YOUNGLIFE TRAINING… buckle your seatbelts

This has been an extraordinary week.  I really got to know the heart of God more this week… and more about why the heart of God brought me here to Rwanda.  I have had the privilege of helping to train about 25 younglife leaders that will be serving the local youth community in Kigali.  They met everyday for a week from 10am-6pm to go through the same training material it took me a whole semester to go through when I trained to become a YL leader in Bloomington.  INTENSE!  I spent all of Monday with these kids (ages 15-22) and then the rest of the week I came after school or during one of my breaks.  In such a short amount of time, I saw what an impact this training had on these young adults’ faith.  I am more sold about the mission of YoungLife than I have ever been.  To see the same principle applied to a totally different culture confirms that YL hits the core of what people need on the head.  Jesus and deep meaningful relationships.  By the end of the week, the general response from these newly enlightened young adults was gratitude that they were given the opportunity to learn and be stretched in their faith in this way.  It is such a unique opportunity considering the general consensus of churches around here.  It is nearly impossible to find a church here with sound biblical teaching coming from the pastor.  Most of the local church pastors are not even trained and they go about preaching things that don’t entirely match up with what the Bible says.  Therefore, the validity of what they preach is questionable.  This is in the works of changing as there is a Bible college here that is training loads of pastors as we speak!  Praise God for that! and for getting YoungLife started here only 2 years ago to create more and more followers of Christ! 

YoungLife is SO meant to be in Rwanda.  Rwandans are generally private people.  They don’t talk about their feelings and rarely share anything deep about their life with others.  For instance, it is shocking to have a Rwandan share anything about their experience with the genocide of 94.  And you know ALL of them were affected by it one way or another.  During the training, of course they were challenged to break that cultural boundary and care for these kids by offering them a deep meaningful relationship.  God is bigger than cultural normalcy! 

God keeps surprising me in the ways he has shown his love for me in Rwanda.  I have to admit,  this last month has been especially hard.  I haven’t been able to update my blog until now because I literally didn’t have anything positive to say.  I was resentful of the fact that I felt trapped here when the symptoms of homesickness were creeping in.  I’ve been here over 3 months, and I’ve been told that’s about the time when you realize you aren’t on vacation and you won’t be going “home” anytime soon.  It was true for me!  I’ve also had a really busy few weeks which helped and hindered my attitude.  It helped get my mind off missing home, but also overwhelmed me and I again started forgetting my mission and purpose for me being here.  How quickly I can forget!  Thankfully, through this training, God has opened my heart up to see the amazing opportunities out there that He has planned specifically for me to take advantage of!  I was able to share my heart and passion for youth ministry with these kids and through that, it’s like God was reigniting my passion I had forgotten about while I wallowing in negativity and self pity.  Seriously, every where I turn, God has been there first, and instead of continuing to walk in front of me, he turns around and walks through it again with me.  I’m reminded of this time and time again when there’s no way to explain the events of my life except through God’s reign over it.