Day 3: Hungry. Love. Jesus.

I'M HERE!!!

Ok, I have been in Hawaii for 9 days, been officially part of YWAM since Thursday (today is Saturday) and I have fallen in love with the purpose of being here: Falling in Love with Jesus.
I love everything about what this program stands for which is somewhat ironic being that one of my favorite things is that the staffers here stress that this 6 month adventure we are all on is NOT about the "PROGRAM" but instead it is about RUNNING after Jesus, knowing God's heart and reaching that fullness of identity and redemption, grace and love that the J-man (Jesus) is all about.

You can't say the name Jesus enough around here and I LOVE that, too.

The campus is great, very hilly and I will definitely be getting my exercise in without trying. I must resort to my pata-mobile (foot-mobile, i.e. walking) to go to the grocery store and fro-yo and such.

This place is filled with people that desire to honor God, loving Him and loving others. Jesus essentially rewrote the Bible when He challenged the Sadducies' challenge and said, Love God and Love Your Neighbors. That's what we get to do here...which reminds me, why do we not do that so often outside of programs like this one?

Goal #1 for the life outside YWAM, constantly denying myself, my rights to be put first, and to never leave a conversation, job, friendship, encounter of any kind without loving that person.

Readers, you could probably tire of reading the word love, but I pray for you that is an impossibility! I can't say that I don't have plenty of moments where I'm not loving my neighbor, this much is a given, but I see love everywhere. On our tour of the prayer room it was not just a walk-through tour, it was a come in, praise God, lets sing some worship and let the Holy Spirit rock our hearts. Imagine this, about 125 (guessing) people all moved to tears and shouts and knealing and swaying and smiling and proclaiming and praising God. He was instantly jumping at the chance to enter our hearts and stir things up. I hope you know God is willing and waiting, eager even to do the same for you. Again, God is not already changing me because of a program, but because He is the Almighty, Lord of this world.

A couple things I thought of in that AWEsome worship experience:

• Wow, there really are a whole lotta people with passion and frustration (in the form of HUNGER!) and desire to know God and to get closer to Jesus and become best friends with the Holy Spirit.
• If we can have this much fire and raw energy-love here on earth, what the heck is Heaven going to be like?! And, will I be able to handle it?
• I have company in this divine romance. Praise my God.
• All the hunger and desire that has left me frustrated and even disappointed in myself (more on that later), was never free of God, but perhaps the precise thing that led me here.

Classes start Monday. We have a basketball court that is the floor to our group church and worship events, Ohana Court. We have a coffee place, a cafe rather, and I hope not to ever reach a dependency on it (debatable). Theres a gym, movie nights, and sack lunches on weekends. I can see the ocean a bit from my dorm window: theres 7 girls. We're all very strong willed/have strong personalities and it was almost uncomfortable initially because, well, lets face it, I usually dominate conversations and get plenty of air time to voice the whirlwind in my mind. But, I also prayed for the opportunity to sit back and learn to listen more, to not get to winded and exhausted just from voicing so much.

Its always nerve-racking for me to meet so many new people at once. You probably are puzzled and think, that's crazy, she's a social butterfly. But, I usually flourish in my flutter when I get to be the center of attention and I'm the new person and theres a group of persons I get to meet and, again, lets face it (LFI for here on out, there will be a lot of these confessional comments) the opportunity to impress and please people with my people pleasing skills.

But I have heard "I love you" from so many girls and the staff already in the last few days those insecurities and lack of center-of-attention-pleasers have begun to disapate.

Today we went to the beach as the PhotogenX school alone--there are several different DTS schools and other programs. That was amazing. I think there are about 10 men here so the initial segregation resembling a junior high dance--girls on one side, boys on the other, was breached. And I got to just pass time without too much analysis (shocker?) and relax a bit around faces I was beginning to think were old as sliced bread.

Deb, Daniel, Josh, and Chelsea bobbed in the sea beyond the gentle wave-break (there are A LOT of technical ocean/surfer/beach guru-esque terms that I need to learn) and then decided to swim to the end of the beach/shore limits where the majority of the group were jumping off the volcanic-y rocky cliffs. No thank you. So we swam further beyond that and found a cave and just when we thought oceans were somehow nicer in Hawaii, we found ourselves annoyed by the salt content and unhelpful pull of the waves.

Gosh, I wish I could record all of the great moments to share with folks back home and also to be able to remember them years later, but what is living if we are always holding onto the past, even if its the recent past. Just know that I am safe in God's arms, happy to the core to be in His will, protected by His grace and surrounded by the truest community I've ever known all connected by the same exact truth.

Love,
Brittany