Like those who dream

I came here to Tijuana three months ago because I wanted to become better equipped to work with children, but God has given me so much more than that.  He met with me here next to this ocean and taught me so much more about who He is.  God is so good, and so just, and I can say that with all of my heart even though I’ve spent the past three months learning all about the injustices in the world today.  My eyes are red and tired from crying after our class about human trafficking today, my stomach is sickened at sexual abuse and I am weary for allowing my heart to feel so much of the world’s pain.  But I know that God’s heart is much more broken than mine over these issues, and I am filled with joy because He is asking me to work with Him to fight them.  I am honored that He asked me to come here and learn, and I am so thankful for the way in which He met with me here.

He met with me here next to this big blue ocean to show me His heart for me, and His heart for the world.  And I have falled in love with God here in a way that I never have before.  When I came here I wanted to reach out to the children of the world because I saw that they were in need, and my compassionate heart wanted to do something about it.  But the first thing we talked about in this school were our motivations.  Why do we want to help people?  I was quite offended when compassion fell under a negative motivation… and I couldn’t grasp what was being taught: that God has to be our motivation.

Three months later, I wholly embrace that truth, and I think my understanding of it has everything to do with the fact that I am so much more in love with God now than I was then.  The Bible speaks often of God being grieved for us, his children, of God being brokenhearted because of the emotional, physical, and spiritual poverty so many of us live in as a result of our sin.  So for those of us who love God… our desire should be to minister to that broken heart of His.  To reach out to the vulnerable because God’s heart is broken for them, not because our hearts our broken for them.  “To minister to the broken heart of God over sin is to say to God that we want to encourage Him in the midst of the worlds tragedies.”  Serving God’s vulnerable people has become so much less about my desire to reach out to them and much more about my desire to reach out to HIM, and I know that this is what is best.

My heart is stirred and I am ready to go out from this place carrying everything I’ve learned and this brand new love for my Maker… and I know that as I continue to walk hand-in-hand with Him there will always be beauty to be found.

Did you know… Slavery Still Exists?

Human Trafficking is a real true thing that occurs everyday around the world.  In fact, there are currently more than 30 million slaves in the world today (this is more than there were at the height of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade) and many of these people are children.  Modern day slaves are often forced into farm labor, restaurant work, construction work, and prostitution.  Men, women, children and babies that are sold for SEX.  In Mexico alone there are currently 15,000 child sex workers.  I’m currently living in Tijuana, and I’ve walked past clubs where children are for sale… and everybody knows it.  Even the police.  And yet there has not been a single prosecution of child sex-trafficking in Mexico.  There is something horribly wrong with this.  Several of my missionary friends are about to move to Jaco, Costa Rica which is a famous sex tourism destination where one can easily find child prostitutes.  Child sex slaves.

So what can we do?

Our prayers are powerful and I assure you that God wants to put an end to this injustice, but he also want so use US to accomplish this.  An important thing we can do is learn to recognize the signs of someone who is held in slavery, as people who have been trafficked have been discovered in all 50 states.  If you think you know someone who is a victim of slavery you can actually report it online, here:  http://www.polarisproject.org/what-we-do/national-human-trafficking-hotline/report-a-tip

There are many organizations currently working to fight human trafficking, and the following are several:   http://www.polarisproject.org/     http://www.notforsalecampaign.org     http://www.himalayan-foundation.org

I think it’s so important to know about things like this that are going on.  Throughout the school that I’m currently in I’ve been confronted with so many horrific realities, and sometimes I just have to sit and ask God to help me cope with everything I’m becoming aware of, because it’s so heartbreaking.  But we can do something about it.

“Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.”  Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

let justice roll like a river

Week 11: Attachment Disorder // Refugees & Immigrants

“Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.  Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me.  I lift my lamp beside the golden door.”  Statue of Liberty

I’ve introduced the beautifully lovely Lenneke before, but I am delighted to do it again!  Lenneke is currently a social worker with the Women’s and Children’s Advocacy Centre, but before her involvement in YWAM she worked in a Children’s Home in The Netherlands.  This week she taught us on Attachment Disorder, with which she has much experience because of her previous job.

