Lectures Week One

This past week has been so stretching. I can already feel God moving in me and pushing me in ways i never would've expected. We got together on Wednesday, we got together as a base and talked about ways to get the most out of our YWAM experience. It was an extremely hard decision, but I chose to give up facebook during the week. Sometimes I still take the time to check before I go to bed. But I gave up talking to people on Skype and having conversations on facebook. It was so hard because before that, my computer was my comfort- like my security blanket. It's what I'd run to if I felt alone or out of place. But I don't need to run to a material thing. I need to run to my Father. I'm so amazed by the peace that He's given me about it and the strength He's backed me up with.

Wednesday, we also started our first week of lectures. Our base leader, Dave Neibling, spoke on the Character and Nature of God. He was so good at making things easy to understand and also with showing us what things WE as Christians can do.

Some interesting insights:

As Christians, we feel like anger is bad. But God created anger and it it's handled the right way, anger can be so good. The thing is, we should be angry. If we're living our life and we don't get angry with the way things are in the world, we have a problem. Anger pushes us to do something about the wrong- we can't be comfortable.

We also talked about families and broken homes... how a child's parents can effect their view of who God is. We all have a warped view of who God is (well, most of us). I don't think we can understand in entirety how great and powerful He is. We all chose something that we felt we didn't really believe or understand about God and we prayed about that specific thing. For myself: unconditional love.

Later that night, we had worship. Worship here is funny. I never would've imagined spending 2 hours worshipping but only singing 3 songs. But the worship is so amazing. Sixty people can sound like 300. It gets so loud and it's truly amazing. We were singing "Beautiful" by Phil Wickham and I was just overcome with emotion and I broke down and cried on the floor. It was so powerful and I never do things like that. It was so amazing :)

Today was a really powerful day. We pretty much had a day of confessions for... 6 and a half hours. It was such an amazing day and God is doing so much in our school. I can't wait to see what He also does in me :D

Time to go pray for the cities in Brisbane :)

Thanks for your prayers!

Love, Erica