Re-Entry, Really? But I Am Still in YWAM!

By On · 4 Comments

Re-Entry when it comes to Christian Missions is defined as:

Re-Entry – The process of transitioning from short-term or long-term missions to life at home.

Part of the last week of the YWAM Discipleship Training School is usually spent talking about re-entry. It can be quite a shock for people coming home to their friends, family, church, job and / or school. Even after only spending 6-months away on the YWAM DTS so much can happen, and so many things experienced, that coming back to where you left from can be a big challenge.

Because we were never actually leaving YWAM we did not prepare ourselves for “re-entry”.

Calgary_Tower

I guess that we should have known better if we had really looked at our situation. We were leaving a close knit YWAM community that we had grown with for the last 11-years. Everyday I was in the office working with missions minded people, passionate to do everything they could to further the spread of God’s Word and Truth. A few times a week we were at the YWAM Centre for a meal or event, and half of our friends were also part of YWAM in Townsville.

Coming here we were in a way coming “home” for me, even though I had been gone for the last eleven years. I didn’t really think of it as “coming home”, it felt more like “leaving home”, but Calgary is where a lot of my old friends are, my family is all here and my home church is here in Calgary as well. I think that the best way to describe it would be that I was coming back to where I grew up, rather than coming “home”.

Experiencing Re-Entry

We have found ourselves experiencing our own sort of re-entry as we have come here to Calgary.

Here are some points that I have taken from this article about re-entry:

Stages of Re-Entry:

  1. Initial Euphoria
  2. Irritability and Hostility
  3. Gradual Adjustment
  4. Adaptation

This article also has some really good points about re-entry:

  1. You have changed – I’ve been gone for 11 years. When I left I was 21, very new in my Christian faith, single with no responsibilities and no clear direction for my life. Now I’m 32, been involved in full-time ministry for over a decade, married with two kids and I feel that I have a relatively clear calling and direction on my life.
  2. Your friends and family have changed – Friends have moved, married, had kids, gotten jobs, made new friends and changed, a lot. Family has been through similar changes, even though at the moment both of my sisters are living at home with my parent’s, which still the same as when I left.
  3. Your church has changed – Most of the people of my age that were at our home church here in Calgary have moved to other churches in the years that we have been gone. There are new people, and a few old friends, but the face of the church has changed dramatically in the past eleven years. The church also went through a change in the senior pastor and youth pastor who originally sent me out to YWAM, which would obviously bring about quite a few changes.
  4. Your culture has changed – I am amazed at how much Calgary has changed since I left. The population since I left in 1998 has increased by about 20% to over 1 million people. The roads are busier, people a lot more rushed and a lot less polite. Even Tamara has noticed how much more rude people have gotten here since her first visit after we were married in 2001. Calgary has a much more cosmopolitan feel to it (cosmopolitan being defined as being made up of diverse peoples, showing cultural diversity and being more international in scope).

Because we were changing YWAM locations we didn’t expect to experience everything associated with re-entry (as well as culture shock, but I will write about that in another article). Part of why we feel we are experiencing it is because of the substantial difference between the YWAM community that we left in Australia and the YWAM community here in Calgary.

Another thing is that most of our friends in Australia were also involved in missions, but here in Calgary most of our friends are involved in main stream jobs. This brings with it a different way of looking at things, and it’s taking a lot for Tamara and I get to used to it. Just the other day I was sitting around a table with some guys as they were talking about finances and their jobs where they were earning two to three times what I do. I found it a bit of a challenge to know how to engage in that conversation. (Nothing wrong with a main stream job at all if that’s where God’s got you. He has a different plan for everyone of us, we just need to figure out what it is.)

I guess that it would have been nice to have been somehow equipped better for what we were walking into, but who knew eh?

Right now we are just struggling through it, hoping that the light we see in this tunnel is the end of the tunnel, and not the oncoming train …

Do You Fake It on Facebook?

By On · 14 Comments

Is the person that you really are the person that we see on Facebook or other social networks?

Somehow I reckon that quite often the person that we portray on-line, whether it be on a blog, forum or social network, is not a completely true representation of who we really are. This “alternate personality” could be hugely misleading (Brad Paisley’s song “Online” personifies this), partly misleading (but still deliberately so) or simply missing pieces.

I’ll be the first to admit that who you see on-line is not a complete picture of who I am. I don’t think that it’s because I’m being deliberately misleading about who I am, it’s just that there is only so much you can say about yourself on-line. I am also generally pretty reserved with how open I am about some of the things that I’m going through in my personal life. Some things are better left to in person conversations I reckon.

Knowing how I represent myself on-line reminds me not to be quick to judge people by what I read on-line. It’s impossible to get a complete picture of someone simply by what I read on-line, even if they’ve written it themselves.

So that begs the following question:

  1. Can I get a full picture of who you are on-line?
  2. Do you judge others by what you read about them on-line?

Let us know below in the comments…

Defining My New Role in YWAM

By On · 2 Comments

It’s been an interesting transition for us as we’ve made out move to Calgary. Not only have we been settling into our new home, but we have also been working on defining our new role as we continue our work with YWAM.

Working on a YWAM base back in Australia with over 100 staff meant that most of my time was spent doing tech support and network management. Now working from home has opened up all sorts of other possibilities.

At the moment there are four main projects that I am working on within my role on the YWAM International Chairman’s Team:

  1. The new YWAM International Web-Site (the current site is at www.ywam.org)
  2. Capturing, editing and distributing leadership training videos by Lynn Green from his visit to Calgary a few months ago
  3. Developing a new web-site for YWAM Resources (www.ywamlife.com)
  4. YWAM “Social Media” Interaction (Facebook, Twitter, etc.)

In addition to this I’m also toying around with creating an on-line radio show (audio podcast) out of the news and content developed within YWAM. Each week I usually see dozens of stories from around YWAM about upcoming conferences, schools, outreaches and more. I try to document some of them at YWAM News that Bill finds Interesting.

As I continue to connect with the YWAM ICT I’m finding more and more opportunities and needs presenting themselves. The problem certainly isn’t going to be finding stuff to do, the challenge will be finding where to best spend my time and effort …

Sometimes it’s the Little Things

By On · 3 Comments

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:

  1. Most of our major appliances (clothes washer, drier, fridge and dish washer) need to be replaced (read more here).
  2. I need to paint the deck and all the trim on the exterior of the house before winter comes to prevent more wood rot.
  3. 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:

  1. We were given an annual pass to the Calgary Zoo and were able to enjoy a family trip there this week.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.

YWAM News Site – a Prototype

By On · 4 Comments

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.

YWAM News Site

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:

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