Hey All!First off I'm going to apologize for the long amounts of time in between my blogs, I know it's been over a month which is kinda ridiculous, however within the last month life got super crazy and much has happened!
Speakers.
So Week Five we had Gordon, who spoke on the Father Heart of God. Gordon talked a lot about information that I’ve already known, however apart from the lecture there was a lot of realizations that I did come to. I realized that there is pain and hurt that I haven’t dealt with, or thought that I didn’t need to because it was unnecessary. Unfortunately for myself I was wrong about that. Listening to Gordon talk really helped me think deep into those hurts and be able to let them go.
Week 6 We Had Sam who spoke on Spiritual Warfare. Hmm where to begin... Well I’m just going to be honest; I wasn’t a huge fan of Sam’s. It might have been because of the fact that he was really built up to me before he got here and then just didn’t meet the expectations that I had, or he just didn’t click for me. The information was key, and was very important, but other than that Sam didn’t impact me as much as other speakers. This week has been really awesome, having the snowboarders come back and welcoming them into our family was awesome!! I loved getting to know them, playing soccer with them, and serving them. It was really sad to see them leave, and as well as hard to say goodbye to the ones I got to be close to.
Week 7 was Aaron who didn't have a topic so it was a Spirit lead week. Aaron’s week was a very interesting week, hard to process just because there wasn’t a particular aim that he was teaching on... he was just teaching where he felt the Holy Spirit was leading him. Aaron made us think, and think hard about stuff that we already knew from before but on a deeper level. What really impacted me about this week was how practical and hands on Aaron was. Not only did he teach us about praying, and prophesying but he got us to do it as well. At the beginning of the week I thought that only certain people had the gift of prophesying, but through Aaron’s teaching he made it a lot clearer that everyone can prophisize by inviting the Holy Spirit to enter in. It was sooooooo cool when it actually happened though. I was in awe of how the Holy Spirit can move! The only down part about Aaron was that he didn’t have time to spend with us students, as soon as lecture was over he usually headed out quickly. It was just a tad disappointing because I would have liked to pick his mind a bit on some subjects. But all in all I thought Aaron was great and really easy to listen to.
Week 8 was Mark Parker who spoke on Lordship! This past week has been a very interesting week, I didn’t like Mark Parker at the start, and I think it was due to his “in your face” personality. I wasn’t so keen on him that’s for sure. But what he spoke about each day was really great. I especially enjoyed his talk on relationships, it reaffirmed my view on relationships, as well as I personally think it’s a subject that is not talked enough about and needs to be talked about more. It was great hearing it come from him because he is a dad. I really enjoyed what Mark set up for us on Friday. It was kind of like doing surgery to our souls and hearts, and it was incredibly moving. The most impactful part for me was when we had to take a burnt and sin offering to God, letting go of some things was really hard to do, but once it was done it was completely freeing.
Week 9 was Matt Dawson who's topic was relationships... FAVORITE SPEAKER SO FAR! Matt reminded me sooo much of Marty Mcfly from Back to the Future, mostly because of his personality and his sense of humour. He was really easy to listen to, which made it easy to learn, but hard to take notes. It was really great that Matt can be very direct with whatever he was talking about, there was no beating around the bush about a point that he was trying to get across he was just blunt. Yes bluntness for some people isn’t good, but when it comes to talking about relationships the bluntness was great. Matt talked a lot about stuff that I’ve already learned and have grown from, but it was really great to just have those ideas and thoughts reaffirmed. During this week we also had something called Angels and Mortals week, which was we each were an Angel and had one person who was our Mortal. Throughout the week we had to bless our mortals by doing crazy nice stuff for them, but it all had to be done in secret! My mortal was Erik who is from Sweden, and I had so much fun blessing him; my favorite one was when I got all the girls to serenade him at the beginning of class one day. We sang Ain't No Mountain High Enough, and so what we did was every girl had a line and so when it came to their line the stood up and sang it and then at the chorus we all walked to him singing the song and then said your angel loves you and gave him a group hug. I don't think I've ever seen Erik's face so red, but he did tell me later that it was one of his favorites because of how funny it was. This week was probably one of my most favorite weeks because of how much fun it was to bless our family, to be blessed, and to learn about relationships.
