Breaking in

2011-10-12T01:43:00.000-05:00

^{October 11}two thousand eleven

Chad Reimer- YWAM Arctic Mercy- Homer AK

Dear friends and family what an incredible journey God has us all on.

In 2009 when God first called me here to Alaska I really didn't know where my time here would take me, and how many lives would be touched. God has been faithful to walking and talking to me along the way to bring His testimony to many nations and tribes.

We just finished our 4^th annual Homer Hockey Camp where we had 30 campers from here in homer and neighboring towns. It was refreshing to be around these kids even though most of them weren’t Christians. We spent time on the Ice with two instructors from YWAM hockey based out of Vancouver, worked them hard off ice with some conditioning, and we challenged them with the Gospel and with lessons on Godly character. We had the most campers we have ever had and that was partly because some of the parents (mostly non Christians) were so proactive in getting other kids to come that they even went out of there way to pay for other kids and hand out registration sheets. Some of the kids parents had withheld them from previous camps because they didn’t want them in a Christian camp, but God softened their hearts for such a time as this.

Oh, give thanks to the Lord, for He is good! For His mercy endures forever. Let the redeemed of the Lord say so, Whom He has redeemed from the hand of the enemy. And gathered out of the lands, from the east and from the west, from the north and from the south. Psalms 107: 1-3

If you place a map of Alaska on a map of continental United States it stretches coast to coast and Canada to the bottom tip of Florida. That is just how big our area of influence is especially when we are involved with things like the World Eskimo Indian Olympics and other Christian and non Christian conferences and events. One of our visions as YWAM Arctic Mercy is to have a fleet of boats and ships that would give us a reach to the innumerable coastline communities here in Alaska. We are starting to plan yet waiting on the Lord for perfect timing for this project.

I am planning a staff outreach to St. Lawrence Island starting October 14^th going for about 6 weeks. It is exciting to pray about this trip and seek the Lord for His purposes. So far its 3 of us going which is a smaller team than normal, which will mean we will be stretched over forward and backwards in our work which will definitely be fulfilling but busy. At the same time a bunch of our staff are going to Minto, Alaska which is another great opportunity to train and disciple many, which is a door that opened partly because of our trip to the World Eskimo Indian Olympics. Bless His Holy Name, God is awesome.

As I type this I am uncertain of what next year will look like for me. I will be spending some substantial time at home as I'm at the end of my 5th American tourist Visa around Christmas time and have to make decisions of whether I should pursue a Religious workers Visa or not. Pray for me as I seek the Lord on this because I know God has spoken to me about more than just what He wants to do in Alaska.

Jesus may your Kingdom come, may your will be done.

for info on supporting me prayerfully or financially please contact me

i will be out of cell range from october 17th till november 22nd

Chad Reimer chad.reimer@gmail.com

1 907 299 6255

2011-09-16T02:01:00.000-05:00

Chad Reimer- YWAM Arctic Mercy- Homer, AK 8/15/11

Fireweed is starting to inhabit ditches and fields here in Homer meaning summer is almost over around here. The seasons of ministry are kind of changing too, going from student focused discipleship schools to mainly staff outreach. We are in a key time period to start one of our long term visions of having a boat that would be able to give us access to many villages all over Alaska. But we were praying and seeking the Lord and God gave us Nehemiah as and example, we are to build and fight at the same time. We will be getting information packets out so we can start fundraising for this project that would enable our ministry to getting to the countless villages that arent on the road system. We will use this boat to bring construction material to repair churches and homes, to bring teams to villages to do conferences, but most importantly to bring real people to minister on a 1 on 1 relationship/ discipleship level.

We are also at a time period where I believe God is about to break through again in a deep way on St. Lawrence Island which is our main outreach location. There has been a lot of sorrow and pain that has made a people so desperate for something greater and I think that this desperation is going to start evolving into lasting change. There have been 4 suicides in the past 8 months in Savoonga, this has brought much brokenness. Many whom we minister to have lost the people closest to them through these deaths. There is a pastor in Savoonga who has preached all these funerals, plus many more in the past 2 years. I know that seed has been planted through these hard times, through the faithfulness of this pastor who is reaching out to this community with Jesus. Continue to pray for him and his family as they minister and pray that our next trip out there can be refreshing for them.

Our mini DTS went really well, with huge breakthrough in the minds, hearts and souls of our students. More freedom to love God and love their neighbors. We had 2 students from St. Lawrence Island, which was really awesome. We battled the fear that kept them in the dark corner, the shame and guilt that was hidden leading them to the cross of Jesus and His embracing arms. Showing them the Love of God and the power of truth and faith in that very truth. The outreach portion of the Mini DTS was at the World Eskimo Indian Olympics (WEIO) in Fairbanks. A gathering of natives from all across Alaska to celebrate culture and to connect.

We had a group of 15 people from one of our staff members home church in Texas join our trip to Fairbanks for WEIO. We went as volunteers to really be able to plant seeds of reconciliation, love, and faith in people from all over Alaska. We were invited by a native run ministry that has long been involved with gathering volunteers for the event. During the 5 days that we were there we were involved with setting up equipment for events, taking care of elders, running the merchandise table, helping native artists set up their booths, and much more. But that isnt what really made this a outreach, relationship and discipleship have always been Gods strategy. Being an authentic lover of God and showing genuine love for your neighbor really opens hearts up, we got to pray for people who were going through hard times, people asked us who we were and we got to share with them, I told athletes that I was praying for them, we just got to go above and beyond what people would think a volunteer would do and with true joy doing it( I got to carry dead seals in for the seal skinning competition and a few other kinda gross jobs). The board of directors who are all influential native leaders gave us a “key to the Olympics” and invited us back anytime we want. We got to see some of the God given cultural characteristics come out like the way that the athletes “competed” not acting selfishly but all helping each other out giving tips but at the same time really giving their best effort in the events. God showed up in a lot of ways through the way our big group was willing to jump in and do anything and to do it for and with Jesus. A lot of the fruit of our actions wont be seen for a while but we get to plant seed and in due time we get to see harvest. And we now have contacts in many villages.

Fall is knocking at our doorstep and with it quite a few opportunities are knocking also.

Most of our staff have gone on outreach with a YWAM team coming from Kona called the circuit riders. They are going from Fairbanks, AK to Valdez, AK visiting cities and villages (I believe that we met some people from those villages at WEIO) along the way. They are visiting churches bring a strong emphasis on revival in the church leading to love for the lost, then proclaiming the word on the streets believing that God will move in power to bring the lost to Jesus.

Our hockey camp registration is gaining speed and we have more hockey players pre registered than we had total last year. The hockey rink manager even though he isnt a Christian (that we know of) loves our camp so much that he wanted us to do 2 this year. This has been our best opportunity to share the gospel with unchurched kids here in homer, and I know the top notch hockey training provided by YWAM Hockey is having effect on our hockey teams. Our hockey camp dates are Sept 22-25.

Right now I am serving the base here in Homer, keeping our building and property maintained and starting to prepare to hand over the “ head of maintenance” role over to the next person as I leave in late December. I am still not sure how long I am going to be away from here for, but it is likely that I wont be able to get another tourist visa so I might start the religious workers visa process (which took other staff members here a year and half to get). I am not giving up by any means, and actually feel like im fighting for this place, for these people now more than ever. We are planning on sending a team of YWAM staff to St. Lawrence Island for the months of October and November which I am very excited about, and already preparing for. But this season is very much a season of keeping my eyes open for the opportunities that God has prepared for me and in the power of the Holy Spirit walking out in those good works.

God is shaking the things that can be shaken, and refining those willing to be refined. Hebrews 11:1 “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” God has shown me laying down my life for my brothers, I cant begin how much it hurts to help carry the burdens of my brothers and sisters in Christ but there is joy too. The power of faith is striking me, the scripture says faith in grace is what saves. Gods love is even more striking, a infinitely powerful majestic God choosing to love a broken and rebellious people. He is worthy of undying trust even when the world around us is being shattered into a million pieces.

I just want to thank you all for your support both in prayers and in finances

In Christ chad.reimer@gmail.com

Chad Reimer 907-299-6255

2011-06-19T21:53:00.001-05:00

Greetings from Chad Reimer in Homer, Alaska with YWAM june 6^th/ 2011

Gal 2:20 I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.

Today has been a day of prayer and encouragement. I have committed myself to a people whom the Son of God loves and gave Himself up for. Its been a week since the graduation of our latest Discipleship Training School and almost 2 weeks since we got back from our 2 month outreach to St. Lawrence Island. It is awesome to see what God can do when people surrender their hearts and their time to God. I saw the students of our DTS really grab onto the solid foundation of Jesus and start to tear down the things that hindered them from understanding the fullness of the truth. Throughout our time on St. Lawrence Island I also got to see many individuals come into the salvation Jesus offered them. Today is a day where when we minister to people we get to look at them with love and perseverance in relationships, no matter what is going on in their lives we get to offer them Jesus.

Our model of outreach can be interesting at times, we go into St. Lawrence Island with little to no ministry schedule or plan. We call on the Holy Spirit to guide us and give us ideas and open doors for us and then we run with it. God had amazing plans for us these past 2 months, things we couldn’t have imagined. So many friendships were built with people of all ages and out of those relationships a lot of trust was built because they know that we are simply there to love them and to show them Gods truth. In Gambell we had 40 kids show up at our door everyday for the first week of kids ministry time for about 2 hours after school, they just crave the love that is offered. The youth were the ones that wanted to hang out and hear about how God really is real and active and how He does move in power and wash away our sins and heals our hearts and gives us courage to walk with Him. They always wanted to be with us, as it is quite refreshing for them to be in a positive environment. I am always humbled to be able to help the elders of the church run the services and also to be able to pray and encourage each other as we walk together in bringing Jesus to a lost generation that is looking for its identity.

Honestly there are snares of the enemy that seek to destroy each and everyone, no one is exempt. Most of these traps are really just small lies that entrap minds and hearts to keep us in shame, guilt, or fear. During our nightly worship and bible study in Savoonga (the second village we went to) I really got to see the truth battle those lies. As some of the youth were picking up the bible and reading things for themselves for the first time, whether they were reading that they were fearfully and wonderfully made, or that there is no condemnation for those who are in Jesus, or that Jesus came to bring deliverance from sin it really delighted my heart to see lights go off in their minds and the utterance of there mouth declaring the truths that God had revealed to them through the Word.

Both villages have a population of about 750 each, they are isolated in the far north west. Alcohol, suicide, depression, sexual abuse, addictions are things that effect every single person whether first hand or second hand. Suicide and abuse have caused severe trauma that wars against the minds and hearts trying to drag down the value of life in which Jesus established on the cross. The battle rages, we are in a fight together as followers of Christ to encourage and pray for these people, and for others like them all around the world. We saw about 40 people give there lives to Jesus during our 2 month trip, but there were countless others who were encouraged and prayed with through the many struggles and trials that they are faced with every day, many received courage to face the battle, others were healed in their hearts, bodies, and minds. The work is not finished though so keep praying for them to press on towards the goal and also for those who are walking in

darkness heading towards destruction.

In the beginning of July we are trying to get a group of youth from st. lawrence to join us in homer for a mini DTS as they are really looking for a deeper time of learning, we are praying and pooling together money to offer scholarships as it is quite a challenge for most to get airfare off the island.

Sincerely

Chad Reimer

st. lawrence update

2011-05-02T22:37:00.003-05:00

we have been in savoonga for just over a week now after 3 weeks in gambell. in gambell we saw alot of open doors, we got to be a comfort to a family that i had been in contact with for 2 years as one of them passed away, people turning to jesus for comfort and hope, we worked alot with the youth, connected people together to be support to each other and we saw many youth touched by God and many more re commitments than we know and 3 lives given to Jesus. 2 of the dts students made open doors by helping with landing 2 whales and working on butchering them along side the people many of whom thought christians were wimps who could do physical work. that is gambell in really short.

savoonga has been incredible so far, about 36 people have given there lives to Christ or re committed their lives in just a week through some of our evangelistic services. so be praying, satan wants to steal the seed so he doesnt want them to be connected to the church, he wants them to lack understanding of the kingdom of God so be praying that they really open their hearts to the truth.

God has amazing plans, we have been working with the kids and youth alot mostly because they dont mind coming to church as much. pray for strategy to get others to church, to be fed by God, from the Word.
i am doing good, it is really alot of work being in charge of a outreach, i finally got some of my duties delegated to the other staff. its always been hard for me to delegate. but God is good. we have all been struggling with some sickness, i recently have been fighting a fever and ear aches. so continue to pray for our health.

today my heart really broke for these people, i dont know if it had to do with fasting yesterday, or seeing the ways of the world creep in to attack people we know. i am tired of seeing people living defeated but i know that all i can do is continue to love them and present Jesus and Jesus crucified and Jesus resurrected.

Rom 12:1 I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.
Rom 12:2 Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.

my heart is tired of seeing the ways of the enemy. So through Jesus: i want to preach transformation. i want to preach saving grace. i want to preach the righteousness that comes through faith and not by works.

chad

march update

2011-04-02T15:19:00.002-05:00

Chad Reimer YWAM Arctic Mercy March 20^th, 2011

James 1: 2-4 Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds,

for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness.

And let steadfastness have its full effect, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing.

There is something special about working out your salvation daily knowing very well that Jesus is in you and you are in Him, knowing that the cross and empty grave mean that the battle is over in a sense but still looking to Jesus every morning and telling Him “ I need You”.

Jesus and His redemptive work on the cross mean so much more than we give Him credit for sometimes, God has redeemed so He can have fellowship and communion with us on so many levels. But As I work in village ministry, as I work in the lives of our Discipleship training school students, and as I work out my own salvation I have to remind myself that just because we are fully redeemed by the grace of God that we still have to let Him sanctify and complete His work in us. These past few month I have seen God do a might work in the lives of the students here. This week the speaker has really hit what I think the heart of the DTS really is. It would be fair to say that the students have all experienced God a lot in these past few months, one of our students was healed from dyslexia another student received her peripheral vision. They have been hearing Gods voice/ prompting in community outreach, in our intercession times, in their quite times, and in our latest village outreach to Ouzinkie which I will share about later. They have been experiencing financial blessings pouring in to cover their outreach costs, they have experienced the peace and joy of the Holy Spirit. But what the speaker this week is saying and what we have been saying this whole time” we care more about you being more in love with God when you are 80 than you are now”. With a greater spiritual knowledge and a stronger identity in Christ these students look at what is ahead of them with a great responsibility. will their faith be tested? guaranteed, will perseverance through trials and testings bring them closer to God? yes. We want Truth to dictate experience not the other way around.

