Amazing Students and the Zweletemba project!

Its been over a month since our last post-- ouch! Sorry! AND since we always talk about US, this time its time for you to hear about our amazing students and some of the work we’re doing with them!

Every Wednesday the DTS goes to a nearby township to spend time with the kids there. We worship with them and do dramas and talk to them about things like basic hygiene and safety, as well as how much Jesus loves them! Each September our students work to build a house for a family in need in Zweletemba. Most families in the township live in shacks without windows or doors, and without much inside. The lack of security contributes to the high crime rate—last week we got news that a little 3-year-old girl was raped by her neighbor. Part of the goal in giving a real house is to provide more security for these families. So far, we’re still in the planning stage, but by the time we leave for outreach I’ll have pictures of the house to show you!

The students have had an incredible response to the poverty they’ve seen in Zweletemba. When we heard about a family (whose kids we work with on Wednesdays) that hadn’t eaten in a week, the students collected enough money to get them food for a couple of weeks, and some of them even agreed to give up one meal a week and bring their meal to someone who needs it—and when they don’t bring it to Zweletemba, they give it to a staff on the base who has been struggling to raise enough support.

The students have also been busy doing fundraisers to come up with the money to build the house. They held a movie night this weekend and spent hours baking and making popcorn to sell (even though they’d had to do a ton of baking for a bake sale only the night before!). the fact that they’re also doing fundraisers to go on outreach has made them no less generous or determined!

If anyone would like to donate toward the Zweletemba house, please take a look at the website they’ve made!

http://web.me.com/childreninneedDTS

(the links are at the very top of the page—nice and easy to miss! The donate button is on the “what we’re doing” page)

Mark your calendars-- for the first time, our lack of blogging is actually because there were TOO MANY good activities to write about! If you'd like the condensed version, please continue only until the class picture. Beyond that you will be subjected to all kinds of ramblings.

Two weeks ago: students arrived and most of our days were spent getting people settled in and getting to know everyone. LOTS of airport trips, mall trips, and running all over the place to get last minute things ready.
Last last week: First week of teaching. Topic: Nature and Character of God. Speaker: Lysias from Zimbabwe. AWESOME guy—especially as a first-week speaker. DTS is all about setting aside what you’ve learned before and letting God blow your socks off…and I think last week’s teaching was a FABULOUS introduction to that. Our poor students wanted to contradict everything this man said. Which, believe it or not, is something really valuable in this setting, with a speaker that knows what he’s doing. Or, more accurately, a speaker who is sensitive to what God is doing. He pushed people’s buttons and got them thinking, and truly DIGGING, and still cleared up the leftover confusion in the end.
This past week: Topic: Crucified Life. Cliff from Texas was our speaker, and his teaching is even MORE amazing than last week’s. He’s unbelievably fascinating to listen to (especially with the accent) and he’s made us question and dig and stand in awe of God.
Our Part: other than class, what have we been involved in? I’m the hospitality department for the DTS, so I’ve been doing lots of little things—setting up birthday parties, student/speaker lunches, cards & notes, and general welcome stuff. Jesse is doing more administrative-type stuff: working with the school leader to orchestrate meetings and such, and he’s been doing TONS of work to prepare for the outreach we’ll be leading to East Africa. This is supposed to be the summarized section, so no details for you!
THE END.
(read on if this was much too shallow of an update for your liking)

Let’s be real now. Being here is not really about meetings or birthday parties, or even lectures. We’re here to be transformed and see other people transformed. And by George, its happening! Last week’s teaching on the Crucified Life was NOTHING like I expected. Rather than being a practical teaching on all of the things we should be doing as a working out of “dying to self” and everything, it was actually a mostly theological teaching on GRACE. It was one of those weeks that we all heard things we’ve heard a million times, but this week old knowledge became new revelation. There was a collective sigh of relief from all of the recovering legalists. Its not about crucifying ourselves over and over again; its about LIVING in the reality that we HAVE crucified ourselves and now we are God’s children, pure and blameless before him, and all the working and trying to please him is absolutely ridiculous! I’ll never be able to explain it correctly—people have been trying to untangle the grace/works paradox for centuries, but we still screw it up because head knowledge just doesn’t accurately articulate it. Its something God HAS to speak directly to our hearts about—and this week that finally happened for a lot of us. WOW what a week!

On a less spiritual note, there are some other hugely important things we should update you about.
FIRST. You need to go out, buy some UNO cards, get a group of about 15 people together, and PLAY SLAP UNO. (for the confused souls that have been missing out as I was for the past 20 years: slap uno is like uno on steroids. You can play on other people’s turns, dive for the middle of the table like an over-active game of spoons, and make someone draw TWELVE…and then end up having to draw sixteen yourself and getting eliminated. WOW. Heaven in a pack of cards.) We’ve been playing every few nights with our new students (who happen to be AWESOME humans. I’m SO overwhelmed with how fun they are) and its been the greatest thing ever. I haven’t laughed so hard in who knows how long!

SECOND. We’re running again. Maybe I should be more specific. I’ve been a tired, busy mess, and Jesse’s been quickly stealing my title as the runner in this relationship. He ran NINE MILES the other day! Up until last week, he hadn’t gone farther than four. He’s officially been bitten by the running bug! Too bad he’s now also WAAAAAAAY too fast for me. I’m going to have to go searching for new big strong males to run with to keep me safe. Unfortunately, men who are willing to run as far as me are ALWAYS a million times faster than me. Solution? DTS students who are actually athletic! We all went and got a super awesome group rate at the gym in town! We’ll have group trips twice a week (at 6am!) and there are plenty of people willing to go whenever else we have free time! Hurray!

