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Thanksgiving, Praise & Worship
We had an awesome time this week! Our speakers were part of a band called Vertical Response and they taught us about thanksgiving, praise and worship.
Did you know that there's a difference between thanksgiving, praise and worship? We tend to put it all under the same hat, but they're all very different things, and each one is equally important. In Psalm 100:4a it says

Enter his gates with thanksgiving; go into his courts with praise.

Thanksgiving means expressing appreciation. We sometimes tend to forget to be thankful for all God has done for us, but I know for myself that if I start to think about it, I can hardly stop saying Thank You to God because He's blessed me in so many different ways! And if we're not thankful, it means we're unthankful, and that's just...bad. Doesn't it hurt when we give someone a present and they don't smile or even say thank you? How much more must it hurt God who's given us everything we have!

The next thing is praise. Psalm 117:1 says

Praise the Lord, all you nations. Praise him, all you people of the earth.

Giving God praise doesn't mean saying "I praise you God," it means actually praising Him! Praise means expressing admiration or to boast. That means saying what He's like, declaring His character and nature, how good He is, how big He is, how merciful, how kind, how patient, how humble, how creative, how beautiful, ...

And the next thing is worship. Worship means expressing reverence and adoration. Worship is our response to who God is and to what He's done. Worship comes from our spirit. In John 4:23-24 it says

"But the time is coming and is already here when true worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and in truth. The Father is looking for anyone who will worship him that way. For God is Spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and in truth."

By giving thanks we enter into the "outer courts", by giving praise we enter into the "inner courts," and finally, through worship, we enter into the "Holy of Holies." All of these three things are important, not one of them should be left out...
,br> Here's a story which gives plenty of reasons to give thansk to God... :-) On Thursday morning we had intercession, and we got so fired up for God! We got such a huge passion and were so excited, it was awesome! We ended up praying for everyone who was sick or was experiencing any kind of pain. There were a couple or people who had asthma, some had back pains, someone had a hurt ankle, some people had trouble with their eyes, one person had a sore throat, someone couldn't hear very well, someone had a bad shoulder, and there where many other things as well, and we prayed for them all, and a lot of them got healed!! One girl who had asthma could go running without having trouble breathing! One girl who couldn't kneel because of her hurt ankle could kneel down without experiencing any pain! A women with a sore throat who could hardly speak at the beginning ended up shouting out in prayer! God is so good!!

P.S. I got rid of the blog. I didn't like it very much, so, yeah, that's why I got rid of it... :-)

Local Outreach (11th March 07)
Whew, this week was exhausting...and so much fun! :-) We had local outreach this week, that means that we were in our outreach teams (so I was with all the people I'll be going to Cambodia with) and we did different outreaches on the island. So...on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday morning we went to a Christian High School to speak to the students for one lesson. One of our outreach leaders, Jason, was invited to speak there, but he decided to let us have a say in it, too, so we planned the lessons together, and some of us spoke, too. It was interesting and good practise for outreach, too, when we might be doing similar things.
On Monday, Wednesday and Friday afternoon we went to a "Kona Adult Day Center," basically an old folks home, except that they don't live there, their families bring them there in the mornings and pick them up again in the late afternoon or evening. We went there to fix up their gardens. Heh heh, I remembered why I chose not to become a gardener... ;-) No, we had fun. I can't remember ever being that dirty. The garden was like a jungle when we first got there. The only thing we did was to pretty much just cut down and rip out a whole lot of plants. It looks quite nice now. We're proud. :-) We also spent some time talking to the patients, and one time we brought a guitar, and Koto, our other leader, sang and played for them, while one of them danced! The people there are really special. And they were so greatful for our help, they let us pick tangerines from one of the trees and backed cookies for us. :-)
On Tuesday night we went to the beach and helped some people from Solid Rock, a local church, give food to the homeless. Some of us also got to talk to some of them, and we saw the sunset over the ocean! It's so beautiful here...
Other than that we spent lot's of time praying, for the classes we taught at the Hight School, and especially for Cambodia. We also spent a lot of time preparing for Cambodia, doing picture files to teach the people there English, and practising skits and songs.
It was great getting to know everyone! I hadn't really gotten to know most of the people on my outreach team, so this week was great in becoming more familiar with each other. I love my team... :-)

One other (really special) thing was the "love feast"... We were all told to dress up and meet at 5pm on Saturday. So we did (it's so cute to see all the girls all dressed up... :-)) and they (our staff) loaded us into vans and drove us all to this really beautiful house. Inside they'd set the tables really nice, with candles and flowers, then they told us to sit down, relax, and enjoy an eight course dinner!! It was soooo... good, we got to just relax and enjoy each others company while eating (really delicious) food. The "love feast" is a DTS tradition that was started at the YWAM base in Lausanne, Switzerland (!). There were several things that led up to that tradition being started, but the reason for it is for everyone to actually sit down together and enjoy each others company, instead of just eating quickly and hurrying off afterwards. The meal took us about three hours...it was great. :-)

We'll be leaving for Taiwan on Friday morning, so I don't know when I'll be able to update this page next. Hopefully I'll be able to next weekend, but just incase, um, yeah, I might not be able to. I want to put up a whole bunch of pictures though before I leave if possible. (I wanted to tonight but the computer's acting stupid...)
I'm really excited about going to Taiwan... :-)

Taiwan!! (18th March 07)
Yay, I'm in Taiwan!! :-) The flight was really, really long, it took us about 18 hours to get here. We left early Friday morning from Kona. From there we flew to Honolulu, then to Tokio and finally we arrived in Narita, Taiwan. This is my first time in Asia, and it's so interesting, and very, very different from anything I've ever seen. We arrived on Saturday evening and were picked up by a bus that took us to where we were staying, and we drove for about half an hour so we got to see quite a lot of the town. It's so strange for me to see everything written in Chinese. (The main language here is Mandarin, and some of the older people speak a Taiwanese dialect, and most of the younger people can speak a little English.) If I had any actual space in my luggage for more stuff (which I don't, my packpack is stuffed to the maximum capacaty...) this would be such a great place for shopping! Everything's really cheap, the food, the clothes, everything! You can get a pretty good meal for one dollar, I've seen a place with pullovers for about three dollars, and there's stores absolutely everywhere! There's literaly one store after another, and almost all of them with a banner that lights up at night, making it really interesting to walk through town at night. (It's interesting during day time, too, but it doesn't look quite as nice...) The people are really friendly, too. We had to do a kind of scavenger hunt today, so we had to ask a lot of people for directions, and they were so nice! A couple of guys even walked with us afor most five minutes just to show us where the internet cafe was.

I don't have time to write much more, and I'm not sure when I'll be able to write again. We haven't had any lectures or done any evangelizing yet, so I don't know how busy our time here is going to be, but I do now that our time here is going to be very exciting. :-) If I can I'll eventually try to write something about our lecture last week 'cause it was really interesting... It was about evangelism... :-)

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