We are preparing to go on our main outreach to St. Lawrence Island Alaska for which I am the primary leader with 2 other staff and 7 students. We leave on April 4^th for 7 weeks to spend 3 weeks in Gambell and 4 weeks in Savoonga. As we go we want to walk humbly before God loving mercy, for God sees our broken hearts and we are made complete in His love and as we walk with the many people we are in relationship with on the Island we have to walk knowing that Jesus has plans and purposes and has such a great love for these elders, these middle age, these youth, and these kids. We face a lot of spiritual warfare because of our stand to be led by the Spirit trusting in the word of God and sharing His truth. Prayer ministry and really a lot of getting involved in the community, showing them the mercy and kindness of God so that they will turn to the Living waters of God and away from broken cisterns. Im really excited because God is sharing with us the things that are on His heart for His people, good news for the poor, healing for the brokenhearted, liberty for the captives, and release for prisoners. I pray that we see the fruit of the Resurrection power that was promised to those who believe Jesus, the power to love purely and to live free.

We spent 2 weeks at the beginning of march in a village just north of Kodiak island called Ouzinkie ( U- zinc -E) working on a mission house run by kodiak baptist mission, we got to minister to quite a few young people and encourage some of the teachers, elders and the russian orthodox reader. Most of our work was physical renovation(mudding, texturing, painting, tiling, etc.) with a side of spiritual transformation. The DTS leader Kevin who is also a father of 4 kids got to really impact one girl by continually speaking truth of an amazing Father in heaven over her as she has been broken by so much death, especially the death of her father. Continue to pray for transformation for the many hearts seeking it in Ouzinkie.

THANK YOU FOR YOUR PRAYERS AND SUPPORT.

Contact me for more info on supporting or praying for me.

Grace and peace

chad reimer cell(will be out of cell range from april 4- may 20) - 907-299-6255

box 959 homer, ak 99603

chad.reimer@gmail.com

meant to post this a while ago

2011-03-16T20:25:00.000-05:00

January 17^th/ 2011 Chad Reimer- YWAM Arctic Mercy

Two Thousand and Ten was quite a year! The Sovereign One did a lot through us this year, despite our short comings He used our faith in many places. When one turns to the gracious Lord He is faithful and I praise Him for that. If I had to sum up 2010 in short I would say it was not what I expected when I signed up for it. From living in the tent cities of Haiti to some of the most remote villages of Alaska; From speaking to crowds of Haitians to visiting shut in elders of northern villages in Alaska; From handing out 100lb bags of rice and beans to handing out free hot coffee to street people during the Vancouver Olympics. Not only do outreaches like these reach the people whom the are serving but also the very heart of the person whom is serving. I have learned that 1. Dive deep into the word of God daily for His word sustains us through thick and thin , 2. that God even uses our mistakes to bring us closer to Himself, and 3. experience is a great teacher(either teaches us what not to do or shows us the very truths of God).

Two Thousand and Eleven is looking like another year of great responsibility. Currently I am looking forward only until June due to my 6 month visa running out then. We are running our winter DTS (discipleship training school) and we have 8 students from all over North America and from Switzerland. Responsibility is something God is teaching me in many new ways. In the past few weeks a lot has happened: 8 people have arrived and (with staff constantly praying) have become great friends, week one of everything (classes, intercession, worship, community outreach, work duties, etc.), staff and students sharing testimonies bearing the deepest hurts and hopes of our hearts with each other. I have a busy schedule but the great part of the busy schedule is that it includes taking half an hour every morning reading the Bible and praying alone. Some of my major responsibilities include; maintenance man (making sure that everything is clean and working in this 70 year old building, making sure the snow is shoveled, and maintaining our vehicles is the majority of the job so far), I'm the cook for 5 meals every week (10 meals every 3^rd week), community outreach leader(coordinating with various venues including pregnancy centers, long term care homes, local churches, youth centers etc. . Also teaching the students about evangelism and local needs.), DTS staff (doing one on ones, leading small group, leading worship/ prayer, being the go to guy for all the students). Our main DTS outreach is April and May to St. Lawrence Island, but I will go more in detail about that next letter. God Bless

Zep 3:17 The LORD your God is in your midst, a mighty one who will save; he will rejoice over you with gladness; he will quiet you by his love; he will exult over you with loud singing.

Chad Reimer CELL 907. 299. 6255

3838 bartlett st.
homer AK 99603
chad.reimer@gmail.com

the throne of your heart

2011-01-24T22:20:00.002-06:00

I need to utilize my Monday evenings as they are pretty much the only alone time I have all week and by alone time I mean all alone. I would say I'm a introvert and really need this alone time, so instead of going with the students to a local seminar on hearing the voice of God I am taking this time to get some much needed stuff done, and tending to my neglected blog.

I need to extrovert my introvert thoughts in order to really be able to grasp this stuff, so here is some of my processing from the past couple weeks.

Who/ What is on the throne of your heart?

in some cultures the heart means nothing in analogy. Maybe in the lack of knowledge of the importance of a heart, but the liver in some cultures is the core of their existence. The bible talks about the heart alot in the english but in the hebrew( and greek) it is the center. our will, emotions, and intellect.

So who/ what is the king of your will, emotions, and intellect?
(Mar 12:29 Jesus answered, "The most important is, 'Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one.
Mar 12:30 And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.'
Mar 12:31 The second is this: 'You shall love your neighbor as yourself.' There is no other commandment greater than these." )

Why is it so hard even as a Christian to keep my self off that throne?
I find a few things at work here.
the old self (the sinful self) who we seem to constantly be in tension with seems to have not gotten the message that we are living sacrifices to Jesus our saviour and likes to continue to make us stumble.
Humans have a hard time letting go of control. maybe we have been hurt by others and have a hard time trusting in a authority that we cant control. we dont want to be dependent on something we cant physically stand on..

What evil in this world does not directly have to do with people putting the wrong thing on the throne of their hearts?(Mat 15:18 But what comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart, and this defiles a person.
Mat 15:19 For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false witness, slander.)

take a step back and think of all the things that make you angry. rape, murder, lying, people not valuing each other, people not valuing God.

think of Hitler. why did he do it? was he just a little boy who was beaten by his father and suffered the loss of his young brother and mother at a young age. having hurt on the throne of his heart, Hurt that wasnt taken to Jesus. roots of unforgiveness, bitterness, hatred create a tree with fruit of death.

I pray so much for those today who experience such loss and pain. i am not saying that its as easy as waving your Jesus wand and walla all your hurts are gone. but God is good and he walks through it with you. john 11:35 Jesus wept. He told His disciples before they even got the news that lazarus was dead but that he would wake up, why does he still weep.

where do we find strength?
Genesis 4
Cain had "prosperity" even after he was cursed to wander and lost his ability to work the land. He built a city around himself with some of the first recorded musicians, blacksmiths, tent makers, and cattle herders. they didn't find the peace that adam and eve had in the garden.

how often do we try to find our strength in the box that we have put christianity in. describing what it means to be a christian we pull out a list of rules because they are black and white enough for us to grasp. where is our faith? Heb 11:4 By faith Abel offered to God a more acceptable sacrifice than Cain, through which he was commended as righteous, God commending him by accepting his gifts. And through his faith, though he died, he still speaks.

do we by faith Give Jesus His rightful place on our hearts, letting Him wash away any guilt, letting Him speak to us, letting Him wash our wounds.
Zep 3:17 The LORD your God is in your midst, a mighty one who will save; he will rejoice over you with gladness; he will quiet you by his love; he will exult over you with loud singing.

remember you were bought with a price
1Co 6:19 Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God? You are not your own,
1Co 6:20 for you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body.

The Holy Spirit is what creates good fruit.
Gal 5:22 But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness,
Gal 5:23 gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law.
Gal 5:24 And those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires.

I want to have Jesus on the throne of my existence. He has judged me with mercy, God is love its not just something He does it is Him. Who doesnt want that in their heart, my prayer is like David's Psa 139:23 Search me, O God, and know my heart! Try me and know my thoughts!
Psa 139:24 And see if there be any grievous way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting!

just some thoughts from the past few weeks

chad

winnipeg

2010-12-02T16:26:00.003-06:00

hey so here i am in winnipeg and have been for 2 and half weeks now. its been a while since i have posted anything not that i havent had anything to say but, well i dont have any reasons that feel good enough to have not posted anything in long time. been working through or at least trying to work through some of my life's big questions. feeling like im at the bottom again, at a new level of awareness that brings me down to the core of my existance. but really struggling with giving it all to God, dont know where to start with breaking down this wall. wanting to give life instead of just preserving life, trying not to fear courage.

more to come...

the great northwest

2010-10-19T23:14:00.004-05:00

Well just wanting to update you all on this time up north to St. Lawrence island.

we got in to the first village called savoonga on the 30th of september, me and 2 other YWAM alaska staff. We came with no real agenda, no programs, no set schedule. most of the places we intended to do our "out outreach" never ended up being open, young adults usually have to main hangouts, the gym(they have open gym during the nights normally but due to some major vandalism problems gym was not open) and the teen center ( a teen hangout that sometimes is open, i think run by parents or the suicide prevention team) was also closed. so we ended up keeping our time there pretty low key. Kids will flock to the church at the sound of a open door, and we got to pour into a solid group of more of the "outcasts" the kids mostly from the old housing who werent into sports. it hurts me to see some of these kids with as deep of pain as they have. i dont even like to mention the "sexual abuse rate" partly because i dont know how accurate it is and partly because it hurts my heart but the number that was on the poster was 1 in 3 girls and 1 in 5 boys and 88% arent reported. savoonga is where i heard the story of how the island once had a population estimated at 10 000 (which i find hard to believe) to 300 in one year and the power of what one man can have( hopefully my version is somewhat right). one fur trader sailed around the coast of the island trading alcohol for the first time to the siberian yupik eskimos and lots of it so much that they men were out of commission for long enough to fail to hunt in the ever crucial period right before winter. famine and having sold most of the furs proved a deadly combination.
our time in savoonga with the younger adults was very interesting, different from anything before. staying up until 5 in the morning starting worship sessions at 3 in the morning, praying for people, building friendships, calling people towards living Jesus centered lives. there were 3 funerals in the 2 weeks that we were there one young girl 1 and a half years old and a young boy 5 years old and a older man. so being there to pray and even feebly try to comfort not that i gave pat answers, but being there for a few of the family members whom i was friends with previously.

then we went to gambell which is the other village on the island and we have had a great time here so far, we added some maturity and some immaturity haha onto our team a married couple and their 2 young kids and have been more scheduled but in a good way. almost all the people we have come in contact with have seemed really hungry for God there are only a few houses that people did not want prayer at and the youth are asking for prayer, they are asking to worship, they are asking about what happens when we do bad things. there has been alot of opportunities to speak truth. we had a youth group last night where we shared a few testimonies, worshiped and watched a movie called "to save a life" and discussed it. had many meaningful conversations and moments with kids and teens of all ages because we got bombarded with 10 year olds at like midnight, they have until friday off of school and so it has been weird having people show up right as we are trying to wrap things up and quickly changing our game plan to be open to ministering in any way almost anytime. for the most part i have been impressed with the respect youth and kids have for us even though things are shifting towards children being loud and out of control. keep these villages in your prayers and Kevin Smith the pastor of the baptist church in savoonga whom we got to spend some time with and all the other people who serve so faithfully in and out of the church.

our team is doing pretty good, some minor tensions.
and i am doing good, it is a interesting feeling to have your heart broken and yet mended almost at the same time in some situations. we are in a battle, there is so much that i could share ontop of this.

God is good.

chad

St. Lawrence Island

2010-09-29T15:31:00.002-05:00

well today i start my journey back up to St. Lawrence Island on a outreach trip. the first and only time i was up there was about a year and a half ago and thats what broke my heart for missions and for the native people of north america.

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=st.+lawrence+island&sll=37.0625,-95.677068&sspn=30.130288,86.572266&ie=UTF8&hq=&hnear=St+Lawrence+Island&z=5

this marks the 4th anniversary of the first YWAM trip up there, in which time alot of seeds and alot of relationships have grown, we are seeing fruit. Not to say that things are going to be easy or fun all the time, I plan on having my heart broken for these people, i plan on crying, i plan on laughing and experiencing joy too but i will intercede in sorrow with God. God has been so faithful to us and we are looking forward to seeing breakthrough on this island. there are beautiful people with value and they need to understand Gods love through that as much as i need to understand that.
we are going to be there for 5 weeks and there are a total of 5 adults and 2 children on our team, but we always look forward to seeing who in the community partners up with our ministries because we always seem to be facilitating that. We tend to focus more on relationships outside and also inside the church walls, going to the teen center, the gym, dances, to homes, basketball courts really striving to be with the people, and on top of that to build up the church as a encouraging non judgmental place of refugee. this is really vague description of our ministry here, but our ministry has looked so different at times. we have run bible study, kids church, worship nights, church services, youth group, pretty much anything "church related" at times, we have gone into the school and help with tutoring, we have done dramas in the school with a suicide prevention message. and ther is so much more. we have open doors to do alot of stuff and so be in prayer for us, we want to be obedient to God in doing what Hes wanting accomplished.

sorry i have to go without giving much more information but we are leaving to go to anchorage right now haha

pray for us ill give you a update soon hopefully

chad

influence

2010-09-19T00:29:00.000-05:00

So I'm sorry I'm such a bad blogger.

So I am back in Homer, Alaska after a simply awesome trip back home sitting in what used to be called " the dungeon" but now is our quite lovely hangout area. I'm here because I don't get internet here and I really want to just sit and not be distracted by various "social networks".

But there are some ideas that have been on my heart recently to put down on paper, to speak out, to express. These ideas have to do with the principles of influence, the cold hard truth of our effect on our surroundings. its been told to me that every thought/ action has a consequence(consequence doesn't necessarily mean bad but just cause and effect) and the importance of a biblical world view/ how you view yourself grows exponentially with that statement.

what do we let influence us?

Funny story that's going around town is this: its about a family that has been in homer since the early days so a few generations. So there is this young lady who is hosting a dinner party, she has prepared it all from scratch and the smell of ham wafts through the house, the finished ham completes the table as the guests are seated the lid comes off and there is the ham with both ends chopped off. one guest ponders out loud what the rest of them are thinking " why are the ends chopped off?" the host responds "I don't know, its the way my Mom did it" so later she calls her mom and asks "why do we cut the ends off of our hams?" her Mom responds " I don't know, its the way my mom did it" so she calls her Mom with the same question and she responds " we only had one pan and it wasn't big enough for the whole ham". Now in the grand scheme of things that little tradition of cutting the ends off of the ham wasn't life threatening. Truth is that there are a lot of influences other than our parents but our parents/ family teach us a lot about how to relate to each other, our society, and God.

What goes in must come out is a statement that I've been wrestling with, it seems like in most cases you do what you have been taught, what you have seen. If your environment is full of sex, booze, drugs, despair, darkness, hopelessness, abuse, etc. that's what gets passed on to you. Dont for a second think this only applies to the north end, or to places far away from you. Gods has power that can protect kids from such hopelessness but believe me its not easy, even ministering to this next generation of kids I believe needs to be done multi generational, if we can get whole households to cling to the light then we have that family dynamic that God so desperately wants.