Week10 Chris Donaldson on Missions.
Week 9 was Matt Dawson who's topic was relationships... FAVORITE SPEAKER SO FAR! Matt reminded me sooo much of Marty Mcfly from Back to the Future, mostly because of his personality and his sense of humour. He was really easy to listen to, which made it easy to learn, but hard to take notes. It was really great that Matt can be very direct with whatever he was talking about, there was no beating around the bush about a point that he was trying to get across he was just blunt. Yes bluntness for some people isn’t good, but when it comes to talking about relationships the bluntness was great. Matt talked a lot about stuff that I’ve already learned and have grown from, but it was really great to just have those ideas and thoughts reaffirmed. During this week we also had something called Angels and Mortals week, which was we each were an Angel and had one person who was our Mortal. Throughout the week we had to bless our mortals by doing crazy nice stuff for them, but it all had to be done in secret! My mortal was Erik who is from Sweden, and I had so much fun blessing him; my favorite one was when I got all the girls to serenade him at the beginning of class one day. We sang Ain't No Mountain High Enough, and so what we did was every girl had a line and so when it came to their line the stood up and sang it and then at the chorus we all walked to him singing the song and then said your angel loves you and gave him a group hug. I don't think I've ever seen Erik's face so red, but he did tell me later that it was one of his favorites because of how funny it was. This week was probably one of my most favorite weeks because of how much fun it was to bless our family, to be blessed, and to learn about relationships.
Week10 Chris Donaldson on Missions.
Chris had good lessons to teach us this week, however I don’t feel like I got much from him. It might have to do with the fact that he was talking/teaching us about stuff that we have already learned during the lecture faze. I felt like a lot of the stuff he brought to lecture had already been covered, or I’ve already known. It was really awesome how he got us to do hands on things. I LOVED doing the project of the 10 year plan! So basically we got put into smaller groups, had to pick a place (my team was Israel), and make a 10 year plan for missions in that country. This made me so excited for missions, excited for Israel, excited for the future, and excited to see what else God has in store! It was crazy to see how possible this could actually be. Chris took information we already knew and made us more excited about it.
Week11 Shane Jette OutReach.
Shane and Tara are wonderful people and have amazing kids, just saying. Anyways, it’s hard to have a great opinion of what Shane is like for a speaker just because it’s only half way through the week, but also because of the topic for the week it must be hard to bring new information. What I mean is, Shane is the last speaker and is talking about Outreach prep, therefore lots of the information the he could be talking about has already been said by many other speakers... which does make it somewhat hard to listen to in lecture just because we’ve heard a lot of it before... Not saying that Shane is a bad speaker, it just must be really tough for him is all.
OutReach Team... Team KiwiFiji!
Ok, so for those who don't know I'm on a team of 5, 2 staff, and 3 students. Really exciting news, Matt is actually one of my leaders! Crazy right?! I really didn't think it was possible for us to be on the same team because we were close friends from back home, so I'm really stoked about this! So there is Matt(SK. Canada) and Katie(WY.USA) as our leaders, then Kristoffer (Norway), Derek(NH, USA), and of course ME! Our team is pretty awesome, however it's kinda hard because none of the students I got close to while being here are on my team. One of them is on the Australia Fiji team, so there is a chance that our team will be able to meet up with them but that's it. It's been a hard process because when the teams were picked I saw all my friends with at least someone else that they are close to on their team. Yes, Matt and I are close, but at first I was frustrated thinking "But I can see Matt whenever I want at home, where I won't get to see my other close friends because they are so far away". After thinking about this for awhile I realized how selfish I was being, and didn't actually realize what sort of blessing God had given me. Yes, I'm not with any of my close friends studentwise which is rough, however when I go home and I'm having a rough day and need someone to talk to that has been through the same things as me and was there with me I can call up Matt and be like "Hey, you busy? I'm having a rough day can we hang out? Yes? Great! I'll be there in 15 minutest!" How special is that?! Really April wake up, can't you see that this is a rare occasion and it's a huge blessing to you!! So yeah that really woke me up.
