A few months ago before we moved into our house I wrote about some of the ways that God’s been providing for us. Since then we’ve had a lot of ups and downs with moving and settling into our new house. Some of the downs have been:
- Most of our major appliances (clothes washer, drier, fridge and dish washer) need to be replaced (read more here).
- I need to paint the deck and all the trim on the exterior of the house before winter comes to prevent more wood rot.
- Two of our windows need to be replaced or repaired because of wood rot or broken seals.
There is also a lot of other work that needs doing to the house, but like my pastor reminded me on Sunday, at least we aren’t raising and enclosing under our house to create a whole other level again.
This week we’ve seen a few little things that have really helped to lift my faith, even though they may seem little to some:
- We were given an annual pass to the Calgary Zoo and were able to enjoy a family trip there this week.
- At the last minute we were given some discount coupons to Calaway Park, a local amusement park. Even with the discount we still didn’t have it in our budget to go, but within about 10-minutes of putting our need for $40 to go to the park on Facebook we were donated the money to go. We all had a very good, albeit wet, time at the park.
- Last night I was sitting on my back deck trying to listen to Amazing Grace streamed from the Internet. I couldn’t get it to work for some reason, so I gave up. The people across the street were having a bit of a party and all of a sudden someone pulls out a set of bag pipes and starts playing Amazing Grace! It was pretty cool, I love the sound of the bag pipes playing Amazing Grace.
These are just some of the little things that we’ve been blessed with recently. They continue to remind me that regardless of our circumstances, or what else if happening, God’s looking out for us.
Here is one of my favourite versions of Amazing Grace on You Tube, albeit there are no bag pipes in this version:
If you want a version of Amazing Grace by Il Divo, with the bag pipes, then you can listen to it here. It definitely ranks up there with the Randy Travis version as one of my favourites.
One of the things that the YWAM International Chairman’s Team is working on is to improve the communication inside and outside YWAM. It is a part of the mandate to “heal the nevous system” of YWAM.
After a disussion I had with some other members of the YWAM ICT I setup a simple YWAM news site. The goal for the site is to help communicate what is happening around YWAM to anyone who is interested.
The site is built on WordPress, a free open source CMS / blog engine. I used Google Feedburner to deliver the news via email because it was easy and free. There are many different free themes available for use with WordPress, so I played around with a few and finally settled on the one that is currently running on the site.
To help with the functionality of the news site I added a few WordPress plugins to it. Most are available for free (all the plugins I used were free) and are easy to install on the site. I’ll put a list of my current plugins, the template and the other resources used for the site at the end of this post.
Right now the site is really more of a prototype or proof of concept news site. Trying to gather stories by myself is a very time consuming job (hence why there is not too much up there). To really make the site or concept work would require either a lot more time on my part, or more people doing it. I would also want the site to do more than just aggrigate the news (Planet YWAM already does some of that), there needs to be some editorial work involved, and a simple script or plugin can not do that.
Have a look at the YWAM News site and tell me what you think.
Here is the list of resources, plugins and the template that I used:
CMS / Blog Engine
Template
- WP Premium theme by WP Remix – Nice and clean theme with the e-mail subscription built right in. Available in three different colour variations.
Plugins:
- Contact Form 7 – for contact, feeback and submit story form
- Dragon Design Sitemap Generator – Generate sitemap
- Digg Digg – The Digg button on each post to submit the story to Digg
- Google Analyticator – Plugin used to tie in with Google Analytics, which allows me to see the stats for the site (about 10 visits a day right now)
- Google XML Sitemaps – Create an XML sitemap for submission to the search engines
- Redirection – Mostly for when I mispell something in the URL and then change it. This plugin lets the old URL still work
- Social Bookmarking RELOADED – Makes it easier for readers to submit the stories to social networks and bookmarking sites
- WordPress Database Backup – Allows automated backups of the database to be e-mailed to me every day or week
- WP-SpamFree – Eliminate annoying spam comments
- Yet Another Related Posts Plugin – Adds related stories that are already on the site to the individual stories, and the RSS feed and daily news e-mail
Other Resources
- Feedburner – Used for the e-mail function to send out the stories daily to anyone who subscribes in the top right of the page
- Google Analytics – Package for the web-site to help me see the stats about what’s happening on the site
- Host Gator – My web-site hosting, which is the only thing that I pay for on the site
I was watching this video of Seth Godin speaking about Tribes, and how they are and can be used to influence the world and create movements. It thought that it was a great talk, and a fantastic thing for us to think about for YWAM and how YWAM is, and can be a tribe.