*sorry little soapbox but im tired of purity being traded for a laugh*
what are you influenced by: tv shows, music, the word of God. now this is where i have to try to not be legalistic in my heart, for i know that it is what comes out of a mans heart that determines many things but what shows do you watch and enjoy, what has our simple ignorance allowed in. two and a half men? a show where we laugh at a sex addict and his negative influence on his nephew. how many of the shows( i could make a long list of sex driven shows) we watch today are complete filth but oh hey they make me laugh. dont get me wrong, Jesus loves the sex addict, but numbing ourselves to such low standards of finding humour in it doesnt exactly transform us into being Christ like.

so to be transform and to help those around me seek the same transformation i need to be rooted in love, self discipline, and power. we can be a influence to this generation, we can start by choosing life over death, by choosing eternal love over temporary pleasure. things seem to always go back to basic love God with everything! and love your neighbor as yourself. i still cringe when i hear the word everything, what does achieving that look like, all i can hope is that im being peeled away into this full time everything mode, Holy Spirit have your way. Love your neighbor as yourself doesnt work as well when you dont see yourself the way God see's you(which brings you back to the consequences of our thoughts), you are to value others with intense passion but it is important to embrace the way of patience and timing.

who is my neighbor? who can i influence?

I am telling you there is a big world out there, with many people. Do not be ignorant to the need of the gospel in all nations. We need to start in our homes, most of the time we need to seek forgiveness with our family members, we need to move on, lay down our pride, work on our personal places. But if you want to be passionate, there are many "issues" that are crying out for passionate people, what are you willing to sacrifice to reach out. if you want people to pray for there are alot of them, i want you to think of the sex trade slaves, the inner city, the reserves, the addicts, the orphan children, the child soldiers, the persecuted church, your neighbor down the street to your neighbor across the world.

who can you influence, be faithful in the small. when i started thinking of facebook as a tool to reach out(believe me im still trying to learn how to not make everything about me) I started seeing fruit. I have up to 40 friends online at the same time, all with different life stories, from different places. sometimes someone just needs a little bit of encouragement to not drown in a bottle tonight, a friend needs to know that im praying for her, a old friend sees something different in me and asks me what it is, reconciliation to someone who i had been a jerk to in grade 6. encouragement, prayer, and the power of testimony go a long way.

this past week i was across the bay in a village named Seldovia population 307, we were a part of a school assembly, 2 workshops (suicide prevention) (bullying prevention), and a evening assembly. this was a awesome experience for me to get to be a part of someones ministry even when the school time was pretty tame in not using the name Jesus, most of the students came back for the evening to hear the word of hope that is that God has a plan for your life, Jesus died to give you eternity. but at the same time the school assembly had alot of power, one of the illustrations that his me was 20 dollar bill, bill took the bill and threw it on the ground, told the bill it was no good not worth anything, stomped on it, spit on it, put it in his armpit and asked the kids how much it was worth.

let that influence you, in your view of yourself and of others.
every moment is a opportunity
carpe diem
Let God transform you

coming home with the summer

2010-08-17T19:59:00.001-05:00

Chad Reimer - YWAM Arctic Mercy- Homer, AK-
as the fire weed grows 2/8/10

Well time seems to be moving faster than normal, I cant believe I've been out of Winnipeg for 7 months already but I guess only a slim majority of that time has been here in Homer, as I did a fair amount of traveling. The fire weed is blooming here telling us that summer is on its way out(not that we really had a summer anyways), it also tells me that I'm going to be home soon. I am arriving in Winnipeg on August 22^nd until the 31^st and then I am back up in Alaska until late November when I'll have to renew my “visa”. I again want to thank you for all your support and prayers through these hard but good months.

From July 10^th to July 24^th me and a team of 6 others the first week and 14 including 5 kids the second week we were in Ouzinkie, Alaska at a mission house owned by Kodiak Baptist Mission that YWAM Arctic Mercy is partnering to reestablish as a base of village ministry. The house was built in 1938 served at a orphanage, preschool, clinic, church, most of all I think it served as a place to build relationships. The first week was a really intense work week, we put up about 96 sheets of drywall the first 4 days, while doing a little demolition. We muded and taped the next couple days into all hours of the night usually after losing time due to a villager insisting on sharing a meal or fellowship with us, it was all welcome. From listening to a elder talk about how Jesus had met him and his family time and time again, to hearing a young teenage girl cry out in her frustration we experienced many deep heart wrenching conversations. The second week we installed 11 windows, continued with muding and taping, textured primed and painted the kitchen, installed cabinets and counter tops, and finished off some electrical work, installed counter tops at the house of a woman who just lost her brother( he was going to install them but he passed away suddenly). There is something about a old house, something about a weathered community that has put a spark in my heart.

I think this YWAM experience has taught me something about the body of Christ and how it is working. Vancouver during the Olympics, Haiti after such a disaster, even here in Homer in the face of church splits I am finding people willing to humble themselves to their brothers and sisters in the name of Christ. I ask myself why cant this be the normal church, it seems like in the face of disaster or when Christians know the spotlight is on them they can rise up above such pride and be the hands and feet and eyes and mouth etc they were made to be. Its kinda fun looking at different denominations and the different strengths they have, in Haiti I saw this with the 200 plus people from all over the world. Its cool to hear other peoples opinions on Mennonites too, we are notoriously hardworking and steadfast servants.

This past month has been really busy, I have often been working on stuff until the sun was going down which is around 11pm here now. The “projects” on my plate while in Homer have been doing the groundwork for our hockey camp this fall: advertising, website work, researching event sponsorship. Helping pioneer an Adventure DTS slated for spring-summer 2011: researching cost, seeking out the vision, making a promo video, trying to get to a place where we can get a website up. Lately I've been heavily involved with staffing a mini DTS which is a 3 week version of our 3 month lecture phase which has been good, and we just had 30 youth drop in for a couple days who were part of a different missions group called teen mania.

Colossians 3:1-17 have really been my life verses recently, I'm realizing how God doesn't want us to just avoid sin but to actually clothe ourselves with His own qualities.

Thank you,

Chad Reimer

3838 Bartlett st., 99607, AK

http://withgracealone.blogspot.com chad.reimer@gmail.com

ouzinkie blurb

2010-08-05T14:04:00.001-05:00

ouzinkie

2010-07-29T22:11:00.002-05:00

little video of some scenery/ the mission house/ ouzinkie

report to follow

old house

2010-07-28T01:46:00.002-05:00

july 14th 2010

Here I am sitting in a 70 year old house in a small Alaskan village, sipping 35 year old tea, reading white fang while the sun dips just beyond reproach at 11pm. Another day is eloquently coming to a end another day, i just think of all the days that this house has seen. Earthquakes, funerals, weddings, raising up kids while raising up the village's children teaching them to read teaching them to learn, one rooms inscription reads joyce's office/ examination room, wonder what wounds have been stitched, if anybody has died in this house. A house is such a simple thing wood, nails, glass, and various other materials but what makes a house more than just a house, is it simply the age of this house that makes it seems so fascinating to me, or was it the 50 summers, autumns, winters and springs that were lovingly endured in the wild of it all. I ask myself who am I to tear down a 50 year old wall, what right do I have to demolish the past. I try my hardest to soak the house in, but its not really the house that speaks to my searching heart, its the life that was so dedicated to serving a community, so dedicated to Jesus to the nails in his hands and feet, to anointing Jesus's feet with tears and perfume, with a lifetime of service. If you asked me today if i ever wanted to leave this house, i would say “no, never”. I keep on seeing this trip as a perspective changer, maybe ill have afresh way of looking at things, if anything i think it might shift my heart to be completely committed to where I am The people here are different than ive ever experienced before, we arrive at the pier with no plan on loading our gear, our material to bring them to the house, we get a truck and a driver willing to drive for us right aways, guess he didnt have much other road ahead of him as the village only has 3 miles of road. We leave the light on, so if your in the neighbourhood wed love you to come for a visit. Ill have fresh tea on, 30 years old but fresh nonetheless.

just some thoughts

chad

bon voyage

2010-07-10T12:46:00.003-05:00

well as I type the ferry i am on is getting cleaned getting fueled and getting ready for the 9 hour trip to kodiak. long story short these next 2 weeks I am going to be in a village names Ouzinkie doing renovations on a baptist mission house. I am excited to be on this trip as I really do love the villages of alaska, and i know that we will have the opportunity to show that love these next 2 weeks. this past week was a really hard one, but I come out of it with wisdom or at least i hope so. It feels like the boat of my life is still at harbour, getting ready. i pray that grace will be my wind, love will be my sails, trust will be my wheel house, joy will be my galley(the real heart of my boat), and hope will be my gangway.

well i tried posting this like 2 hours ago and we are still sitting here waiting for the boat to be finished loading, so it may relate to my frustrations of life too if my life was a boat, but ill get where im going even if i dont know where that is.

chad

joy comes in the morning (even when you ruin your oatmeal)

2010-07-06T11:24:00.005-05:00

Well I will be honest, I've been very up and down, side to side lately, feeling like I'm being tossed around in a whirlwind of sorrow/ regret and yet a underlying laughter. Summer is slow in coming, my heart isnt as warm as i want it to be. circumstances seem to have kicked me to the floor, well im on my knees now. this past weekend was a long weekend for us due to 4th of July there were some really key parts to this weekend, I got ministered to in a way I hopefully wont forget anytime soon. though a lot of it didn't sink in until yesterday night, God spoke through others that I am like a wall in a good way where i am constantly moving forward as a ground breaker and actually protecting the inhabitants of my heart, and my heart is to serve and to bring joy. the joy of the Lord is my strength, and last but not least that the places where i feel like ive hurt people are going to become new.
earlier last night i didnt believe any of these good things about myself, i felt like the mistakes that ive made have made God angry and that He is rejecting me for my disobedience, that He had lifted His presence off of me and that peace that He offers was too far gone, that i was a wicked man being tossed in the waves of destruction, I turned to the Bible and really it didnt help me much the first reading, to which i asked God why was i feeling such condemnation, a aha moment told me this wasnt God that was making me feel such a weight such hopelessness and believe me this feeling has been building for a while. I simply said "God has accepted me, paid for me with a price, Jesus is my hope and i put my trust in Him" bam heaviness was already being lifted off and in came some valid hope, i felt conviction for a few things that i was feeling condemnation for but i read the same words in the bible and they brought a new understanding.

this morning i woke up at 6am and went down to the beach for about a hour watching the waves, felt joy and peace again, trying to go back to the simple place of abiding in Christ, and seeing circumstances in the eyes of hope and love and those eyes are Christs eyes.
chad

sing it out

2010-06-26T19:26:00.003-05:00

ok so here it is 12:30 am still bright enough outside to see pretty clearly one of the quirky Alaskan things, but i figured i should just bear the lateness and just write a quick something.

so its been like a month since the graduation of our winter DTS which it seems like june went speedy fast, i had half a week of time off which was nice and then we had a short term mission mime team that was passing through town come and stay for a couple days and we helped them help us in a few great service opportunities in town like helping at a desert/ auction fundraiser for 3 couples from around the community who's houses have burnt down recently, where it wasnt necessarily a christian event and the families arent necessarily Christians but people of the church community wanted to bless these people in the midst of their loss. we have been meeting every morning to have a corporate worship ( i havent blogged about it yet but one of my biggest pet peeves is having "worship time" unless you schedule it for 24/7 and stop limiting the word worship to singing) we sing, we pray, we read the bible aloud, and its really been about reconnecting with each other, trying to set our hearts on who God is and how we can serve Him best. and i spent 3 days on a canoe trip which was fun, it was my first trip like that in Alaska. we have been ferociously trying to paint our building, but then we all got really busy with planning stuff that its kinda unfinished at this point, Im glad i graffitied some stuff on the half finished wall.

looking to what is ahead things get pretty busy, we still want to consistently have time in the morning to meet and worship together, but I have alot of projects on the go. for Hockey camp at the beginning of september( one of our major local outreaches) we are starting to try to get sponsors, trying to get raffle stuff together, starting up communication with the rink to finalize some stuff, working on the website updating information, working on getting jerseys, working on advertisement, etc. And next year we want to start a Adventure DTS where pretty much we are trying to embrace challenge as opportunity going out into the wilderness but also to the people/ tourists of the trails. almost every other week we are out in the wilderness doing things like hiking, canoeing, and fishing, and then we have one week of lecture. so we have to do some more ground work, promo video and trying to get stuff together for the website, etc.

so these next months look like this, working on all that stuff^ as i am on both those projects. On july 10th to 24th i am in a small village called ouzinkee doing some more renovation on a mission house, which we have been working on for a few years, and will be glad to see completed so it can serve the purposes it was build for 50 years ago, to bring the love of Jesus to the community. and then we have a Mini DTS from july 28 and then it goes for 3 weeks. and then I come home for a week and a half august 21-31 for Kurtis's wedding, and then return to homer for the Hockey camp sept 9th to the 13th and then hopefuly go up north for a month or so and then we have staff conference in early november and then i have to fly home before november 19th to renew my "visa".

so thats my life, i really would like to update relational news like interactions with people, some of our guests have had a wealth of knowledge and encouragment but i have a meeting in 1 minute so adios. so i didnt finish this the first attemp at 12:30 at night but i fell asleep and finished it this morning.

-chad

Haiti Video

2010-06-20T19:40:00.001-05:00

well i finally made my Haiti Video, so here are some of the things i saw in Haiti

what can I say?

2010-06-18T02:28:00.005-05:00

Well I spent the past 3 days mon-wed on a canoe trip a few hours north of here ill share a little bit about that, but I don't think that's where this post is headed. so we headed up monday bright and early (and actually up here in alaska it is quite bright even when it is early as the sun comes up around 3(im actually not sure how early it comes up but that sounds about right)) and spent 3 days paddling, portaging and camping. We were on a scouting trip for a new DTS (discipleship training school) that is going to be an adventure DTS, so all that hard work of paddling through 23 lakes(16 different lakes), and portaging 5 1/2 miles wasnt just for fun haha. we had a few just awe inspiring moments of peaceful calm, watching a moose swim across a lake, looking at the mountains in the distance on some of the lakes. i feel so blessed to know my Creator who created the beautiful landscapes but made us in His image, we are His best work, hard to believe but we are.

....

