After weeks of classroom lectures on different areas of discipleship, week six of our lecture phase of Discipleship Training School (DTS) marked our coming halfway to the completion of lecture phase. And I could not have more ecstatic to find out that we were going to Glasgow, Scotland for an entire week!
By this point, being one with a tendency to live in what I like to call
organized chaos (and what my mother likes to call a hurricanes aftermath), I had already lost my DTS calendar and forgot what the weeks topic even was. As far as I knew was that we were going on 6 hour car ride to Glasgow for a "DTS Gathering" and that a group of us girls would be staying on a YWAM boat called The Next Wave. The DTS Gathering consisted of all the other DTS's from other YWAM bases in England who all came together for a week of teaching and mini outreaches. To give us a little sneak peak into how outreach would be like. The whole thing had me so stoked. Not only were we going to have a week of lectured outside our classroom, but in Scotland, a place I've always wanted to go to, AND we'd be meeting a whole bunch of other DTS students and I was going to stay on a boat. The boat thing was especially exciting for me because being from Santa Rosa in California and not really ever seeing the ocean unless we drive an hour or two out, to now living in the middle of England, any chance to see the ocean is a great treat. And not only was I going to see the ocean, but I was going to stay on it in a boat!
Upon arriving though I found out what the weeks lecture's were going to be about. Evangelism. One of the most challenging things Ive faced while on DTS so far. Our school has done and continues to do, evangelism once a week. Not any kind of evangelism, but straight up old school street "Hey how are you, can I tell you about Jesus?!" Evangelism. Basically it was the worst day of my week, beginning with gut wrenching fear and ending with non stop with "Woe is me, the worst Christian ever!"
As you can imagine I was already getting nervous at that point then I we all received name tags with our weeks schedules on them. And they looked like this:
I dont know how well you can see from your screen but I was mortified when I saw that there was outreach everyday. Yes, it was different in the sense that everyday we had a choice of what kind outreach we were going to do. There were a lot of creative ideas like treasure hunting, where your pray for God to give you a picture of someone then going out and finding them on the street. Say One For Me, where you go out with these little pieces of paper and asking people for their prayer request and writing them down and praying with them. "While I Live" a project where you have a chalk board and ask people what they want to do while they're alive, and getting a chance to talk about their answers and share the gospel. So these were some of the options of ways of doing evangelism. All very creative, but not any less scary for me. I realized very quickly that this week could very easily be the most distressing weeks of my life and that I was facing my biggest fears of talking to strangers, dead on.
That very first night upon arriving in Glasgow, after an evening of ice breaking and making friends with the other DTS students, we all headed to our various sleeping accommodations within the area we of Glasgow we were staying in called Bridgeton. The boys in one church down from our host church, Champion Life Church, where most of the girls stayed, except for my group which got to stay on the Next Wave. I was filled with joy, despite the thoughts of the weeks schedule on the back of my mind. I decided I'd do this new thing Im learning to do, where you take one step at a time instead of getting overwhelmed by trying to do it all at once. Crazy stuff, I know.
So at this point, Im just so happy to have arrived safely, and be staying on this awesome boat in an awesome cabin with cute little bunks with curtains and personal tube lights. I laid down in my warm bed, with a weird piece in hoping that maybe, just by some one a million chance, I could make it through this week unmarred and maybe even stronger. And over the coarse of the week, thats exactly what God did in my life. Through the teachings from the different speakers I was drawn into asking Gods forgiveness after revelation about the root of my fear of people and that was a huge lack of the fear of God. Not hating what God hates, or loving what God loves. I has made what people thought about me more important then what God thinks of me. And that was the day I began to burn. Burn with this inner fire I had never felt before. I began to want so badly to tell people about Jesus because He loved them so much and I could feel that love in a way I could never conjure up on my own. I went out to the streets with my group and started stopping every person I passed to ask if they needed prayer and let them know God loved them enough to tell me, some random kid, that he loves them, Not everyone was interested but a few blessed my heart in ways I wont ever forget. Their was a woman who we literally chased down because I knew we were supposed to talk to her and once we began to share, she had tears at the rims of her eyes and she said how she had brought her kid to church once and had been thinking about going, but that now that this had happen, she knew she HAD to go back. Amazing. A few things that God really showed my about Himself was that He enables me to go above and beyond everything I am. From being an introvert, to all my fear and even the things Im good at. With Gods Spirit inside me I'm Lisa at 10,000% My fullest potential. And that we have no say in who God uses to do His will. Not even for ourselves. And if He has called us to do something, He gives you grace to be obedient. And thirdly, the pleasure of knowing in your heart of hearts that you have brought joy to Gods heart, your Heavenly Father's heart, because you chose to obey His will is a peace that cannot be compared. Its perfection and love that boosts your faith in Him like no other.
I left Scotland very sad to leave. God wants those Scotts to know Him so bad and I am blessed to have had the opportunity to have planted seed to see that happen. My only prayer now is that one day I can go back.