Seth asked a few good questions, and made some good points, and I have a few of them below:
1. Who are you upsetting (if you aren’t upsetting someone you are not challenging the status quo)?
2. Who are you connecting?
3. Who are you leading?
He also made some good points about leaders within the tribe and what they do:
- Tribe leaders challenge the status quo
- They build a culture
- They have curiosity about people inside and outside the crowd
- They connect people
- They are committed to the cause / tribe / people
YWAM has often been referred to as a tribe of people, and I reckon that Seth’s talk about it gives a great discussion point as we look at how we can as a mission continue to draw people to us who have a passion “To Know God and to Make Him Known”.
One of the exciting / challenging things that we experience serving in missions is God’s amazing provision. Since we are full time volunteers we rely fully on financial and practical gifts given to us by friends, family, churches and other organizations that believe in the work we do.
In the last week or so we have seen God provide for us in two rather unique ways…
A few friends of friends heard that we had just moved to Calgary from Australia and were setting up our house from scratch. They contacted us through our friend with offers to go through their surplus stuff and take all that we wanted! It was amazingly generous and we ended up with a van full of quality stuff to help set up our new home.
Through another friend we got invited to their church garage sale with a difference. The difference was that it was open to families in need, and everything was free! Wow! We filled the back of a pickup truck and my dad’s sedan with gear to help us out even more in setting up our house.
God is good…
We take posession of our house here in Calgary on Monday, June 1. The house is about 120 years newer than the one we left in Australia, and needs WAY less work done to it. I am looking forward to seeing how God continues to provide in His own unique way.
My Youth With A Mission – Discipleship Training School (YWAM DTS) was an amazing experience for me, and many of the stories live on and continue to have huge impacts on my life.
Everyone who has done a YWAM Discipleship Training School has walked away with their own unique stories. I thought that it would be fun to gather some of those stories stories together in a “YWAM DTS Blog Carnival“.
So how does the YWAM DTS Blog Carnival work?
To participate in this carnival all you need to do is write your DTS story on your own blog, with a link to this post. If you already have a story written then you can just add a link to this post and you can submit it. After you have written your story make a comment below on this post to let me know you have written it.
On July 1 2009, I will close submissions to the carnival and start to put all the posts together. I will be linking to all the stories that meet the criteria (true stories from your own YWAM DTS) in a final post and highlighting some of my personal favourites.
Your story can be about any aspect of your school; lectures, outreach, finance, etc. Here are some story ideas from my own YWAM DTS that instantly come to mind:
- Falling off a cliff while running away from God’s conviction
- Camping in the middle of nowhere and digging our own pit toilets
- Getting high on paint fumes while painting an enclosed room in a Pastor’s house in Charters Towers
- Getting left at the airport when we first arrived in Vanuatu, and no one noticing you were missing for a few hours
- Getting forgotten for a second time while in Fiji, but this time at least knowing how to get to where we were meant to be
- Three weeks of dysentery while on outreach
- Being taught to dance in a small village in Vanuatu
- Experiencing amazing hospitality while door knocking in an Indian neighbourhood in Fiji
- Crashing a billy-cart while on outreach in the Sunshine Coast and driving over my passenger, breaking a few of his ribs
Those are some of my stories, but I would love to hear about some stories from your own school. If you don’t want to write them down, then how about recording it on YouTube or an audio file and putting them in a blog post? We can work with that as well.
So again, here are the steps to participate in the YWAM DTS blog carnival:
- Write your YWAM DTS story on your own blog
- Link to this post from your story
- Leave a comment on this post with a link to your story
- I will be closing submissions on the 1st of July, so do all the above before then
- Stay tuned to this blog to find out about all the submitted stories