I keep on asking myself, what are you doing with your life? measuring and judging the core of my existence, keeping notes on tangible perspective. If you will dare to venture on a trail of analogy, Haiti was HOT: scorching, boiling, ferocious. For me leading a team in Haiti was like a fire, like a test, parts of that test I "failed"( o boy did I fail), parts of that test I passed, and God rejoices in both my passing and my failing because of His sovereignty He chooses to teach through the "failings". I keep on being frustrated with myself and the severe lack of vision, endurance, passion, communication skills, and most of all courage. as i want those things to overflow from my mouth and actions, i want my life to be like the shining stars in phillipians 2, i want to be constantly pouring out and being filled. Alaska is cold: freezing, cool, ice. As i came back from Haiti i really in my heart needed to process all that i could of my Haiti experience before i got to busy to, and ive been doing it, but theres more of a depth i dont know how to get out, mostly because i dont really comprehend alot of it. this life is a journey, I am at the 20 year mark. learning to be brave, wanting to be real, finding humility, holding onto hope. this summer wherever i go, whatever i end up doing, i want to grow from what God has shown me about who He is but also about who He has made me to be. right now we as a YWAM base are in a weird season, its supposed to be a refocus/ rest time with a good mix of local and almost local outreach, and a mini dts in august and thats kinda been the story, but i was really looking for a opportunity to go out and so being a counselor at a camp on kodiak island might be in my plans and if not helping coordinate hockey camp and adventure dts and a 2 week mission house remodeling project on spruce island would fill my time. keep praying for me, i hope to drop something encouraging off soon about specifics of what Gods doing in my life and to share wisdom.

we have a team of of 14 youth here for a couple days and we are facilitating some work projects and evangelism for them and hopefully tomorrow we are going to set up some prayer stations on the spit "free prayer" today we set up/ cleaned up / helped run a auction to help out 3 couples in homer whos houses have burned down recently, i bid 200 on a quilt but didnt get it haha.

well my battery is dying now too
chad

bon bagay (good thing)

2010-06-13T21:44:00.002-05:00

trying just to share some more of the positive things of Haiti and what is getting accomplished. alot of my team had opportunities to help with the prison ministry that one of the staff members at YWAM Haiti started and thats the video I'm going to share with you.

chad

haiti report

2010-06-05T13:47:00.002-05:00

sorry its taken so long for this to get up here, i wanted to at least have a few of the paper copies out there before i did this blog report, so this is my trip to Haiti summed up on a 8 1/2"x 11" sheet of paper.

May 24^th 2010 Haiti report/ summer outreach
Greetings from Chad Reimer in Homer, Alaska

First of all I want to let you know that I thank the Lord for all of you out there who are taking the time to read this and for your prayers and support. God has given out many different roles/ gifts in the work of His Kingdom, and its my prayer that we can see God purposes for our lives and be faithful with them, because we are called to do the work of Jesus. Hebrews 12: 12-13 is a verse that stuck out to me during our outreach.

So April 12^th we(I led a team of 4 students and 3 other staff) went to Haiti not really knowing exactly what our time there was going to look like so we came with a heart to do what ever was needed. We worked with YWAM Haiti in St. Marc (which is about 1 ½ hours from Port Au Prince), St. Marc is a place where the earthquake hit too (but not as severely) and a place where some people(roughly 12,000) from Port Au Prince fled to. YWAM St. Marc has been in Haiti for 20 years so they are firmly established and so when the earthquake happened they were set forth into motion sending out rescue teams, setting up tent cities, taking over a abandoned medical clinic, and distribution of foreign aid among other things. So our time there was split between working at the YWAM base doing things like sorting medical supplies, distributing food, working on building a school, interceding for Haiti through prayer and worship, preparing housing for future house building teams, doing day to day tasks so that Haitian staff could go out and do ministry, etc.

The other half of our time in Haiti was spent out in the field, we lived in a tent city called Parisse for a week and a half with a translator really living life with the people, we were the first team to work with those people and so a lot of our time was spent doing assessment, seeing where they were spiritually, praying for them, really trying to build them up in the faith to help them see hope after such a disaster as a lot of them lost everything they had including family members. In prayer and worship we wanted to show them Gods love, we wanted to show them that God is worth our attention, that He is the rock in whom we should build our house upon. We also worked with the physical needs, we provide the basic needs of food shelter and water but we are working with them to build houses on the same piece of land that the tents are, so they are getting paid to build houses that they will get to move into which will hopefully give them a sense of ownership and so they can see that there is a way to see hope physically also. We spent up in the countryside up the mountain in a area called Guavier, we were measuring land to see how much Coffee was growing up there because we want to create up to 150 jobs by setting up a co- op program and building some sort of processing area so they can export their coffee internationally so that they can get good prices. The rest of our time was spent was planning land for a new tent city, clearing the land with machetes and praying for it also

The spiritual atmosphere of Haiti is a bit confused and that is really represented in the physical. Most will say that they are Christians but practice voodoo and don't really understand what sin is, so pray for a softening of hearts and a fear of the Lord which brings understanding. I don't have exact numbers but I know that in single events hundreds of people came to Christ throughout our time in Haiti and even though my team was more behind the scenes when it comes to typical evangelism souls were won for Christ.

So I just got back here in Homer Alaska after those 6 weeks of outreach and I'm starting to get to look at my summer plans, and so far they are undefined but they have a lot of potential. I will update you more on those plans with my next letter, I'm just happy that I get to focus on Alaska and its people. Thank you for getting behind me and really making this happen, praise the Lord for all He has done in my life.

3838 Bartlett st, Homer, AK, 99603 Chad Reimer
chad.reimer@gmail.com 1-907- 235- 9339

accross the continent

2010-06-01T02:12:00.003-05:00

well its been a week and a half since ive been back in Alaska but this past week has been pretty busy to say the least, im going to share a little story of my trip from Haiti to Alaska and my next post should be a clearer look at what my time in Haiti was like.

so we left Haiti the morning of the 19th of may, starting the night before there was a team from Kona Hawaii that was doing a 24 hours of prayer and worship and so pretty much I decided im not going to go to bed because we are probably going to leave around 4am, so i spent the night in between the prayer room and the main dining hall area reading my bible, so i'm not sure how smart that was but im pretty sure God gave me energy because i really wasnt that tired until the next night. so we left around 5am on our drive to port au prince. it was a beautiful drive on the countryside as the sun was rising, we made it to port au prince, the city really had a different feel from the last time we were there more tents up, seemed more developed in ways, but still looking at the "tents(cardboard, little pieces of tarp, etc.)" that they were living in really gave us a good look at how much longer Haiti is going to be in rebuild. well we got to the airport and we cleared all that, got some of my snacks confiscated, and made the horrible mistake of saying "you too" to the person who checked my bags and then said "enjoy your flight" haha we both had a laugh, i said i meant "have a nice day".

got to Miami almost a hour late, had 40 minutes to clear immigrations and then clear customs and then get to our next plane.so i start going through immigration i get into a relatively short line and proceed to the counter, i tell him i was just in Haiti and now im on my way back to alaska where i was before, i show him my one year entry form(little paper thing on my passport saying i can enter the US for a year), he says it looks good but he doesnt think its the right form for me to enter from Haiti, so he checks and then tells me yes it is infact not the right form and so i should go get the right form and come back and he will have his supervisor and he will stamp it and i can be on my way. so im traveling with a group of 5 others and they all are long gone by this point. so i hurry to fill out a form that looks exactly like my old one. go back to the counter, no supervisor. he hands me all the stuff i filled out and my passport in a red folder and tells me to follow someone to this backroom so i go thinking oh maybe his supervisor is in there ready to stamp my form but no here is a room full of people like 100 people mostly from mexico or cuba. so i proceed to wait and wait and wait, until most of the room was empty there was me and 3 other white people, i'm praying that the rest of my team has left on the next flight after the one we were supposed to be on, and they did. so i wait for 4 1/2 hours at 4 hours they finally talk to me, they give me the usual run down where are you going why are you volunteering ? whos supporting you? how do you survive? are you sure you dont want to go back to canada and find a job instead? they send me back out and then call me back in a little later give me my passport and tell me i can go. so now my passport is a mess they put a wrong stamp on crossed out another one of my stamps and gave me a 6 month form instead of my year which was already almost 5 months used.

so i get through and then down to the re booking desk, they rebook my on a completely different flight path i mean it ends up in the same place but instead of flying to chicago i fly to seattle the next morning and so i was like well im going to have to sleep at the airport by myself (because i found out the rest of my team was on way different flights) but no they were at first just going to give me a discount on a hotel because it really wasnt there fault that i got held up but then i told them that my first flight was a hour late and i dont even know if i could have gotten to it and so they gave me a free hotel room, and after sleeping in a tent with 3 other sweaty smelly guys a huge bed to myself was really nice. so i got a room at the marriot in miami for free and also met like a whole bunch of other guys traveling alone and sitting at restaurants alone, it was cool i met a guy who had been to both alaska and winnipeg and another guy who had just been to winnipeg and who was working on designing earthquake proof windows for Haiti. then the next morning i proceeded on a 6 hour flight across the country and then a 3 hour flight to finally go across the continent and into alaska.
the end

more news soon, hopefuly i can get back into blogging mode and actually keep this more up to date.
God bless

chad

Haiti update

2010-05-01T10:47:00.003-05:00

Bonjour, im not even sure if that is a proper greeting to start a letter off with but what the heck. so I have been in Haiti for 3 and a half weeks now im going to do a little chronological overview of what things we have been doing and really just talk more about Haiti and what Gods doing here.

YWAM Haiti has 2 bases one in Port Au prince and one in Port St. Marc and so I am in Port St. Marc which is about 2 hours away, so what has happened is that some people have fled from Port Au Prince because of fear of another earthquake or with other reason, initial reports were that 25000 people made the move but that number is probably significantly lower more around 15000 refugees, some people have family in port st marc but we (YWAM) have 3 tent cities that we work in. YWAM from what I've seen has been given responsibility of relief in port st. marc from the UN and other organizations.

so the first day we arrived in Haiti it was like one moment we were in America and the next moment we were somewhere completely different, a little bit of culture shock, alot of temperature shock. We arrived in Haiti spent like half a hour looking for our bags, its a little bit of a mess looking for them, spent like 4 hours in port au prince at a orphanage while our driver ran errands, got to have a first hand experience of the children of Haiti. we rode in the back of a mini truck (can't remember what brand) 7 people and our bags, the hour and a half to port st. marc going 100km a hour on the highway navigating our way through traffic of cars, scooters, piles of rubble, semis, farm animals, etc.. Got into port st. marc, set up our tents, at the base there (a gated walled base that doesnt even really feel like Haiti other than the heat) got a little settled, found out the sun goes down at like 6pm and then the following morning found out it rises at like 4am and gets so hot by 5:30am that you dont mind having breakfast at 6:30am. The next day we started working, started with doing some stuff for the base by going to the dump to shovel the trash off the trailer (there were people at the dump going through our trash, made me realize what i take for granted). now I'm just going to do a general overview of what we did the next week and a half but we helped in the process of building a school by working to level off the floors to be ready to pour concrete, helped prepare the base for the people who are going to be coming soon to work on house projects by preparing the housing for them, did alot of sorting( of medical supplies, etc.), the UN sends us food to distribute so we give it out to pastors to hand out , we spent a day in a refugee camp (tent city) pouring concrete posts for a foundation to be built on/ assessing (finding out what the people need/ where they came from/ what there plans are), alot of preparing ourselves for our our actual time of living in a tent city. me as a leader trying to develop a team to be ready to be in the physical but also very spiritually draining place, working through some trust issues, we also spent some of our afternoons learning more about how to develop a community opposed to just giving them all they need for a short time and making them feel like we will be there forever to give them all they need (physically) and really developing (spiritually/ physically).

this past week we were in a tent city in a pace called parisee all week, we really were there to work with the people, really have alot of relationship with them, create part time jobs, try to assess whether or not they know how to budget, worshiping God with them, even being in charge of day to day happenings of the camp. really immersing ourselves. this was the initial week of assessing more so and next time we are going to be more goal orientated. we do give most of the adults jobs 3-4 days a week working to start building houses, alot of manual labour, digging dirt and filling foundations that have been partly built, and then making concrete pads ontop of that and I was overseeing that project this week. really trying to tell them the reality is that we wont be able to feed you cloth you build you a house, but we will try to teach you how to. give a man a fish he eats for a day teach a man to fish and he eats for a lifetime. progress was had, we made a lot of first steps towards rebuilding the hearts of the people.

pray for us as we battle what the devil is trying to do by making the people live in fear of voodoo.
pray for us to proclaim the truth as 80% of the country claims christianity and 60% of the country claims voodoo, God is not happy with the mix of His name and the imitation power of the devil.
pray for strength and encouragement for our team as we work in a very hard environment.

pray

thankyou
chad

Haiti

2010-03-19T18:12:00.001-05:00

Grace and peace from Chad Reimer in Alaska March 20/ 2010

-Well I'm still here in Homer, Alaska for about 2 more weeks preparing our team for our outreach. The first week of our 2 month outreach we are spending on a Island village just south of us called Ouzinkee where YWAM Arctic Mercy has done a fair bit of work both relational and construction so we will be continuing that by doing some major renovations to the Baptist mission there.

-From there we will be going down to Haiti for 6 weeks, we will be a part of this stage in between the first stage of basic survival and the second stage of rebuilding so I am sure we will be a part of the humanitarian relief but also part of the spiritual, physical, relational, emotional rebuild. We are joining Youth With A Mission Haiti as they have been there for years and have doing doing extensive relief already. I am co- leading this team of 8 people; the 4 students, 2 former staff, and me and my co leader, and so I am in charge of purchasing the tents and other basic living gear, and preparing the team for this service of Gods kingdom, among other things right now. Some of the projects YWAM Haiti are involved in are; the rebuild of the Haitian church, Adopt a community (where we serve a community in what ever way it needs; food, erecting tents, rebuilding houses, spiritual needs, water management).

YWAM Arctic Mercy is dedicated to bringing the Mercy of Christ to the nations, we are first and foremost dedicated to Alaska, we just sent a team of staff back up to St. Lawrence Island yesterday for 2 months, we are seeing incredible fruit coming from our commitment to persevere in some of these northern villages. Thank you for your prayers and support, it means a lot to me to know people are behind me so don't be scared to contact me, just to say a simple I'm praying for you.

There are a few different ways you can invest into our outreach.

we have to purchase 2 tents that are going to cost about $250 each.

if you have American airlines airmiles that you want to donate.

this trip is ending up costing $2750 due to high travel costs, I have paid off most of it already.

If you want to even support one of our students who is in more need of money than me.

You can also help simply by prayer and praise.

First of all praise the Lord for:

He makes all things possible
His love goes before us and follows behind us

He is constantly praying for us
He is sending us to be His hands and feet in this time of need
He is sovereign
the battle belongs to Him

And then pray for this team
that we will be the first to volunteer and be servants of all
that God will protect us in our time of need
that God would use us in spiritually rebuilding this country for His purposes
that we will be obedient to following what God has for us to do each day
for me as the leader, trying to maintain what God has built in this team
for deep wisdom beyond my years that only can come from walking with God

Chad Reimer chad.reimer@gmail.com 1-907- 235- 9339 (feel free to leave a message)

to support me/us financially you can contact my parents (Klaas and Helen) or go to http://www.ywam.ca/donations/index.php ( send cheques to YWAM to the address given with a note on

it saying Chad Reimer YWAM Arctic Mercy)

revised letter =]

2010-03-15T01:04:00.001-05:00

A big hello from Homer Alaska March 10/2010
Wow the first two months have just flown by, the first month spent in Homer, Alaska being thrusted into leadership, being lovingly stretched into responsibility, and the second month which started in Homer and ended in Homer that had 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, We are going to Haiti, and I am co- leading the team of 8 people. The YWAM base in Haiti has called out for help because there is so much to do involved in rebuilding and just basic survival for these people, I'm going to be sending out a mini update in a couple weeks to update a little more specifically. We normally have our main outreaches in Alaska, but since we have a student from the town in Alaska that we normally do it and we have to give a cross cultural outreach we started searching for something else and Haiti came up. There is a team of staff going up to the Island up north that we normally go, so I feel at peace about it.