Attachment is one of the most fascinating things I’ve been learning about during this school, and it teaches us so much about God’s heart for us as His children.  It is absolutely essential for a baby to develop a bond of trust with it’s primary caregiver, and if one doesn’t develop this “attachment” as a baby they are much more likely to have relational problems throughout their life.  This is called Attachment Disorder, of which there are many levels of severity.  One such severe case that we looked at is the story of Beth Thomas, a girl who was severely abused and neglected as a baby and developed an extreme case of Attachment Disorder, which fully manifested after she was adopted as a one and a half year old infant.  Her adoptive family was everything a family should be, yet because of the abuse she had suffered as a baby Beth had no ability to care about anyone else.  This was made clear when she tried to kill her little brother, and talked about killing her adoptive parents.  I would so encourage you to watch this 30 minute documentary, called “Child of Rage.”  ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ME2wmFunCjU )

Fortunately Beth was able to receive intensive therapy and was eventually able to live in harmony within a family, which brings so much hope of how attachment disorder can be reversed.  However it was not a simple process of healing for Beth, and many people who have attachment disorders never receive the kind of help that she did.  This has caused me to wonder, “How many people in our prisons have done the things they’ve done because of attachment issues?  What about people who’ve murdered?  Is that because they truly have no ability to understand their actions?  What if our prisons helped people become restored to who they really are underneath their behavior?”  One of the week’s most surprising statistics is that 30% of Americans have some level of Attachment Disorder.

The surprising statistics didn’t end with Attachment, however.  We also had another teaching this week: Refugees & Immigrants.  Phil Gazley is British, but has lived in the States for the past 10 years, working with refugees and training other people to do the same.  Phil took time out of his very busy schedule to be with us for a few days this week, and he brought with him much passion for both Jesus and social justice to share with us.  So.  Refugees.  What comes to mind for you?  A few days ago what came to my mind were images of mud-covered people, small children in their arms, trekking through jungle with few of their possessions in hand, fleeing from their home in search of a safer place.  Certainly this is a reality in our world, as there are currently 12 million people living in refugee camps, but it’s not the only reality in terms of refugees.  There are also millions of refugees that have been re-settled in the United States AND there is the highest  number of refugees in America living in MINNESOTA!  Whaaa?!  I didn’t know this!

In both his teachings on Refugees and Immigrants Phil brought up the common attitude among Americans that new people in our country somehow pose a threat to us.  But should we be threatened?  Or should we be thrilled?  Especially as Christians, we should be ecstatic about welcoming people into our country.  God is literally bringing the Nations to us. Refugees come out of very traumatic circumstances, and to be able to welcome them into their new country, to walk with them as they figure out their crazy new life, to be their friend as they heal from horrific events, should be seen as a blessing to us.  We know the truth of God, the reality of His love, and how beautiful it is to know Him, and here we have an opportunity to share the gospel with the Nations, right here in our own country.  Not just the gospel of salvation, but the whole complete gospel, of a God who desperately loves his children, who hears their cries, and wants them to have life to the full.

Phil presented us with so many ways in which we can become involved in reaching out to refugees who are re-settling in the States, and it is so exciting to me to know that returning to the U.S. does not need to mean an end to working with people of other cultures.  If any of you are interested in finding out more about working with re-settled refugees you can find out more here:  http://www.acf.hhs.gov/programs/orr/partners/state_coordina.htm

as Thyself.

Week 10: Ministry to the Poor/Inner City Ministry

“I think God keeps the poor on Earth for me.  Because the poor change me.”  Mother Teresa

This week our teacher was Kit Danley, a feisty, compassionate woman who started Neighborhood Ministries in Phoenix, Arizona with her husband 30 years ago.  She came to us with lots of wisdom and lots of passion to share, and left us with a fresh perspective on poverty and urban missions.

