Monthly Archives: May 2013

Today marks one month since starting my first secondary school in ywam. That sounded funny so let me break that down a little. Youth With a Mission’s most basic school is called a DTS or discipleship training school, it is the school I did 6 years ago and have been staffing almost ever since then. But ywam offers a lot of secondary schools that you can take after you complete a dts that are more focused on a certain skill or aspect of missions. Don’t ask me why I waited till now to do one of these schools!The knowledge I am attaining would have been super helpful all those years of trying to answer my students theological questions about the bible, when I really am no scholar! haha. Anyways, the secondary school I am now doing is called the Chronological Bible Core Course. It is a 3 month in depth study of 12 books of the bible where we  learn how to look at the bible inductively. Pretty much this means we look at the text not as a love letter written to yours truly (as I have often thought of it) but rather as individual books written to a specific people at a specific time for a specific purpose. To put it simply we look at the background information of the time period a book was written, and try to observe how the people who were a part of the story would have felt, and then also the people who the book was written for and how they would have reacted to it. The greater in depth you go into what the original reader’s lives were like, what they valued, how they viewed God, the greater revelation you receive on what the book is really trying to convey and how it is applicable to our lives today. So far we have studied Genesis, Deuteronomy, Kings and Proverbs.

So far it has been something…amazing? The mental breakdown, studying till 2 am, shoot-me-now kind of amazing. The homework load is, shall we say, extensive…besides 3-5 hours of lecture most days, (plus worship, intercession and work duties a couple times a week) we typically have between 8-12 hours of homework every weekday, and 6-8 hours on the weekend. It is incredibly stressful at times, but a good kinda stress. A wonderful how am I this blessed? kinda stress!

Even though it is a lot of work, i feel completely refreshed in doing it. It is wonderful being a student again and not being in charge of anything or responsible for anyone accept me! I absolutely love being a leader, but sometimes a girl needs a breather.

I remember on one of my last entries in my Ch.na journal i said something along the lines of, “I am not the same person who entered this country 3 months ago, something is different.” Doing this school has helped me to pinpoint that change. And simply all it is is thankfulness. Being in a commie country where portions of the bible are omitted by the government, where Christians meet in secret to study the word of God, well stuff like that should leave no room for complaint in my life. All that I am is incredibly blessed. To not only own a bible, but have the privilege of doing a BCC and studying it inductively…that this is my full time job for the next 2 months-It’s just too much blessing all rolled into one!

To those who are praying for me and supporting me in doing this school, thank you!