That's 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

http://withgracealone.blogspot.com

For more info on Financially supporting me http://www.ywamcanada.org/donations.html

write a note that says Chad Reimer YWAM Arctic Mercy with any cheques

update letter to be revised with more outreach info

2010-03-04T00:35:00.002-06:00

A big hello from Alaska

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

hearing the Lord

2010-02-28T22:14:00.003-06:00

check out my new blog too

God has speaking to me lots about writing about something i see as crucial in my relationship with Him, hearing Him and more important listening to Him.

My sheep listen to my voice; I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish; no one can snatch them out of my hand. John 10: 27-28

If we are followers of Christ we listen to Him, we hear His voice and are obedient. The Holy Spirit is our direct line to Jesus who is our direct line to Father

Sometimes I struggle with hearing God, sometimes I think I'm completely missing it. I get down on myself because I talk to God and sometimes the answer doesn't seem tangible.

God speaks in silence
1. sometime we cant hear God because we are too loud ourselves, or not willing to sacrifice our precious me time to pray and silence ourselves, ready ourselves to hear.

2. When he doesn't seem to respond sometimes its because He wants us to learn through the bible, because He has given us a lot of answers, if we were disciplined enough to study it and ask God for wisdom and revelation (Ephesians 1:17-19)

3. sometimes we are just in the desert, its not a bad thing.(matthew 3:16- 4:11) Jesus was in the desert, he was driven out there by the Holy Spirit right after Holy Spirit descended on Jesus like a dove and the Father said this is my Son whom I am well pleased. we often panic when we are in the dry places, but its so important to trust God in this place because this is when the devil will try to tempt us to fall away from Christ.

God wants us to be sold out! willing to hear His voice, willing to learn in ways that may seem "foolish"!

1. sometimes God tells me to stand up and then 5 seconds later tells me to sit down. He has given me one dream and then given me a completely different dream. and told me this one is for now and this one is long term " be willing to bend to hear my voice".

2. be willing to hear "I Love you" simply said be willing to hear what is biblically true if you hear " I would like you to help that poor person" do it and hearing can be a feeling you get it doesnt have to be a audible voice haha or it can be that quite voice that it usually is for me. and then even right after hearing " i love you" be willing to be corrected God corrects those He loves, if you have sin that you haven't confessed sometimes God puts it on your mind but sometimes He speaks through silence at this time especially when it comes to direction or ministry, He wants us to sort it out before we go any further.

3. Even Jesus heard satans voice. We are not immune to hearing demons voices. if anything that is being said to you is condemning, not said out of love rebuke it don't tolerate or entertain such thoughts. God loves you, you are found worthy in His sight. God brings conviction of sin God will specifically point things out. Satan loves to accuse, bring condemnation on you don't mix the two. use scripture to rebuke the devil, but most importantly be willing to believe what God has said for you, confess sin if you need but find freedom through Jesus dont let satan accuse you.

live the Bible out God is a teacher let Him teach you

Isaiah 61
1 The Spirit of the Sovereign LORD is on me,
because the LORD has anointed me
to preach good news to the poor.
He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted,
to proclaim freedom for the captives
and release from darkness for the prisoners, to proclaim the year of the LORD's favor
and the day of vengeance of our God,
to comfort all who mourn

God is love, so walking with the spirit of God means that we are love, dont harden your hearts to showing love to your enemies. be quick to forgive. carry your cross. proclaim Gods love fearlessly. dont let anything get in between you and God. it may block his voice. He is quick to extend his arm, to those in need.

ask Him questions, nothing is too little. be willing to read His answer. seek Him out. be willing to hear His answer. quite yourself. dont worry, dont control. know that He loves you and has hope for you. He wants to be intimate with you. dance with the trinity.

this is in short what God has been teaching me lately, any opinions, any advise, anything you think i completely missed. i want to hear from you, because God speaks through people.

I think this is part one I might revisit this soon. focusing on fear of the Lord, false humility, love language, and might even get into prophecy.

-chad

additional blog

2010-02-28T18:29:00.002-06:00

I have made a new blog as a creative solution for me to Blog more.

http://facethewestsayhello.blogspot.com/

titled three interesting things
hopefully it can refresh my love for writing, give me the ability to make both blogs what i want them to be.

grace and peace.

ambitious

2010-02-28T03:06:00.002-06:00

I'm thinking about starting a new Blog with a different focus because i think what i really am needing is something more creative, more interesting, shorter posts. different perspective on life. it will be called 3 interesting things( im thinking i might spice the title up a bit) and it will be daily or at least 5 a week. it will consist of 1 picture, one bible verse, and one thought provoking question or quote, or maybe it will just be a loose three interesting things. another ambitious thing in my life is that i want to become a morning person, usually i feel like i over sleep, or at least i know if i get less sleep it doesnt really effect me. so i want to wake up at 6 on weekdays get an exrended quite time in the morning as half an hour doesnt seem long enough.
i hope you eagerly expect my first 3 interesting things

i like how my ambition comes at 12am
chad

olympics so far

2010-02-16T13:39:00.002-06:00

well i have been in Vancouver for a week now arriving here last Tuesday, It has been incredible and yet quite overwhelming.

so the organization More than gold really felt the mandate to join with existing ministries and so we are doing alot of work with salvation army and other more independent ministries one of them being something called the great room on the down town east side on w hastings which is a place where women can go to learn skills to dare to dream of a life other than street life. i cant begin to describe the place here is a website that might explain more http://linwoodhouseministries.typepad.com/ . The work we are doing with salvation army is diverse but mostly we are offering radical hospitality by handing out hot chocolate and coffee at alot of main skylink stations. but yesterday i spent 5 hours turning old bed sheets into rags because they had a abundance of sheets and they wanted to sell the rags to mechanic shops around town to raise funds so they can do more outreach.

and the other days have been pretty awesome one day we had prayer station which was us standing in a fairly busy sky train station and wearing a smock that says prayer changes things and a little sign saying free prayer. standing boldly giving people eye contact not there with any agenda other than to offer prayer to those who ask. we got to pray for quite a few christians but alot of people looked at us and i could see how intently they were reading, some of them seemed to not have the opportunity to stop and so we prayed for them without them. and we have also done quite a bit of work with a free concert series here in vancouver put on by a group of christians with a huge list of artists so we hit the streets handing out information about it.

my internet is getting shoddy so im going to have to put this blog out now
keep us in prayer
today we are handing out hot chocolate

-chad

update letter short version

2010-02-08T01:20:00.002-06:00

well i am currently writing a update letter to update alot about what I'm up to but ill point form it just so i can not worry about blogging too much.

first of all God is really good, how hes alive and well around the world even though alot of what we concentrate on is that bad stuff He is at work, and at work in us(that means you)

-I am leaving to go down to seattle and then to vancouver, I am leaving tomorrow. we are spending from the 9th to the 23rd in vancouver doing ministry, being Gods hands and feet at the Olympics and throughout vancouver. Pray for unity and strength as we do this intense much needed work. pray for our travels, it snowed a bunch here this weekend and we dont really want too much more snow or ice to slow us down, and also for our flights and bus rides and entries and re entries of the border.

-I am still trying to stay in contact with seemingly alot of people, facebook seems like the easiest way but it really seems to be very impersonal and non relational, pray for my communication and relational skills as they seem to be lacking.

-I was given the option of going back to st. lawrence Island this spring or to Hati, which was a really hard decision for me, i struggled back and forth for a long time God seemingly telling me to do both, It has just become clearer to me that God is wanting me to continue to dream about Alaskan ministry while taking me out of Alaska for a short while. I still have yet to give my final decision but its due tomorrow, seemingly God directed me to 1 Thessalonians 2-3 it kinda reminds me that I can still be a big part of the things God is doing on the island while i am on a different island being obedient to my call there, and reminding me that Gods timing is a lot better than mine. it seems weird in those verses that its satan stopping them from getting to the people because i believe its God calling me to Hati, but thats not the part of those verses that were really speaking to me. we are still sending a small team of staff to st. lawrence island but the DTS which I am a staff on is going to Hati.

-I thank God for all my friends and family, and I pray for you guys, I think God is really showing me alot more about you guys and your faith and how he is at work in you guys. just keep pressing into God, He never gets tired of loving you. I pray for my friends who are having troubles (health, family, etc) too, because I know that God is faithful and that sometimes we lose sight of Him and yet He is still right there beside you. And I pray for my friends who are still searching or maybe tired of searching, I pray that God will meet them where they are and that they will acknowledge His grace and love.

its great being here in alaska, God really blessed me with this opportunity even if it means "suffering" I really want to pour my life out as a offering to God, and to grow even more in love with Him and His people. I saw 4 eagles flying about 150 feet above the ground just circling in the sky, and it reminded me of the four students here, they are flying, learning to fly, but there will be times for them to come down, humble themselves so that they can serve each other, the body of Christ, and the lost people of this world, and God will provide the grace for us to do this. Thanks be to God amen

love

2010-02-02T20:28:00.003-06:00

In one sense we are always traveling

And traveling as if we do not know where we are going

In another sense we have already arrived

We cannot arrive at the perfect possession of love in this life

And that is why we are traveling and traveling in this darkness

But we already possess love by grace

And therefore in that sense we have arrived

And are dwelling in that light

But Oh! How far are you and I go to

find that love in whom we have arrived



Thomas Merton

God has been rocking me with the fact that He is love.
everything he does, He does out of love. pure and untainted. A love we could never understand.
so beyond comprehension so awesome. He not only speaks all our love languages He created them all.
He gives gifts to all, yet to those who believe in Him they find purpose in what they have received, and they find a lot more.
even when we fear the Lord we need to do it out of how much we see that He loves us, cause if you view God as a angry dad your missing the fact that He wants to pour his love over you. He poured His judgment out on His Son so when He disciplines you which He will if you are His child its never out of judgment He just wants to pour His sons blood on you, his mercy His grace, and healing. Ive learnt that sometimes the Holy spirit leads you and sometimes it drives you, like Jesus was driven out of this whole baptism scene into the wilderness and to the temptation, its out of love that he allows things to happen, sometimes he tests us with hardship, sometimes what the devil trys to do for bad God turns into something good.

The Greatest Commandment

³⁴Hearing that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees, the Pharisees got together. ³⁵One of them, an expert in the law, tested him with this question:

³⁶"Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?" ³⁷Jesus replied: " 'Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.'^b]">[b] ³⁸This is the first and greatest commandment. ³⁹And the second is like it: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.'^c]">[c] ⁴⁰All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments."

what are we called to do first love people or love God, which takes priority some churches have to consider that they may be too focused on trying to love God and some churches have to consider that they love people more than they love God

We need to embrace Gods love, embrace fully the relationship we can have with him by the blood of the Son. Not be status quoe Christians who live on the basis that they have said a prayer, or on the basis that they are doing Gods work, or on the basis that they go to church every sunday. What are works without faith and what is faith without works. NOTHING! What is Christianity without God, who are we trying to fool. It about a relationship with God, if we arent seeking a intimate relationship with God the truth isnt pretty.

so back to the quote at the top we have arrived at Gods love, you accept Jesus and you are given the right to become a child of God PERIOD But do you want to be a child that doesnt have a relationship with your Father, id say your adoption agency might take your kid away if there was no relationship between the parent and child. we are constantly traveling under His love towards His love

Beauty...

2010-01-24T02:20:00.004-06:00

The first couple of weeks of a dts (discipleship training school) are usually pretty intense, there is usually considerable growth with just one week of being out of your comfort zone in a place where you feel you can trust people, but more importantly God. Breakthrough in how we view ourselves is inevitable when we look to who our Lord is, there has to be a intense fear of the Lord when we look to Him, He is Holy, He is Righteous, He is love. How can we apply this to how we view ourselves, well simply said we have to look at the throne of this lovely yet all powerful God first.
Ephesians 2:10 For we are God's workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.

We believers are Gods "pieces of work" now you can take that in a joke because we all know we are real pieces of work. But God is/has creating/created us in Christ Jesus and we are His handiwork, made beautiful. Why is it so easy to see each other in a judgmental way, why is it so easy to see the ugly side of things. we need help.

I thank the Lord for the healing of the hearts of these students, the live giving breath of God that is leading us to experiencing more and more of His love, more and more of His grace, more and more of the fear of the Lord(which may sound like a bad thing but really it isn't, I wish more people had it). We have put deep pain from the past, shame, guilt, rejection, and lies, down at the foot of the Cross not because its easy to let go but because God meets us there and gives us new life. Redemption is a word I love, I love it when God reminds me, you are redeemed, i payed for you. that's where I find my worth, my beauty. In the ashes of death, in the new life that springs up.

Do we look at the landscape around us, the sunsets, the mountains (wheat fields for you Manitoban's), those places we go to, to find beauty or do we go to the people around us and say to ourselves or directly to them" wow the glory of the Lord is shining on you, that new life in you is radiating love."

which is more beautiful?

sunset in homer

our small but oh so great winter DTS 2010

yes i see the Saskatchewanite, and I love him and find him beautiful.

dont get me wrong I love the sunset, I thank God for revealing some of his beauty through it, but i seriously question our ability to see others through Christs eyes sometimes. its something God is teaching me being up here, to love others as Christ loves.

give God all the glory, he has it already so you might as well let him give it to you through Jesus and not pretend to have it already.

some writings of this past week

2010-01-17T17:35:00.002-06:00

What is this, where does it lead; A journey on the narrow path. When is it alright to numb myself to this world, when can I face it with a warm smile. Is there hope apart from Christ, Certainly not! when does reality bend to hope, when does hope break reality. I think where the word hope loses its meaning is when we use it to describe uncertainty, long shots. Is that what the power of Christ has been reduced to.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Homer Nazarene Church sermon notes

Names of Jesus i relate to this moment.
The Lamb of God (pure), Light, I AM, Messiah, Provider, Mercy seat sitter.
time to offer ourselves Romans 12

John 2:1-11

Jesus turns water to wine.