Plans for our team... Well the rough outline for our teams travels go kinda like this... We are first going to travel about 6 hours to go and do the Kepler Track, which is a four day hike. Unfortunately we will not be going on this track because 2 weeks ago I tweaked a ligament in my ankle. So instead we are going to this amazing camping spot though I forget the name of it so I'll keep ya'll updated :) Alrighty! after the awesome camping experience we will head over to Queenstown which is in the southerner part of the South Island... confusing eh? haha! We will spend about a week in Queenstown and will be there over Christmas. We'll be staying in a hostel and will be working at a church! The next week we are going to go to Wanaka which is close to Queenstown and we will spend about a week there as well. After Wanaka we are going to head north up the west coast, possibly stopping at Fox Glacier, but our destination is the Able Tasman. The Able Tasman is a 3 day track that we will be doing! At Able Denver (school leader) will be doing a pastoral visit before we start, and he's going to be bringing the bases kayaks so that we can kayak and hike the Able!! Should be lots of fun! Apparently near the Able there is this bay where lots of penguins, seals, and dolphins go, and you can kayak in there and they'll come right up to you!! Its said to be a haven for them there, and there are so many dolphins that after awhile its like "oh, there goes another pod of dolphins over there..." I really hope we can go see that!! After we are done our 3 day track we will head to a spot called Hang Dog, which is suppose to be every climbers dream... The lifestyle of Hang Dog is camping, climbing, chill.... camping climbing chill... camping, climbing, slacklining, chill... hmmmm :) So we will be hanging and Hang Dog for a week. After hangdog we will head back down south along the east coast to Lyttelton for a day to have debrief for the NZ part of our trip. Then we will meet back at the base drop off the van then fly over to Fiji for 3 weeks yay!!
Highlights of the Last month.
1.We hiked Louis' pass which is a track up a steep mountain and it's suppose to take you 4-5 hours round trip and we made it up the mountain in less than an hour and a half... and then perhaps going down the mountain it was a lot faster due to running because we were soooo cold at the top. I only stayed at the top for about 5 minutes because of how cold it was! After Louis we went to a hut on Daniel's Lake... but little did we know we thought was a close by campground turned into an 8km(one way) track. So in one day we did a hike up a mountain and an 8km track, it was intense! On the way back the next day, near the end of the track there is this bridge... and perhaps a bunch of us might have jumped off of this bridge into the coldest mountain water of life!! It was awesome!!!!
2. Cave Streams!!! So about an hour away from Oxford there is a cave that has a mountain run off going through it. It takes about an hour or so to go through the cave and you're in at least knee deep water the whole time. It was soooo cool!!!! I went twice in one week I loved it so much. Unfortunately the cave streams is where I wrecked my ankle.
3. Last weekend! Alrighty, so on Saturday I got to go on a trail ride through some amazing scenery!! We took our horses into a river and it was so awesome cuz they started playing in the water and we got soaked! Anyways Sunday was killer awesome! After church I went with some of my buddies (Wyatt, Jonathan, Philip, and Nate) who are really awesome, and they took me to this waterfall. Well we didn't go to SEE the water fall we went tracking through the streams and climbing on smaller waterfalls! it was so sick awesome! We got to the big waterfall we couldn't climb it because it was to high up, however we did climb the cliffs around it and jumped into the pool at the bottom of it. The pool was about 20ft deep, and we jumped from about 10-15ft up. It was so awesome! Later that day all us girls had planned a surprise for the guys. We blindfolded them and took them to a river where we had a fire and had a wiener roast. Well Philip and Wyatt, who are always crazy decided it would be awesome to go a floating in the water. The river wasn't deep, but it was pretty fast moving... Normally I would never do anything like this, but they convinced me to go with them, even though we had no towels, change of clothes or anything... so we jumped in with whatever we had on... and it was fantastic!! It was such a great day!
Anyways all that's about it for now. I head out on Outreach tomorrow so if you wanna know what the team is up to our blog is teamkiwifiji.blogspot.com and it should also be connected to this blog. Love you all so much and thank you for the prayers! I'll update you as much as I can during outreach... which at this rate should be better than I have been so far!
Much Love!
