Sorry this is a bit long, but God moved in huge ways!

This week was a really uplifting week! For our teacher this week we had a man from the organization Victorious Christian Harvesters named Bob come in and share about evangelism. This man has an amazing amount of energy and passion for the Lord and for seeing the lost come to Christ and it truly showed through in his teaching! This man has shared the Gospel message with thousands of people and is truly an evangelist if I have ever met one. The teaching about evangelism this week was actually a bit challenging for me as personal evangelism has been a weak point for me in the past. Bob’s teaching really helped motivate me to do more in the realm of personal evangelism and gave me a good starting point to work from in that realm. He encouraged us to keep the message simple and to remember the fact that the power is in the Gospel itself, not in something we can do. One illustration he gave was from his earlier days doing evangelism in Mexico. In those days he made some note cards with the Gospel message in Spanish and began to memorize the cards, not really understanding Spanish at all. He then went out and presented the Gospel in what was to him just memorized sounds and people were getting saved because the power is in the Gospel message itself.

To wrap up this week, yesterday our Discipleship Training School took a trip to a small village about two hours outside the city called Apoderado. On Saturday we helped with a cell group and with a youth celebration at which I got to pray for a young crippled man, who felt the power of God, and a young girl with a heart problem.

Today we first learned a fun skit for little kids about God making each of us for a purpose and then went out into the village to share the skit with the kids. We first found about five kids, but they ran and got other kids until we had nearly twenty or thirty as an audience for the drama. We did the drama and then gave the Gospel message and gave an invitation for the youth to accept Christ. Afterwards, the kids were so excited that we were going to go over a block or two to do it again, but as we were on our way I saw a man with a crippled leg that made it so that he could barely walk. God told me we needed to pray for him, so we went over and asked if we could. When we asked we found out he was also mute but could understand everything we were saying. The man said that the leg gave him too much pain to walk on it and said we could pray, so we did. We prayed once, asked the man how he felt and he indicated that the pain had left. One person from the group said we should pray again, so we did. Afterward we asked him how he felt and he said that he had no more pain! So we asked him if he could walk and he began to walk out in front of us! He hurried over to the rest of the tough-looking men in their twenties or thirties nearly jumping for joy and motioning toward us indicating what had happened and telling them to listen to us. We had probably twenty or thirty tough men staring at us, waiting for what we would do next, so we got up in front of them and preached the Gospel, telling them that Jesus wanted to heal them physically, emotionally, spiritually, and mentally too, and then showed them how they could pray for Christ to come into their hearts. We then led the man who had been healed to Christ. I believe all of those men were affected greatly and that many went on to accept Christ.

As we were leaving, an elderly woman came up to us and asked us if we could pray for her nephew who had a tumor. We said we would and we followed her to his house. We prayed for the man, but the tumor didn’t go away while we were there. We told them, however, that it didn’t scare us that it didn’t happen right away because we believed that it would soon and told them that they should be praying for him as well, but when we said that the elderly lady said that she didn’t know how to pray. So we got the opportunity to share with her the fact that we can talk to God just like we would talk to our dad because He is our Father! The whole experience was truly a testimony to God’s greatness. Glory to God!

this week

This week was a very relaxing week after the stress of the previous couple weeks. We returned to the original schedule with less class hours and got in a new couple of teachers. Our teachers for this week were a slightly older couple from Canada named Doug and Jan. They were amazing. They taught on relationships of every kind, but focused a lot on male/female relationships which made for interesting classes. I thought they handled the topic very well, with all the care that a topic of that weight deserves. More than that, they are really awesome people and you could feel their love come through in all of their teaching. They are really funny and very fun to be around, which helped the week significantly. This week on Wednesday we also had a live webcast with the founder of Youth With a Mission and tons of other YWAM bases all over the world where the people from the base in Egypt were interviewed about what's happening there. If you don't know what has been going on, basically the government has been peacefully overthrown which has caused some major changes in the country (which is one of the major centers of the Muslim world) which have the potential to turn the whole Muslim world on its head.

the last couple weeks

The last couple weeks have been... well... interesting. We had a couple teachers come in and we didn't see eye-to-eye on a few things. Actually, we completely disagreed doctrinally on a lot of things that they taught in class. In fact, I would say that most of the students in my school disagreed with them at least on some points. They also spoke for two weeks and requested extra class time to cover everything they wanted to go over. This made for a very interesting couple of weeks. I got very frustrated, and even angry at times, but I know that all of it is God's way of refining me. This is His way of working all things together for my good (Romans 8:28). He has been bringing a lot of things to the surface in my life, and these two weeks were no exception. Through these last weeks He brought to the surface pride issues I thought I had dealt with but now I realize they still need a lot of work. Although the last two weeks have been rough, I love being able to rest in the fact that He is working everything out in my life to make me into the man He wants me to be.

p.s.

Please be praying for myself and the rest of the people here on the Youth With A Mission Mazatlan Base. We have been passing around a couple different illnesses and couple really use some prayer.