-God is concerned about both small miracles and big
- God changed the water into wine. not just in appearance, He transformed the molecules, it is no longer water but wine.
-Christ gives extravagantly
- abundant life= transformed life
- sometimes God waits for us to be thirsty before He pours out transformation

im here

2010-01-11T21:41:00.002-06:00

HOMER Alaska

Ill tell you a little about my journey here to homer, and how God brought me here.

well wednesday the 7th was my last real day in winnipeg, I had a night where anyone could come say goodbye fortunatly most of my friends had already said goodbye to me, throught the many parties and Christmas celebrations. I was feeling a bit nervous on wednesday, not about anything specific, I had to combat it. so at 1 in the morning on the 8th we started the trek to granforks, me my brother and my car. we got to the border and thats when i had to get my "visa" so first they asked me questions about what I was doing and all that kinda stuff, so i think everythings going good, but then they talk amongst themselves , tell me to wait for a bit, ask me more questions, they really didnt understand why I would want to volunteer and actually pay to stay. but after a hour of hmmming and hawwing they give me my entry for a year, which is a ptl.

get to the train station down in grandforks, its quite stormy on the american side of things we pass by a pretty serious accident, but we get to the train station on time and I have a really awesome brother who bought me candy and other goodies for the train ride. the train arrives one hour late, ohh great(the most i can really be late is one hour), the train attendant tells me that they can probably make up the time, so we get going and when we are almost across ND the train stops at the train station which i miean was normal but then we stay sitting there, they tell us they are doing some minor mantainence which turns into three hours, so we are running 4 hours late, im going ot miss my flight. me not knowing anything about flights and stuff like this start freaking out a bit, But meanwhile Im reading the bible looking to God for some sort of peace, and really Gods telling me trust me. I try to get online every little stop, everytime we get into a little town, try phoning my mom, to change my flight, which would have cost me $200. but everytime i got close to changing my flight the internet would die or when i phoned my mom the line died. you know through this im trusting God, im trying to expend my options but really throughout it I know that God is going to pull me through.

and so I meet some people on the train some very interesting people and some very helpful people, no real amazing conversations but alot of good ones. I get to talking to this couple from billings MT and we make a few connections and they are Christians, He tries to help me phone the airline but i jsut get the busy line. and so they offer to drive me to the airport, which actually didnt same me time but was really good. so i get to the airport, she puts me on standby for free, which is probably normal but still amazing to me(here i was trying tochange my flight for 200 and its free, God must have not wanted me to waste my money). i go to security and then realize that i dont have my wallet, i figure maybe i put it into my bag (i had to pay for my luggage) but i get through and no wallet, so i go back to the check in desk and there my wallet is.i get through security again, and then try to call my friend who is supposed to pick me up, here my flight is 8 hours later then it was supposed to be, late friday. He cant pick me up anymore which was really understandable he had to go down to homer earlier, and so now i have to find a ride down.

i phone like 10 people trying to figure out a way down, half of the lines are either busy or not there and so I finally get ahold of my aunt who lives about 4 hours from anchorage and she has a friend who might be able to pick me up and let me stay at her house for the night and so she picks me up, without one hesitation i pick her out of the crowd never having seen her bfore. turns out my aunt and uncle have to drive up to drop there daughter off at university and I just hadnt asked them before if they could pick me up because i had a other ride that i didnt even have to ask for. so it worked perfectly for them to pick me up the next day, after calling them 3 times and getting the busy signal the first 2 times.

The Lord is good

its soo good being back here, turns out I am a small group leader which means im co in charge of the guys in the DTS, which they had asked me the day I left if i would do it so I said i would pray about it on the train, and getting here it was a yes. still getting ready to go down to vancouver in like a month not with the school but with some of the other staff here. continue to pray for me as i continue to pray for you.

if you want to support me financially this website will help you http://www.ywam.ca/donations/index.php
they send it through vancouver so that they can change it from cnd to usd for me. there is also some way you can do it through credit card, but i dont know what that link is.

thank you Jesus

update soon

2009-12-31T19:19:00.002-06:00

Merry Christmas and may 2010 be full of Joy

The first Christmas is recorded as a time of great vision, great wisdom. Such an incredible visual of God's glory, the angels rejoice in song, its almost too much for everyone. Well the heavens are rejoicing with every moment we serve our Lord, oh to hear that song. As I try to think of what my life will look like on a grand scale I can not look very far, the possibilities seem endless. So I start with trusting God to guide me, and He has led me back to Alaska to serve with YWAM (Youth With A Mission) Arctic Mercy located in Homer Alaska. As most of you know I was in Alaska from January till June of this year with YWAM doing a DTS (discipleship training school) which consists of 3 months of study and discipleship and 2 months of missions and making disciples. This program has become the staple for YWAM, we run DTS's so we teach people about what it means to know God and make Him known. We have been committed to serving one northern island called St. Lawrence Island in specific sending two teams a year to spend 2 months each on this island serving about 1500 aboriginal villagers, but as we gain staff we are hoping that we can expand our vision joining what God is already doing all over Alaska. We are already able to send a team which I am part of to Vancouver, to help out with a broader ministry at the Olympics called More Than Gold which I am very excited about. We will be doing anything from working in homeless shelters to offering prayer at the Olympic events. As we move forward from that, we are really stepping into a time that we will be able to send out mobile teams(YWAM staff that go out from base as a group), doing anything from dramas, to helping out with other ministries already established, to doing construction projects( I know we have already helped out with a lot of church repair). We are committed to doing whatever it takes to bring Christ to the people who need Him and encouraging those who already know Him.

The Isolated aboriginal villages of the north are on my heart a lot, mostly St. Lawrence Island, the way in which YWAM Arctic Mercy got the call to start sending teams up there is something that really continues to keep us passionate. The suicide rate was the highest in North America, the elders of the community were crying out for help, some of them knew that God was the only answer and since that initial cry for help YWAM and other Christian organizations have really been enabled to bring hope to these villages through the incredible love of God. But these seeds need a lot of watering which has had its ups and downs for those who are committed to seeing fruit. The cycle of hurt, depression, shame, guilt, despair, alcohol, anger, worthlessness, abuse, suicide, pride has one answer and that is Jesus Christ so I pray that the Holy spirit which is the presence of God will empower us to love like he does and to the work of Jesus which He started and in which he will finish someday soon.

I come before you as my family and friends and I ask you to pray with me and pray for me as I take this step, my commitment with YWAM is 2 years, I am doing this all as a volunteer and so is everyone within YWAM, which is going to take a lot of trust on my part. Pray for me as I travel because If anything I need my plane to be delayed, because I'm cutting it short with the time between my train arrival and my plane departure with all these new security measures. I am leaving on January 7th and hope to be back for Christmas of 2010. thank you for your prayer support and if you want any info on supporting financially just contact me. Feel free to email me or mail me, ask me questions about how its going. Hopefully next report I can share more about whats going on over in Alaska. God Bless.

Chad Reimer

chad.reimer@gmail.com
http://withegracealone.blogspot.com
1-907- 235- 9339

Chad Reimer c/o YWAM
PO BOX 959
Homer, AK 99603
USA

all in the same cup

2009-12-14T00:14:00.003-06:00

I was just reading a blog post titled "a furious longing" (having to do with loving God) on my friends moms blog. It struck a chord in me... it made me ask " Am I in love with God?" "do I often view Jesus as more than a friend or a King?" "Am I cheating on my lover?" " Do I tell people "were just friends"?" "Do I lust after God instead of loving Him?"

obviously God loves us, more purely than we can imagine. more than alot of us even acknowledge, He is the perfect father, no earthly father can even compare. God is love, so we can let Him love us. At first encounter with God we often are like OK God I'll let you love me and you know save me from my sin, we'll leave it at that. We start this "repentance" thing where we feel so ashamed of ourselves, that we dont even let God free us from our guilt. we wait for freedom, until someone tells us its already here God whispers "if only you knew". we struggle with our logic, doubt eats away at our passion, we gain this false humility thing "I have no value" its here where our honest repentance needs to start. Father God I am a sinner, I am not righteous by birth, But you sent your Son Jesus to the earth to teach about your love and live it, and ultimately sacrifice Himself for me, pay the price that I couldnt pay, It is accomplished and I want to live my life like it is. We come to a place where we adore God for who He is, we want to know Him more, we date Him passionately, yet we fall back satan tempts us to spend less and less time with our God we make excuses "oh well im sure your busy God, im doing this over here though anyways". we think were getting away with something, passing one by God. we need the truth to set us free, take away worry, hate, fear, shame, guilt, etc. the truth is that If you accept it God sees you as holy, righteous, beautiful, and worthy. His bride. How much we long to be in heaven where this is much more clear, But God has brought His kingdom here, and wants us to know He loves us, now will we fall in love? choose to let go of our insecurity and embrace Him right now. A line my friends mom likes to use is "dance with the trinity" I like it alot too. As a Christian Its like I'm engaged to Christ, I got a ring on my finger. now do we let the security of having this ring make us take our fiances love for granted eventually leaving us apathetic towards Him, eventually giving the ring back, or do we passionately chase after the lover of our soul, bask in his affection, love Him back, share in His purity . I ask the Holy Spirit to breathe the passion into us so that we will repent of our wrong thinking, and embrace our King, our lover.

when your sitting at the computer and the hours just seem to fly

2009-12-11T00:50:00.002-06:00

haha well ive been sitting here for a good almost 3 hours without even knowing it, at first i was talking to a friend from alaska, the whole time change, makes things usually end up lasting a little later. then I was determined to figure out how I am getting from the train station in seattle to the airport 12 miles away without totally ruining my savings from taking the train. After researching buses, shuttles, trains, and taxi's(many more systems than ol winnipeg has) I finally found the metro system, all i have to do is walk across the street and hop on another train. In this world of technology sometimes you have to be very careful, in november when i picked up my brother from the train station in Grand Forks google maps gave me the total wrong address and directions, made me take a right somewhere when i should have taken a left. well i had to follow the tracks that were nearby and look for a station, it was on the other side of the highway, got there in time but it was a little interesting. So I spent some extra time making sure my stations were infact where they tell me they are.

Why am I taking the train? I've been asked this quite a few times already, my first answer is that it is cheaper, and my second answer is it is adventurous, who doesn't want to go on a cross country adventure by ground. It may add some variables that I dont really enjoy like what if my train is late? but i choose not to live in fear of that. my train arrives at approximately 10:25am I walk over to the metro station takes 2 minutes metro runs every 10 minutes so hopefully i get on pretty decently 30 min trip my plane leaves at 1:05pm should be enough time. and heres where my late nights on the computer have really blessed me, not only have I gotten to talk(facebook chat) to people I dont normally get a chance to talk to, and minister to some hurting people but I found the ride from anchorage to homer I was looking for( i wasnt even openly looking for it), honestly it works out so good I'm pretty sure its a God thing, my plane arrives at 3:47 and my friend gets out of school (hes a teacher) at 3:15 and can get to the airport at 4:15 and he needs/ wants to go south anyways.

and now I'm looking at laptops, which is one of the things that really I'm not sure what I'm going to do yet. I'm thinking of getting a netbook, but its like should i just go all out and get the real deal. its a hard decision used, or from a big box store, small store. what to do, all i know is that after this week i dont really want to spend alot more money for a while.

but anywho i should go to bed

happenings... and not happenings

2009-12-09T15:27:00.003-06:00

well as I have been out of work these past couple weeks, Ive had quite a bit of time on my hands, I have seemingly changed my sleep schedule to Alaska time stay up three hours later and wake up 3 hours later too, which has resulted in me feeling like a lazy bum when it comes to productivity. some things that i really want to do next week or this weekend, go to union gospel mission, do anything that they have there to do, me and Jeremiah handed out cookies there last weekend, still warm. maybe try to find a list of seniors from my church who could use some visiting, or cookies.

I took my car to see if i could get a saftey on it but they had a bunch of work they wanted me to pay them to do and it was a little out of my budget to spend on it. but that took my mobilization away today so that kinda sucked. But I had my last pioneer clubs( kids club at my church) and said goodbye to some of my kids, its hard for me to leave in the middle of something good but I know that God is in control, He has showed us that we are doing His work. I'm going to miss my boys and girls, all of the ones I have are from the community. ill be praying for them, and maybe even have a skype date with them once im in alaska.

So I got my train and plane tickets, train leaves january 7th I get to anchorage on the 8th. While it is really hard to leave, I know im called to Alaska, infact i think i missed a opportunity to go back earlier. honestly there have been some internal frustrations, and i know that ive been strengthened as a individual. One of the things I really look forward to when i get back to alaska is the community and atmosphere that comes with it, and ive been thinking that thats a weakness of mine dependance on a "christian bubble", but I dont think of it as a bubble, more of as a body, so while something may be a weakness of mine it strengthens the body, a body who has an amazing brain. I love the community i have around here but it doesnt seem as full time as in YWAM. I'm going to miss my church here, all the people who mean so much to me.

vancouver 2010 olympics, I'm going to be there. and I'm pumped. I get to evangelize to the masses and also the streets.

If anyone wants to go out for coffee during the day I'm definatly up for it this next week.
my sched is getting pretty full for the evenings and after christmas.

Ramona

2009-12-04T11:25:00.000-06:00

where you are now we can not see, its too bright in a sense. however we can take a glimpse into what your seeing, and we are walking closer and closer to the light in which you live. your road like ours had flowers but also had thorns. I can smell the fragrance of goodness, that ever so sweet taste that brings new mercy, that delivers us hope. there were many storms these past years, lots of rain but you stood firm in your faith, you knew that the sun was above those cloud bursting at the seams, and its shine lit your face up.

purity

2009-12-03T23:05:00.000-06:00

went to something at southland community church in steinbach called the watch last sunday the topic was purity Jesus vs everything else ( a picture of general media).

Sin is something that I've struggled with (Hope that's not too shocking for you(I could go into more detail about it but i wont ) and there seems to be a lapse of time from the time that I said yes Jesus I want you In my life to the time where sin didn't seem to control my life. Here's where purity comes in, you see I struggled hard, harder than I theoretically needed to, but you see it took me time to harden my heart and God wanted me to understand (as much as you humanly can) the things that hardened my heart so I could work through them with Him instead of me trying to cover up and make excuses for my short comings.

Like a bad toilet sin has a way of coming back up if you dont plunge it completely, and any attempt at doing this yourself is feeble at best. Here's where Jesus's blood comes in, its like the drain- o of eternal life. So what we have is a answer to our problem of sin, our purity comes straight from God. Here's where the battle seems to take place, we understand with our minds "sin is bad but Jesus came to take this sin and end sin for those who believe in him" but we dont understand that this purity comes from obedience, listening to the word of God and being recklessly dedicated to follow it. I just started reading through the old testament from beginning to end and I am in exodus 25-30 area, and honestly I have a hard time not just skimming over all the rules and regulations of how the tabernacle is supposed to be built, how the clothes are supposed to be made, how the animals are supposed to be killed, etc.. but it paints a very clear picture of what purity means, God has given moses exact measurements, exact process and while i still have a few chapters to go to see if they actually do it exactly as told I think they do.

So heres where our purity comes into play, the trap of wanting to make a golden calf because you havent heard from God in a while. If we want this purity we have to hear the voice of God, and one of the worst things i could tell myself would be that He's not talking, because more often than not we arent listening (I'm really bad at this). we surround ourselfs with t.v., music, facebook(now if only God had a facebook page and chated with us on facebook chat), and while we can hear God speaking to us through these things, he wants a much more intimite relationship. we often view Jesus as the garbage man, He comes and knocks on our door and we say "hey I put my garbage out last sunday, why are you here" or we see Him as our pastor or ministry leader he comes to our door and knocks we say " hey ill see you on wednesday, when I get to help you with your work". I hate watching this generation of Christians being dulled to what is sin because they like watching the latest TV show, and not caring about God enough to let Him have some input to what we input. this is my struggle, I've let myself be dulled so that I dont have to be the one who says enough is enough. we hate the sin yet we love the sinner, its often a hard balancing act. And my prayer is that we can live purely and wholey abandoned for the one who is making us new creations.