My most favorite fact of the week is that the Bible contains over 3,000 verses that relate to God’s Love for the poor.  Three thousand!  God loves the poor. This is undeniable, yet it’s a difficult concept to understand for those who see the suffering of the world’s poor and don’t see God doing anything about it.  Oh but He is!  And He is doing so every day, working through people who care about others to show His love to everyone.  It’s important to keep this in mind when we want to start a new ministry in a new place, that God is already at work there, even if we can’t see it.

God even works through people who don’t believe in Him, and the Bible says that these people glorify God by what they do for the poor: “He who oppresses the poor shows contempt for their Maker, but whoever is kind to the needy honors God.”  Proverbs 14:31  God is honored when humanity loves it’s own, and He doesn’t specify that Christians are the only ones who can honor Him with their deeds.  Interesting, right?

It’s like the story of the Good Samaritan, who didn’t know God at all.  Yet it was he who helped the Jewish man who was laying broken in the road, while the priest walked right past.  Kit pointed out an aspect to this story that I’d never thought about before and it is this: the Samaritan knew the dangers of traveling on that road, especially alone, and perhaps one reason why the priest and the levite ignored him was because they thought he had made a stupid decision.  They thought that he should have known better, he shouldn’t have put himself in danger, basically.. he got what he deserved for doing what he did.  And Jesus would have known this, as he gave them this example, but He made it clear that the person who helped the Samaritan was the one who did what was right.  Kit connected this concept to the hundreds of immigrants who die each year crossing the Arizona desert.  They’re doing something illegal, they’re knowingly putting their lives in danger, but that doesn’t dismiss us from the mandate we have from God to help the needy.  Very interesting, right?

I couldn’t go to Circulo this week because our class went on a field trip!  We went to a men’s rehabilitation center and a local orphanage, the latter of which was so inspiring to see.  Their mission statement is “In God We Trust” and the directors completely believe that their kids deserve just as many opportunities as children who are being raised outside of a children’s home.  The way that God has blessed for their trust in Him was so evident, as we listened to their story and were given a tour of the ocean view property.  We’ve been learning a lot in our school about the detriments of institutions, but I think God has so much grace, and I know He is working in those children’s lives even though their situation is not the best.

I carry your heart. [I carry it in my heart.]

“Then your light will break forth like the dawn, and your healing will quickly appear; then your righteousness will go before you, and the glory of the LORD will be your rear guard.” Isaiah 58:8

Week 9: Inner Healing

This week we were so blessed by the presence and teaching of Christy Scott, who by allowing her light to shine gives others the permission to shine theirs as well.  (Akeelah & the Bee) She was ordained as a minister from F.I.R.E. school of ministry, has been a missionary for seventeen years, and is a very beautiful woman whose heart is see people have deep encounters with Jesus.  And that is exactly what happened with many of us this week… = )

“Let us make a little heart that will fit perfectly inside our big hearts.”

It begins with Eden.  (As I am learning.. all things do.)  There in the garden every part of our being was satisfied, complete, we were home.  And it was perfect.  Until humanity chose themselves over God.  Christy gave us an analogy of the fall from a vision that she’d had: “When satan said ‘Has God really said..?’ it was like a hammer that shattered God’s heart, and little bits like jewels flew everywhere and landed hidden in the mud, in the darkness.”  God has been teaching me so much through Eden lately, especially the fact that His heart broke when humanity walked away from Him.  This week we talked about why God made them leave Eden: “God asked Adam & Eve to leave the garden because He didn’t want them to live for all of eternity on Earth without intimacy with Him, with the burden of their sin.  And when they left the garden… God created a plan of how to bring them back to Himself.”  It’s beautiful, everything in the Bible is beautiful when we look at it knowing that God is Love, and that everything He does He does with Love.  Even kicking Adam and Eve out of the garden.