April
Plans for our team... Well the rough outline for our teams travels go kinda like this... We are first going to travel about 6 hours to go and do the Kepler Track, which is a four day hike. Unfortunately we will not be going on this track because 2 weeks ago I tweaked a ligament in my ankle. So instead we are going to this amazing camping spot though I forget the name of it so I'll keep ya'll updated :) Alrighty! after the awesome camping experience we will head over to Queenstown which is in the southerner part of the South Island... confusing eh? haha! We will spend about a week in Queenstown and will be there over Christmas. We'll be staying in a hostel and will be working at a church! The next week we are going to go to Wanaka which is close to Queenstown and we will spend about a week there as well. After Wanaka we are going to head north up the west coast, possibly stopping at Fox Glacier, but our destination is the Able Tasman. The Able Tasman is a 3 day track that we will be doing! At Able Denver (school leader) will be doing a pastoral visit before we start, and he's going to be bringing the bases kayaks so that we can kayak and hike the Able!! Should be lots of fun! Apparently near the Able there is this bay where lots of penguins, seals, and dolphins go, and you can kayak in there and they'll come right up to you!! Its said to be a haven for them there, and there are so many dolphins that after awhile its like "oh, there goes another pod of dolphins over there..." I really hope we can go see that!! After we are done our 3 day track we will head to a spot called Hang Dog, which is suppose to be every climbers dream... The lifestyle of Hang Dog is camping, climbing, chill.... camping climbing chill... camping, climbing, slacklining, chill... hmmmm :) So we will be hanging and Hang Dog for a week. After hangdog we will head back down south along the east coast to Lyttelton for a day to have debrief for the NZ part of our trip. Then we will meet back at the base drop off the van then fly over to Fiji for 3 weeks yay!!
Highlights of the Last month.
1.We hiked Louis' pass which is a track up a steep mountain and it's suppose to take you 4-5 hours round trip and we made it up the mountain in less than an hour and a half... and then perhaps going down the mountain it was a lot faster due to running because we were soooo cold at the top. I only stayed at the top for about 5 minutes because of how cold it was! After Louis we went to a hut on Daniel's Lake... but little did we know we thought was a close by campground turned into an 8km(one way) track. So in one day we did a hike up a mountain and an 8km track, it was intense! On the way back the next day, near the end of the track there is this bridge... and perhaps a bunch of us might have jumped off of this bridge into the coldest mountain water of life!! It was awesome!!!!
2. Cave Streams!!! So about an hour away from Oxford there is a cave that has a mountain run off going through it. It takes about an hour or so to go through the cave and you're in at least knee deep water the whole time. It was soooo cool!!!! I went twice in one week I loved it so much. Unfortunately the cave streams is where I wrecked my ankle.
3. Last weekend! Alrighty, so on Saturday I got to go on a trail ride through some amazing scenery!! We took our horses into a river and it was so awesome cuz they started playing in the water and we got soaked! Anyways Sunday was killer awesome! After church I went with some of my buddies (Wyatt, Jonathan, Philip, and Nate) who are really awesome, and they took me to this waterfall. Well we didn't go to SEE the water fall we went tracking through the streams and climbing on smaller waterfalls! it was so sick awesome! We got to the big waterfall we couldn't climb it because it was to high up, however we did climb the cliffs around it and jumped into the pool at the bottom of it. The pool was about 20ft deep, and we jumped from about 10-15ft up. It was so awesome! Later that day all us girls had planned a surprise for the guys. We blindfolded them and took them to a river where we had a fire and had a wiener roast. Well Philip and Wyatt, who are always crazy decided it would be awesome to go a floating in the water. The river wasn't deep, but it was pretty fast moving... Normally I would never do anything like this, but they convinced me to go with them, even though we had no towels, change of clothes or anything... so we jumped in with whatever we had on... and it was fantastic!! It was such a great day!
Anyways all that's about it for now. I head out on Outreach tomorrow so if you wanna know what the team is up to our blog is teamkiwifiji.blogspot.com and it should also be connected to this blog. Love you all so much and thank you for the prayers! I'll update you as much as I can during outreach... which at this rate should be better than I have been so far!
Much Love!
April
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