Blessed are the pure in heart,
for they will see God.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJyW55AXJAk

sorry my next post is taking longer than i thought it would to post

2009-12-01T22:58:00.002-06:00

well ill just give you a update of my life.

the past week has had its ups and downs mostly up, time seems to be going so fast yet so slow, my days have been pretty lazy to say the least, as my job has to do with snowfall and snowfall alone, i have only worked 3 days in the past 3 weeks which has really sucked for my morale but ive been able to get alot of stuff done, but not as much as i would like.

as for my future plans I am going to be leaving winnipeg on the 7th of january and arriving in anchorage on the 8th taking the train from grand forks to seattle then taking a flight from there. I will be up in Homer alaska thats where the YWAM base in alaska is, I am so glad to be going up but also sad to leave behind all my people here, expecially the kids and young adults i get to minister to through my church and camp, I mean i guess my friends and family have a different kind of missing. I am going to be in vancouver for the olympic outreach www.morethangold.ca which is sweet, im so pumped to be working at something so big. from there I really dont know what ill be doing with ywam but I definatly will get to go back up north and thats really what i feel called to.

Its crazy how blessed I am, before I go to alaska I get to go to mexico with my family for a week, my first real vacation since i was a young kid. and despite what my mom thinks I dont believe Christians are called to take poverty vows (though some possibly could) i am excited to go on this trip.

things you can pray for
-ramonas funeral is tomorrow, i thank the Lord for her life
-I'm trying to get my car ready to sell
-pray that i will be able to communicate well this week
-pray that as i take a small step of faith in going into ministry where I have to pay to be there, that funds will come
- most of all i thank God for all He has done all that He is doing and all that He will do He's so good

learn from your mistakes

2009-11-24T22:27:00.002-06:00

some notes from my first congregational meeting.

-there are some very dedicated members of my church who have served very diligently. I applaud not only their effort but there faithfulness.
-the holy spirit is definitely at work creating something new, birthing something, the test that i see is whether or not we will put that something new in new wineskins
-policy isnt a word that i really like yet i understand a need for some sort of policy
- just because you want to hear more opinions on a motion doesn't mean you(me) should second something and not really know what your talking about when you try to explain why your seconding it.
- I am very glad that kinks seemed to get worked out, things made sense in the end, biblically
- I am excited that the elders are starting to understand the need for this next generation to take some responsibility, though i hope that it will become a collaborate effort because we all need to be a part of this.
- end off being very encouraged

eyes light up.

2009-11-20T10:59:00.004-06:00

what it takes to light up eyes.

having built some level of trust, having them know that we care for them. simply slipping a folded piece of paper into the hand of a unpretentious child telling them to put that folded piece of paper into their pocket without reading the simple words on them. turn the lights off, they can barely make each other out in the darkness... a moment of chaos... this is life without God, living in sin. "you can take out your piece of paper now" brings the focus back a little bit. "read it" brings the chaos back. click, the piercing rays of light from the flashlight seem like they should be making more noise than the kids, fortunately I'm there to call them towards the light to read the words God has written for them. they seem interested in the flashlight for a while but what they are really looking for is the lights to turn back on, despite how much fun it is to scream and run around in the dark. God is the light, we sit in a semi circle and read our simple truths. "God loves me" "God has a plan for me" "if God is for me who can be against me" "Jesus died so i can live". they are so much more than words, especially for kids who are honestly looking for hope, and honestly not finding it anywhere else. if those words stop when the sound waves end perhaps they enter your head they can be burned away with apathy. but however hot the fire of apathy it produces no light, the fire in most of the kids eyes that I saw burned so bright that even if it was just for a moment it melted my heart.

this is all here at home kids from the community who came to pioneer clubs
the harvest is plentiful

chad

traveling

2009-11-02T22:50:00.001-06:00

In one sense we are always traveling
And traveling as if we do not know where we are going
In another sense we have already arrived
We cannot arrive at the perfect possession of love in this life
And that is why we are traveling and traveling in this darkness
But we already possess love by grace
And therefore in that sense we have arrived
And are dwelling in that light
But Oh! How far are you and I go to
find that love in whom we have arrived
- Thomas Merton

blood, its in you to live... oh wait i think the slogan says give

2009-10-31T17:50:00.002-05:00

well after having not given blood for almost 2 years, I went and gave again. I didnt realize it had been that long, i had been once in that time but my iron was too low. Something about giving blood I just really like, I think its know that I am contributing to life. Maybe the weird concept of thinking that something inside of me will go inside of someone else is what intrigues me. anyways its fun to give blood so do it, get past your fear and do it. think of what that blood might be do for someone, think of your friend who is battling cancer, think of what would happen if no one gave blood.
I'm B+, what are you.
chad

what ive been working on lately

2009-10-26T00:13:00.003-05:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXkCXdjeCQ8 this is the video with music done by the churches on st lawrence island. the song is in siberian yupik

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J5CgJ5rYCB8 this is the song i think goes best with it but its hardcore music

prayer, open doors, know grace act grace

2009-10-21T20:42:00.005-05:00

^{Colossians 4
2}Devote yourselves to prayer, being watchful and thankful. ³And pray for us, too, that God may open a door for our message, so that we may proclaim the mystery of Christ, for which I am in chains. ⁴Pray that I may proclaim it clearly, as I should. ⁵Be wise in the way you act toward outsiders; make the most of every opportunity. ⁶Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.

Are you avoiding Gods power, saying hey God is bigger than me so He will do something about it if he wants. If so pray for open doors where ever you Go, pray for divine appointments pray for these things, pray for opportunities to be more like Jesus that is what we are trying to do right. I'm pretty sure Jesus didnt live a scared timid life of going to church on sunday (well saturday) but not living the rest of his life with His fathers works fully in mind and in action. He was in the hood, he was in the burbs he was everywhere, not with a come look at me attitude but with a I'm willing to die for you.

Look at the world as a opportunity, not as a burden. You arent by yourself, so you can live beyond your own boundries. call on the blood of Jesus, knowing He came to bring life, sending Holy Spirit to live with us(in us), because our Father loves us so much

so pray knowing who your Father is, knowing His love. open your eyes to open doors, you might have to knock on a few doors. Live more.

dont worry im preaching to myself mostly

chad

psalms 77

2009-10-15T21:53:00.003-05:00

¹ I cried out to God for help;
I cried out to God to hear me.

² When I was in distress, I sought the Lord;
at night I stretched out untiring hands
and my soul refused to be comforted.

³ I remembered you, O God, and I groaned;
I mused, and my spirit grew faint.
Selah

⁴ You kept my eyes from closing;
I was too troubled to speak.

⁵ I thought about the former days,
the years of long ago;

⁶ I remembered my songs in the night.
My heart mused and my spirit inquired:

⁷ "Will the Lord reject forever?
Will he never show his favor again?

⁸ Has his unfailing love vanished forever?
Has his promise failed for all time?

⁹ Has God forgotten to be merciful?
Has he in anger withheld his compassion?"
Selah

¹⁰ Then I thought, "To this I will appeal:
the years of the right hand of the Most High."

¹¹ I will remember the deeds of the LORD;
yes, I will remember your miracles of long ago.

¹² I will meditate on all your works
and consider all your mighty deeds.

¹³ Your ways, O God, are holy.
What god is so great as our God?

¹⁴ You are the God who performs miracles;
you display your power among the peoples.

¹⁵ With your mighty arm you redeemed your people,
the descendants of Jacob and Joseph.
Selah

¹⁶ The waters saw you, O God,
the waters saw you and writhed;
the very depths were convulsed.

¹⁷ The clouds poured down water,
the skies resounded with thunder;
your arrows flashed back and forth.

¹⁸ Your thunder was heard in the whirlwind,
your lightning lit up the world;
the earth trembled and quaked.

¹⁹ Your path led through the sea,
your way through the mighty waters,
though your footprints were not seen.

²⁰ You led your people like a flock
by the hand of Moses and Aaron.

the end of what you would call an era

2009-10-04T15:13:00.000-05:00

after being at camp Beaver Creek Bible Camp for the past 12 years at least one week a summer but recently being staff for 15 weeks over the past 4 summers, it was time to say "goodbye" with a hopeful "see you later" attached. God really prompted me to let go, move forward all in one moment right during our reunion on saturday. there is so much that I could say about camp, it was where I became a Christian, it's where so much truth was shed on my life, it has been a place of learning about God and about myself. it has been a spiritual gate for me, an entrance into my loving fathers arms, a place of continued relationships. God is so good, and he is definitely at work at bcbc, i praise God for the people whom he has set there who have been willing to be instruments of His love, grace and power.

there was one moment that it just hit me that i wasnt going to be back next year, thats when i realized i needed to find a high place to pray from and climbed aboard the roof of the boathouse to pray.

i dont feel like typing too much so ill just give a short outlook/ update

I am planning on going back up to alaska in january for at least 2 year coming home for christmas in between, I am going to be staff with YWAM. some of the things i could be doing would be helping lead a school (a DTS) doing mobile trips (road trip/ mini outreaches) we are going to the olymipics in febuary as a outreach, my heart is still for the northern alaska/ arctic so as soon as i can i want to be up there. as for right now I am working, trying to raise my funds for these next years. also working at the church helping lead youth group and leading a class of pioneer clubs.
right now its 9:30 on a saturday night, i spent 4 hours working serving at a wedding for a youth fundraiser and now i am tired and wanting to go to bed..

something to take to heart

2009-09-21T10:45:00.002-05:00

this is out of a book called "Grace for the moment" by Max Lucado, its sort of a twice daily inspirational reading. I had read this morning reading thinking that thinking that it was the current day but then after realized it was 2 months and 1 day previous, God is trying to speak to me through this, what is he telling you?

WHY DENY?
if we say we have no sin, we are fooling ourselves, and the truth is not in us 1 John 1:8

We do ourselves no favors in justifying our deeds or glossing over our sins. Some time ago my daughter Andrea got a splinter in her finger. I took her to the restroom and set out some tweezers, ointment, and a Band- Aid. She didn't like what she saw."I just want the Band-Aid, Daddy." Sometimes we are just like Andrea. We come to Christ with our sin, but all we want is a covering. We want to skip the treatment. We want to hide our sin. And one wonders if God even in his great mercy will heal what we conceal.
How can God heal what we deny? How can God touch what we cover up?

a gentle thunder

some of my favorite lyrics. these are the words by means

2009-09-17T23:47:00.000-05:00

the kindness of a gentle giant
what blood to shed
my blood isn't a worthy currency
truth grabs me, i become a child of your blood
ive been brought out of the grave

indirect routes, indifferent roads we travel
we walk but not alone, never alone
i wonder why im still alive, you become everything
we become so much greater, greater than the skies
what do i desire, other places

on the outside looking into frosted windows
the one who finds me whispers breath deeper
oh how far we have traveled just to feel alive
breaking down walls so we can find truth
following smoke trails to find the spark
strength finds me learning to be brave

summer nights

2009-09-16T20:39:00.003-05:00

hey way ray its still summer mid september! and I'm feeling quite fine.

troubles seem to bounce away in a BIG BOUNCER and no thats not a ad for bouncing good times, we had our pioneer clubs/ ALPHA BBQ at our church last night, and im pretty sure my fire was lit strong again for these kids but not only the kids the parents as well.
things that stood out:
-single moms trying to raise there kids the best they can
-mob mentality the children take on and the good and bad side effects
-the fierce combination of kids and a giant bouncer
-the fierce combo of me and a giant bouncer
-the boys in my pioneer clubs class this year and how connected to them I feel
-how honest it felt to watch kids go up to the door of the bouncer and turn back multiple times and little by little get farther in the door until they were bouncing. a boy about 4 years old who i saw jump off a three foot retaining wall before he ventured towards the bouncer
-fresh starts

here's to a amazing fall of pioneer clubs and alpha.
let there be love!

-chad

life seems like...

2009-09-14T17:02:00.001-05:00

a constant breaking and healing of my heart.

what breaks my heart as of late.
- seeing people. friends. struggle to the point of total hopelessness.
- watching the world fall into the traps of the enemy.
- the slavery of sex, money and everything in between.
- watching media beat worthlessness, hopelessness, false security/ identity into the minds of children
- axe commercials etc.
- alcoholism
- seeing Christians do nothing about these things
- seeing Christians run dry when the well is full
- seeing Christians so hurt yet not wanting healing
the list seems to go on....

BUT THERE'S HOPE!

I also see people fed up with this spiritual starvation. ready to break bread. ready to be the change. Jesus didn't come to earth for nothing, He didn't die for nothing, He didn't rise for nothing, He didn't send the Holy Spirit for nothing.

Romans 15:13

¹³May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him, so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.

-chad

fog spider soup

2009-09-10T17:56:00.001-05:00

sorry im bad at blogging consistantly

2009-09-08T22:00:00.002-05:00

ive been pretty busy lately, and surprisingly the blog in which I really in theory would LOVE to keep updated takes a hit when I dont take the time to do it. I'm pretty undisciplined when it comes to doing things everyday, other than you know going on facebook. I have realized one thing recently that there is no way im going to blog consistantly if i dont write consistantly, and so i am going to start off with a journal that I am going to write in everyday. and when I can start doing that I'm sure that the blogs will roll out, I dont think i have done a fomal blog report of st lawrence island and you know I dont want to be one of those people who talk about something in the past so much that its annoying but i want to just get one formal summary out there.

as for what the plans of my life are

1.find job, ive sent quite a few resumees out to random places and should be pretty close to getting something, there are lots of jobs that i could have, i mean if i want to make minimum wage or work evenings.

2.thunderbay this weekend? i would really love to go to thunderbay to visit my friend who is running a youth drop in center, mostly for northern students who are in thunderbay for school, and i have a free ride there and back

3. teach pioneer clubs(kids club at my church), work at inner city drop in center(the name of the place is illuding my mind), be a leader at youth group.
3b go to a church planting conference( i should rather say congress) in calgary in november

4. Go back to alaska in january for 2 years, be staff with YWAM help with schools do some mobile teams go back on outreaches to northern alaska.

I choose to be a impact on those around me, and sometimes that requires working hard at the church but most of the time it requires stepping out of the church and going out, with the blessing of the church and even with other people from the church. one thing that was told to me a word of the Lord was a caution for me to not just look at the obvious stages of my time here in winnipeg but to look deeper. I hope I am doing this faithfully.
I hope I am starting to step out of my box, I really want to be all that I can be through Christ and I think remaining relational is one of those things that I need to keep doing.