When they left Eden they were also left with a longing, a longing to be known intimately like they had known God in the garden, a longing for home.  And those longings are passed down through generations, all the way to us, if we let them.  Exodus 20: 5-6 “for I, the LORD your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me, ⁶ but showing love to a thousand generations of those who love me and keep my commandments.”  Since the time that I became aware of generational curses I have struggled with understanding why God made things this way, but.. I have come to a place of peace, and more importantly… I know that these curses can be broken through prayer.

Prayer is the most important part of inner healing, as I learned this week.  Christy talked about how from the time we are in the womb and all through our lives there are lies that are spoken over us.  Everything from “I don’t want this baby.” to “You will never be good enough.” and whether or not we are aware of it these lies affect us, they hurt us, and we allow them to become part of how we perceive ourselves.  But God is a healer.  Each of us had an opportunity to pray individually with Christy, and through that time we were able to gain a deeper understanding of how we can pray with other people, to be instruments in their healing.  Basically it’s all about asking God to reveal to us His Truth, for Him to show the hurting person when the root lie entered their life, and then to ask Him what HE was thinking, what HE was speaking over them at that time.

My time with Christy was beautiful because it was absolutely Jesus working through her, speaking to me.  I came with the desire to break a soul tie, and in that time we prayed for something that I didn’t know I could pray for.  I called the scattered pieces of my heart back to myself, pieces that I gave away, pieces I thought were forever gone.  But I called them back to me and declared myself whole.  God is so beautiful.

Christy’s teaching also echoed much of what God has been teaching me about Himself, about how much He loves me.  That I am a gift God gave Himself, that He wants me to come away with Him and be exactly who I am, because that is what brings Him glory.  To love him, and to be confident of my identity in that Love.

“If we don’t know who God is then we won’t know who we are and we won’t know where we belong.”

I’ve written only a little bit of how this week affected me personally, and I think I should also mention that we talked a lot about children and the lies that they believe and how their homes and their lives affect the way they view themselves and the way they build walls around their hearts that keep truth out.  I know that I will be working with a lot of very hurt children in my life, and I feel so much more prepared in how to help them in their healing after this week.  How to bring them home, back to Eden.

“The LORD will surely comfort Zion and will look with compassion on all her ruins; He will make her deserts like Eden, her wastelands like the garden of the LORD.  Joy and gladness will be found in her, thanksgiving and the sound of singing.”  Isaiah 51:3

Demasiada.

For the past three Miercoles’ (Wednesdays.. I like that word better in Spanish, haha)  I’ve gone to Tijuana’s red light district to give soup to homeless men in a park and intercede in the areas of prostitution.  The first time I did prostitution ministry was in Mexico City, during my DTS, and I remember just soaking it all in, not understanding very much Spanish, kind of in shock about the whole thing.  The past few weeks in Tijuana have been a lot different than that first experience, and they’ve also been a lot more difficult.

Walking down those streets is intense.  The bars are not small dingy little bars, they are big giant clubs with flashy lights and women standing outside, waiting to be chosen, waiting to sell themselves.  As they wait they are watched, there are so many men in that place, watching, controlling: pimping.  And inside several of these big flashy clubs are tiny little children, babies even, also being sold, and bought, and trafficked, and abused, and absolutely lied to about their worth.  The police know this.  The government knows this.  The people know this.  But it happens anyway.  It’s happening right now.  Children.  Babies.

Tonight after walking and praying through the club scene we walked back to the park where the other half of our group was serving soup and talking and praying with the men there.  A lot of those men struggle with addictions, many of them have been deported from the States, and all of them are searching for something… something which I know is Jesus.  This evening a Norwegian guy on our team was playing worship songs on his guitar, beautiful worship songs, “…it’s all God’s children singing glory glory, hallelujah He reigns…” and as we sung there together under those sparkling stars and surrounded by drug addicts all I could think about was how beautiful God is, especially in those places.  How much more beautiful is our God when we see Him as He really is, a God who intensely Loves ALL of humanity, than when we only see Him as a God who dwells in the pretty places, with the righteous people.  A God who loves those pimps just as much as He loves the children that they’re selling.  A God who is pursuing those women working in the night just as strongly as He is pursuing me. He is so beautiful.

