed homeless kids, prayed for all kinds of people, picked up hitchhikers, had countless conversations about the love of God, saw God provide for us ridiculously, met some incredible people who lay down their lives in obedience to God every day, thought deeply about justice and hope, watched 8 scrappy DTS students begin to have their lives ruined for the ordinary.

It was hard-- really hard-- sometimes. There were a few days in there where I had no idea in the afternoon where we would be sleeping that night. But we always had somewhere in the end. And there were times when the team found out that loving people is actually a choice-- and not an easy one. But by choosing it, you see beauty in people that you may have been blind to before.

One thing I learned: never underestimate the importance of debriefing! There were so many lessons that would have been missed if we didn't take a few minutes as a team to see what was going on in people's heads and hearts. It's hard to be motivated to do it when you just want to either crawl in a hole and hide or strangle half of your team, but it's so worth it.

So that is a very quick sketch of the latest in my life. More details later! Seriously, there were so many things that stood out to me during this time, so I'll have to tell more specific stories later. I've been saving up.