He Loves Us Oh How He Loves Us

I have been in Hawaii for three weeks now and I am finally adjusted to the time difference. Wow...five hours really makes a difference :)

In the last three weeks we have been training as staff in how to do small groups and one-on-ones and what it is to be a disciple and how to do discipleship. And I have loved every minute of it. The challenge of not being a staff/student, but fellow disciples bringing people along side of us and the challenge of living it out before we can ask our students to do the same thing.

Well, the training has come to an end and the students arrived on Thursday! We have 12 guys and 38 girls. The men are very lucky :) And no....none of them have caught my fancy for those of you who are excited to see me married....(you know who you are). Friday was a super busy day because we headed into orientation, and although as staff we have been orientated, we were required to sit in on the sessions all morning. In the afternoon we took pictures for what we call our encouragement wall where people can place notes for others or whatever God puts on their hearts for other students, as well as a class photo. I will try to get that published here soon. The staff did their introductions and then we headed to the Hawaiian gathering.

It is a tradition in the islands that the people who come would bring gifts from home to share with the Hawaiian people, so our students brought all kinds of things from Russia, China, Canada, Norway, Idaho, ect. and there was a gift exchange and a blessing from the Hawaiian people on the visitors. Did you know that Hawaii is broken down into three parts and they mean 1.)breath, 2.)water 3.)the one true living God (I don't remember how it was broken down, but that is what Hawaii means). Once we were finished, there was a big feast, and then a party of the nations. There are 42 nations represented here at the Kona base this quarter and they paraded their flags and then we had an awesome time of worship. WOW!

Saturday we took everyone to this beach called Hapuna, where the water is amazingly blue. This year the tide was really high, so I didn't even get in, but the students played football and volleyball and ate the usual hamburgers and hot dogs.

Today was our first day of class and it was awesome to see what God is already doing. Last night I was in the prayer room with my doubts and my simple prayer was "God wreck me! Everything I know about you and about myself....wreck it all and let me fall more in love with you!" And that is exactly what He is in the process of doing, not only with me but with our students. In class today, the speaker had a word specifically for me, which was awesome. Then at the end when he was talking about relationship, we had a time of prayer and half our students stood up to tell God that they wanted to be ok knowing that God does not base His love for us on what we do and what we accomplish and what we gain, but He loves us out of a love that only He can have for us.

One of the things the speaker talked about was our works mentality. And because I come from a church background as well as most of our students, we try to be good Christians by reading our bible, being involved in meetings and teachings, working in Sunday school, going to revival, all of these things being good, but God does not base His love on those things. Here is the question the speaker posed to us and I am going to leave you with:

If you never saved another person, never went to another meeting, never did another "thing" for God in your life, DO YOU KNOW THAT HE WILL STILL LOVE YOU?