21

“It was a day filled with the glow of ordinary things & we passed them quietly from hand to hand for a long time & someone said she had picked a perfect day to be born & I think all of us felt the same.”

Week 8: HIV/AIDS & Alternative Care for Children Deprived of Parental Care

This week our teachers were Larry and Joyce Sandberg, who are MISSIONARY PROS.  They met and married at Wheaton, and became missionaries in 1959 when they traveled to Africa.  In those days… travel was by ship, and it took them three weeks to get there!  They worked in Nigeria for many years, and also in Swaziland where they have a children’s home, and they still travel to Africa every year.  Larry is a bio-chemist and a physician, and he still works as a consultant at a university, and Joyce is a nurse with advanced training in psychology.  Talk about inspirational.

The hard thing about this week is that it was on HIV/AIDS, which reminded me of working at a hospice in Cancun where people were dying of AIDS, and of people I love who have HIV, and those are not fun things to be thinking about.  Something I didn’t know is that HIV can be transmitted through breast milk, which is so unfortunate because impoverished women often lack the resources to buy formula and are therefore faced with the dilemma of either risking infecting their child with HIV through their breast milk or not nourishing their child at all.  What would you do?  Most of them breastfeed despite the risk, and therefore more children are infected.  I also hadn’t thought about how AIDS is different from most epidemics because instead of taking the lives of the most vulnerable, it has generally taken the lives of the strongest people, and left the most vulnerable (the elderly and the children).  This has especially devastated Africa, where there are many child-headed households.  We watched a documentary called Dear Francis, in which a story was told of an eleven year old African girl who was trying to raise her younger siblings.  There is a myth in Africa that HIV can be cured by having sex with a virgin, so one day a man approached this girl and offered her a loaf of bread and an orange in exchange for her virginity, and because she and her siblings were hungry, she agreed.

And this happens all. the. time.

We also watched the movie Philadelphia this week, which is about an American man with AIDS and his struggle against the social stigma of the disease.  That… broke my heart.

Which seems to be a theme of the week because that’s also how I felt during an intercession time we had this week, when we prayed for the U.S. of A.  I realized that morning that I feel guilty for being American.  I was at a table with girls from Canada, Denmark, Japan, and New Zealand, and when it was announced that we would be interceding for my country… I felt guilty.  I felt that surely, deep down, my international peers would rather pray for anything else in the world than my country.  I know the global perception of Americans is not a good one, and I carry that with me.  And it is heavy.  I love my country, I love that I am American, but I feel guilty for that.  So during our intercession time the three Americans at my table prayed, and I wasn’t really expecting to hear any other prayers, but to my surprise there were many more.  And I cried, because they were beautiful prayers, beautiful prayers for my country.  I didn’t realize how important it was for me to be loved for every part of me, nation included.

We also had another teacher this week, who is actually so stunningly beautiful I had to avert my eyes to keep from being blinded by her radiant face.  = ) Haha. Lenneke is staff for our school, and is also my small group leader, and we had the grand privilege of receiving a teaching from her.  Lenneke is from The Netherlands, and works for the Women’s and Children’s Advocacy Centre in Portland.  She talked to us about “Alternative Care for Children Deprived of Parental Care” which basically means other options besides orphanages.  I know that lovely orphanages exist, but what I’ve been learning in this school is that God’s heart for children is to be raised in a family, or a family setting, and that environment is most often not created in an institution.  Also, many children are in orphanages as a result of poverty, and would probably be more greatly benefited if their family was assisted as a whole, rather than the children alone.  Lenneke shared some statistics with us of the percentage of children living in orphanages who actually still have one or two living parents.

Brazil 80%, Liberia 88%, Ghana 90%, Sri Lanka 80%, Soviet Union/Central Eastern Europe 98%.

Whaaaa?!  Are you as shocked as I was?

But… the best shocking and exciting thing that happened this week is that…

I TURNED TWENTY ONE!!!!

and it was lovely. = )