Oh! Great story—wait, actually its NOT a great story for us, but its entertaining for the rest of you, I’m sure! And it would keep you totally appreciative of all of your working electronics:
Remember a couple of weeks ago I may have mentioned something about a broken macbook? (for those who missed it—Jesse’s macbook was attacked by a flying seatbelt and the screen cracked. And macs aren’t really big here, so they’re MASSIVELY expensive and kind of difficult to find stores to service them.) Well, we FINALLY finished dealing with our insurance company (which, believe me, was MUCH more difficult than one would expect, even from an insurance company), and Jesse’s had the computer back for about a week. HURRAY. Want to know what happened next? Jesse was using his ipod touch at the gym on Friday…as he ran innocently along on the treadmill (which is on the second floor, just next to the balcony that overlooks the pool), his hand suddenly hit the cord, sent his ipod smashing into the treadmill, which then proceeded to launch the ipod over the balcony and into the pool. Yes. It is utterly dead. Useless. And, in fact, it even started making sizzling noises when he plugged it in. now there’s some weird liquidy stuff seeping out. Do me a favor—shove a pillow in your face and just scream as loud as you possibly can. It will make you feel better. and I think it will make me feel better too. Especially as we get ready to call up that insurance company again…

I warned you that I would ramble! But it IS coming to an end. Right after my little food-blog-wanna-be section. I haven’t even cooked many fun things this past week. But LAST week…some girls and I made a giant cake shaped like a hamburger. And we named it Tibbets Farley. Actually, I didn’t do a whole lot. In fact, my little oven is intent on burning the bottom of everything that goes into it, so I was only able to make some feeble contributions to the masterpiece. But the birthday girl (and the rest of the class) was very impressed by it. Actually, the whole process was one mistake after the next. In fact, the only reason we decided to make the three round cakes into a hamburger was because of the burnt bottoms and mismatched flavors. Then the frosting was oddly goopy and Emily the decorating queen raced in to fix it…but it ended up looking like someone puked on the cake, so we had to add MORE frosting, and the chocolate frosting was more like fudge than anything else…suffice it to say that it was a disaster. But it tasted amazing, and we were proud! We also had some adventures with an apple crisp that ended up all over the kitchen floor…Four girls and a much-anticipated then RUINED apple crisp can be a dangerous thing.

I feel compelled to let all of you know I'm not proof-reading any of this. I have this sudden fear that all my ramblings are flowing out in a completely unintelligible fashion. if so, I apologize! In any case, I’m thinking a bit in need of some updates myself. Please leave comments or email us!

Apologies for our long absence...

Oh, look! I have a blog! And I am apparently a very irresponsible blogger because I haven’t posted anything in two weeks. BUT, not to be put off by my shortcomings, I shall now ramble extensively for those who find it enjoyable!
for those who don’t, please see the following wordle for a quick summary of key terms:


So, what have we been up to? A haphazard collage of things, in fact. Last week our base hosted a big YWAM conference, so with 500 extra people running around, it was pretty chaotic. We were not attending the conference, which meant we helped out in the form of driving to Cape Town International (about an hour and a half each way) about 6 times during the week. The conference also put DTS staff training on hold, so we were sleeping in and tackling a pile of books we’ve been hoping to get through. That was a particularly enjoyable task, as was the mountain of recipes I’ve been collecting in honor of having a kitchen again. Dear readers: if you live somewhere with a kitchen, please, for my sake, DON’T TAKE IT FOR GRANTED. Love that kitchen and care for it with enthusiasm! Cook! BAKE! And, if you are wise, give away the fruit of your labor to those without kitchens, or you may one day find yourself looking down at the bathroom scale with the dismay that only fresh cookies and buttered bread can bring.

But I digress…what USEFUL things have we been involved in? How are we working toward the vision that we shared while we were home? For me these weeks have been slow—not only in the too-much-sleeping-in sense, but also in the sense that so little useful work leads to a dimming of vision. A couple of weeks ago we were in Muizenberg for staff training with the International DTS Center in Cape Town, and I felt like my head would explode with imaginative epiphanies about where we could be and how we could be discipling people in the months and years to come. Since then, however, I’ve been doing nothing to GET there, and I must admit that I asked myself a time or two, “Why did I think this would be so exciting?” Praise God for his infinite faithfulness to speak truth into times like these. I have not, in fact, been doubting what he has called us to; I’ve simply been bored. Waiting around is not SUPPOSED to be the exciting part—DISCIPLING is! And as we now gear up for our first week with the students (registration is this Friday!), I’m feeling inspired again. Things are HAPPENING. We’re editing manuals and journals and brainstorming things to discuss with students and ways to show them how HUGE and EXCITING and BRILLANT God is and how he wants to speak directly to each one of them and use them for his glory. Whoohoo!

So this past week was not so much busy as it was simply refreshing. As the hospitality manager for the DTS, I happily helped make little welcome packages for the students and have made lovely calendars and schedules of when speakers are coming and such and OH it is a wonderful thing to know the students will BE HERE SOON!

So this week we say goodbye to our friend Jeremiah who is leaving staff and going home to Colorado, and we say goodbye to the current DTS students who leave for outreach…we pray for Jesse’s computer screen to magically (supernaturally?) be fixed, and Jesse begs God for my Christmasy mood to go away until Christmas is nearer…and we prepare for another week of airport runs, and we SMILE BIG and promise to update much more often once the students arrive and things start happening!

Home-Making

This beautiful cinnamon bread is a testimony of the joy of our new home! As many of you know, we've been impatiently waiting to move into our own place, and on Monday we finally got in! We've been hourly rejoicing in the additional space and privacy! I'm especially thrilled with the ability to bake again. Praise the Lord for cute little kitchens!

Back in Africa!

Click on the image to make it full-sized