Wow these first two months have just flown by, the first month spent in Homer, Alaska being thrusted into leadership, being lovingly stretched into responsibility, and this second month which started in Homer and will end in Homer but that has 2 weeks of Vancouver 2010 Olympic outreach in it which was a great learning experience, from learning a bit more about what I would call more of a casting out your nets type ministry, and learning the balance of being intimate yet casual, making eye contact yet not forcing anything, serving the greater community of Vancouver yet being a light to the nations. So before I left Winnipeg I didn't really know what my position with YWAM was going to be, but the day before I left I got asked if I would consider being school staff, I said I would pray about it on the train ride, so my 33 hour train ride from Grand Forks to Seattle ends up being a 37 hour train ride, I miss my flight fly standby, miss my ride from Anchorage to Homer but then end up getting a different on the next day from my uncle and aunt Jim and Norma, through this Gods teaching me trust, and it all works out amazingly, He also leads me towards being part of the school.
So I'll tell you kinda what I'm up to, We (YWAM(Youth With A Mission) run schools called Discipleship Training Schools(dts) which is 3 months of intense study of Gods word/ life application, and 2 months of going out and applying what God has been teaching us. Its the program that I went through a year ago, I am now one of the leaders of this school. Which has been so awesome, I get to be a part of a life changing event for the students while totally changing my life too. Each week of the lecture phase we have a speaker with various topics touching on different areas of our walk with God, we really have a awesome opportunity to open ourselves completely to Christ and have him do surgery, taking out things that hold us down and repairing our hearts so that we can shine His love to those around us. So we have a pretty small school this semester 4 students, but its like a family, we really have a great team. So our outreach will be 2 months long, right now we are uncertain of our location, we have applied to work with the YWAM base in Haiti but we haven't heard back from them yet so we are waiting for that response. The reason we arent going back to St. Lawrence Island the place where i did my outreach is because we are fortunate to have a student from SLI but we also have to give him a cross cultural outreach with the type of school we are running, so while its sad that the school wont be going to SLI, I am glad to see the fruit of our work( and there is a team of staff going to SLI, which might be what is needed( a more mature outreach team)). But if we dont go to Haiti we are probably going to be going to a island off of Kodiak Island which is just south of us called Ouzinkee.
But yeah thats a little bit of what I'm doing. What I wrote is quite vague but there is a lot of responsibility that I have taken with this position so pray for wisdom for me in leadership. Now I will share more about my time in Vancouver. We went not really knowing what our role would be, as we were working with a lot of the churches in Vancouver, working with a big organization called More
Than Gold. But we ended up doing a lot of radical hospitality stuff handing out free hot chocolate/ coffee on the streets/ at the sky train stations for Salvation Army which sparked up tons of conversations about God it was amazing, so encouraging. We also did prayer stations where we wore vests that said prayer changes things and we held free prayer signs, which as a whole brought lots of attention and in my half and hour I prayed for 6 people (They were all Christians but it was still cool). And we did a lot of different things, these are just 2 things we did in those 2 weeks. Met lots of people, from the homeless to the tourists from around the world, wish I remembered all their names, got to share my life, got to share a cup of coffee, a genuine smile and it was so worth it. Any questions, comments, prayer request. Feel free to give me a shout. Thank you so much for your prayers and support
Chad Reimer
chad.reimer@gmail.com
1-907-235-9339
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