I could report on many things this summer of camp was spectacular, ive worked for my mom recently while she has done daycare for 18 kids at times, i helped lead my churches youth camp and then had a blast at my churches family camp, all while learning to trust the Holy Spirit.

my one prayer for me is that I will have the discernment to know when to lead by example strictly, and when to lead with my words and by example. ive experienced something i dont quite have a name for yet, pretty much i go to bed and when im trying to fal asleep i get like a whole sermon in my head or at least i find some sort of enlightenment to some issue that im dealing with. and funny thing is by the morning i really dont remember most of it, and so yesterday i decided enough was enough and finally wrote some of it down. well and previously i had gotten the whale illustration and wrote a letter to the church in savoonga. while its annoying to do this consistantly i think that it pays off, after all it may be wisdom that can change my whole thinking pattern.

well i should go off to bed.
God bless.

a lesson on unity- part 1

2009-08-22T11:28:00.007-05:00

picture from

When I was on St. lawrence Island in Alaska this past may I was in a village named Savoonga (sa-voon-ga) I got to witness a culture completely unlike the present day life that most of us are surrounded with, I had that in both villages on St. Lawrence Island but in Savoonga I got to hear of and see a video of a whale hunt. Now these villagers live alot off the land, and if you went to the store there you would see why, so its more than just a hobby its life. There is lots at stake and so they take it very serious, I have also seen the excitement the very thought of being able to provide for your family has brought some of the younger generation. This whaling business is very organized too, with whaling commissions, whaling captians, etc.

There are many roles in even beginning a whale hunt, they even have camps set up in areas away from the village so that they can be close to the action, so you have to get your equipment ready, get your troops together, and get there and those are just the basic physical start ups. Each boat is its own team, with its own captain and crew of about 5( I'm guessing on the numbers based on what I've seen) these boats are usually 20' LUND aluminum boats. From what I saw there were maybe 10-15 boats out on a hunt. Now these days the communication tools they use are cb radios but back before they were around there were hand signals, maybe flags, but they know that communication is key to working as a team especially with the stakes of success being survival. Now from the people left back at the village, to the people left at camp, to the people out on the boats everyone works very hard and also reaps benefits of success. Teams among a bigger team, they way it works out on the water is when they see a whale they are set into motion trying to find it when it surfaces surround it and throw a harpoon rigged with an explosive tip at its heart, and while it may only take one harpoon each boat is indispensable the video i saw of the kill included many harpoons being thrown at it, a buoy is attached to the first harpoon making its whereabouts known even when its under the water.

Now that you have 40 tons of dead whale in the water you are faced with a whole new task, getting this whale from here to shore, now im not sure exactly how this boat ride looks like but they hook their boats up and drag the whale by the tail, sometimes they cut parts of the whale off at first to eat and then get on there way. The task of getting the whale from shore to land is a whole new task, like a big game of tug-o-war heres where it doesnt matter who you are you are on the rope pulling for all your worth, when there is work to do everyone does there share. when the pulling is over next comes the butchering, now just imagine working your way through 40 tons of whale, nothing gets wasted. usually you dont sleep at least not very much until all the work is done. When the work is done , all the food brought back to the village, everyone gets there share of the plunder.

part 2 to come soon
chad

i dont blog well while i am nervous

2009-08-18T23:48:00.002-05:00

haha well nervous isnt probably the right word but i have been quite anxious probably over anxious concerning my future plans. God has really put Alaska on my heart as a whole, pretty much telling me that at some point im going to be back up there, now the big trouble in my heart was concerning when. on one hand i had big crazy ideas of going back the begining of september which would be in like 2 weeks doing a short stint, on the other hand the more sensable going in january with a 2 year commitment. and to be honest im kinda dissapointed that its not the crazy short adventure but how its replaced with a responsible more commited time, but not in a whole of me sense but in the crazy part of me which i will call adventourous. so yes i have decided to hold off at least until january on my alaska trip, which will give me time to actually follow up wtih my campers from the summer and also do a bunch of stuff with the ministries my church has really been establishing these past years, and also make some money to support myself, so now i got to find a job yay.

im really wanting to mature alot in these next months, i now see my fears and know how they are holding me back from being all that i can be for God, now its time to take courage and step up to the plate that has been set before me.

i really want to work on my communication skills as well as my writing and public speaking

my last post might seem random to you but it was a creative presentation that i gave at some point on my dts.

thankyou for your prayers and i hope i can be a blessing to you as you are a blessing to me.

chad

Joyous Jaquanda

2009-08-15T15:41:00.002-05:00

There once was a girl named Joyous Jaquanda she lived in the central part of Swaziland. Jaquanda was always joyous no matter what so she was called Joyous Jaquanda. Living in such a poor country with no family all Joyous Jaquanda had was 2 francs a hut and an imaginary friend named Jittery Jeffery.

One day Joyous Jaquanda was having tea with Jittery Jeffery when suddenly rebel forces came and took away her 2 francs shouting " who's joyous now" but she remained joyous and retorted "at least i still have my hut and my best friend Jittery Jeffery". Little did Joyous Jaquanda know about the effects of that evenings events on Jittery Jeffery he started questioning the tumultuous political rift that was taking place for land that in the end has no value while it is in a wartime rage and while outside help trys to help they end up stiring the pot deeper and so on and so on(you know jeffery and his politics).

Meanwhile Nice Nick was shooting mortars into rebel territory when a mortar went sailing into Joyous Jaquanda's hut causing it to collapse. Fortunatly Joyous Jaquanda and Jittery Jeffery both got out alive. they slept in the ruines of Joyous Jaquanda's once existant hut, it was a cold dark night. In the morning Joyous Jaquanda was still joyful saying " at least I still have you Jittry Jeffery".

The next day Jittery Jeffery went to seek refugee status in south africa leaving Joyous Jaquanda behind. it was then that Joyous Jaquanda realized that she needed more than things to make her Joyous, she needed Jesus.

FIN

camp/ future

2009-08-02T13:46:00.002-05:00

well its been a while since i last posted, dont really have computer access or time at camp. so these past 4 weeks I have been at Beaver Creek Bible Camp and its has been utterly amazing and spectacular. God has been moving strong in the lives of the campers and also the staff, we have had alot of commitments to Christ, and alot of spiritual warfare, ive found that spiritual warfare often looks like loving kids who dont recieve it anywhere else. The main topic of the summer is the armour of God and its has proved to be a good topic as we have felt Gods protection and also have been able to share lots of Truth, words cannot describe how amazing it is to know that God has given us the ability to grow under his protection. areas that you can be praying for the camp is again that we will rely on God and not on our own understanding, that we will be listening to Gods voice and discerning the areas where hes wanting us to step out in faith. also pray for the campers, pray that they will be open to recieving the Lord and that the Holy Spirit will show them the life that they can live. for me pray that i will be spending personal time with God and really operating out of what hes putting into me and not on my own means.

as to my future, after this next week of camp I am very unsure of whats next, be praying for me in this. I am considering the options infront of me and trying to figure out what to do with them and what God is leading me to do. basically I know that I am going back to alaska just not sure when or with whom, and for how long. ywam would want a two year commitment and maybe thats where Gods calling me, i would be a staff and would have many opportunities to grow in my leadership but it will not come easy, living by faith, would probably mean selling my car. another option is going up just for a outreach, i really feel called back to St. Lawrence island so this would be a option that would look nice, and a option that I just remembered was a option is moving to st lawrence island and living with the pastor and his family in one of the villages. please be praying for me, i dont want to go without the blessings of the people around me. the earliest i would leave would be in september, and the other option is january.
thankyou for your prayers
God bless
chad

outreach vid

2009-06-30T16:43:00.001-05:00

gone canoing

2009-06-26T16:31:00.002-05:00

im going tonight til sunday with my friend "the epp"
ill leave you with a map to have fun imagining what my trip is.
never done this one before, and have only ever heard of a 2 people who i dont know doing it, we are taking two canoes in. leaving one there.

these are the trails less traveled.
chad

i really want to...

2009-06-25T21:38:00.002-05:00

put alot of stuff on paper. I journaled only a few times on my outreach, mostly when i felt in despair and needed to vent to God. I want to write about my outreach, which im surprised i havent done like any of yet. I havent processed through what happened (dont think i can ever completly begin to comprehend everything), the things I saw, the pain, the joy, the people. im left with emotions that well up in me sometimes joy sometime hurt.

I am just realizing how the internet isnt really the place to put the raw stuff I was just about to type.

toodles
chad

.

2009-06-22T17:34:00.002-05:00

I am looking for a devotion book that i can either borrow or have, something that is adventurous yet profound and simple enough for younger teenagers. I am trying to pull together material for this summer of camp.

means- what we seek

Nothing seems to shine when things fall apart
The best lack conviction and the worst are full of passion
Until a moment of hope or a moment of defeat
When we are standing on our own, we're on our own

What do we want to happen now
When the center cannot hold and we are left out
So what will lead our steps
The very thing we seek
What we are striving for

We are the restless
We are set apart from the dead, only dying now
We are known by what we seek
When the center cannot hold
Is it the drug or the soberness?
The failure that we feel inside when nothing seems to shine

So what do we want to happen now
If we are on our own and we are left out
If we are left out
So what will lead our steps
The very thing we seek
What we are striving for

We are the restless
We are set apart from the dead, only dying now
And we are known by what we seek
When the center cannot hold

When the center cannot hold is there anything left
I think we need to simplify it

And if when we forget
We can't find our way
We are known by what we seek
When the center cannot hold

still working on the video

2009-06-17T21:20:00.003-05:00

well i chose we win! by david crowder band for the music.. now im just trying to decide what to put in and taking the time to make it look good. it seems so needed, it feels much more human to have frozen moments, moving pictures and someone singing... more like a human experience thus i make a video. if only i had a pitch i could sell alot of stuff using these faces. id rather bring you all out there... you would all be awesome out there, as you are awesome here.

well i was working this week on a strawberry farm, weeding, hoeing fields. i enjoyed it imensly. it has given me alot of time to think, think about the new things that ive learnt that are really just old things but more in depth than what ive been taught. which sometimes seems like a whole different thing then what is being taught. authority in Christ, identity in Christ, spiritual warfare,the power of words, generational curses/ blessing, protocol. ive also learnt more about myself, and how i have a heart to sing, encourage, worship, serve, be a team player, etc.

ive spent alot of time this week inward, which has been good, but i want to reach out while i am here, i dont see myself back in ywam in homer this year. my heart has turned to camp and thats pretty much as far as i can see. so going back to homer this fall is not out of the question.

im kinda tired right now 10:30 came on me fast, i plan on waking up at 1am to call jeremiah before he leaves to go on outreach

-i would rather see hope all the time then always expecting the worst.
just like my blood type B positive

chad

decisions

2009-06-12T19:36:00.004-05:00

well along with my life decisions that I am kind of avoiding right now I am making a video from my outreach and I am trying to decide whether to use how great thou art in the yupik language or david crowder band- we win!

everything

2009-06-11T15:21:00.002-05:00

this is the drama that we did on St. Lawrence Island(we modified it to fit a little better with the culture). we did it in the school in Savoonga(in front of grades 9-12), and we did it in the church in Gambell. both times we got to talk through what life without God is and what it leads to and then got to talk about the great hope that is in life with God, very powerful times with the light shining on their lives, with grace and love.

I played God during this drama and that was one of the most intense things ive ever done, God broke my heart for what breaks His. i looked at how at the end of the line there was death, suicide, something that people struggle with, not only on the island but anywhere. at that point in the drama I was a emotional wreck shedding tears, but then i step up he turns for me and we fight, bam we are saved by his grace and our turn towards him.

love

ps i had a quote as my decription that didnt really sit too well with me. it kind of seemed like we could earn grace, it was probably out of context, i really didnt look at it before, but it was a martin luther quote. so now i changed it to a quote out of the bible, out of romans 8:15 (the message)

now

2009-06-05T19:47:00.002-05:00

well i sit here still torn in many directions, this week has been a good week I am here pretty much being availible to serve by cleaning, working and praying with the ywam staff that are here.

the thing about short yet intense friendships is that they seem to leave you torn, I am now the only student(well im not a student anymore) left on the base, I am glad that i get to do my missing everyone in sections though, though i think the bandaid rip would seem to feel better. i miss the people on the island, and my fellow ex students, and well in reality i miss the people back home still too, but soon im going to miss ALL the people i met in alaska.

i was going to write something poetic about how i know that Gods timing is for me to leave and how everythings going to be better and while it would be correct, my emotions might be getting the best of me right now and i am feeling very human right now

back in homer

2009-05-23T18:08:00.002-05:00

well i just got back in homer alaska, at about 4 am. im not really going to be able to write very much because of the culture shock and the whole overwhelming flood of emotions from a 2 month pouring out and pouring in of my heart. Ireally dont want to even start right now, but the relationships i made with the people are something that cannot be forgoten, everytime i close my eyes I see them, they are burned into my mind, i cannot say that i will not be back, i dont know how that looks yet but i love these people. God Reigns, in power, and in peace. to God be the glory, forever and ever. also on the plane ride home God really told me "its not about you, I Am there always".
but anyways cars, cement, flushing toilets, white people, trees, and grass are so foreign to me right now i think im going to go crazy.

all i can think of is the song "mighty to save"

God bless
chad

almost on the island

2009-03-28T01:10:00.002-05:00

well it has two feelings to it, it feels like just yesterday i jumped on the plane. at the same time it feels like there is alot going on at home that im not a part of until i hear about it.

here I am 8-9 days away from leaving the city of homer and going to the town of savoonga, I am pumped bout going, its the first missions trip ive been on and im excited for that. God is really going to do something, he would do something even if we didnt go he is a living God and he works even when we dont see it. so we leave to go to savoonga, a town of 700 ish i think. we will be staying at a church and running kids ministry pretty much every day and doing bible studies and other stuff on some of the other days, we will just generaly be connecting ourselfs to this village. spending 3ish weeks there and then going to the town of gambell (20 minute plane ride away) and doing pretty much the same thing. we are pretty much going to be a open church to youths and children to come to after school and then again after supper and just really show them what Gods pure love is. we will very much be working with the elders of the village and the church too, learning more about the culture so we can help build it up, and see it through Gods eyes. we often go in with a western mentality, of our culture is the only culture that christanity fits into when really, that is only because we have made it fit. i mean we should be very sensitive to not try to fit christianity into there culture but to fit the culture into christianity, some things need to be cut off, there is some very dark shamen activity, but any power that they have is just a mimic of what power God has, the devil is not a creator hes just a copier. im kinda going off on rabbit trails here but yeah its going to be awesome, the only things that kinda suck are the fact we can only take 2 2 minute showers a week due to water supply and we can only make 2 20 minute phone calls becuase the only line we have is the churches and we want to keep it open.
there are 10 of us going up so you can pray for us all.
me, josiah, lissy, crystal, maxie, josh(staff) ian(staff) melanie(staff), lydia(not a student), nd christine(staff, only stying for the first 2 weeks)

these are dry communities but there is lots of home brewing going on, they had a raid a couple weeks ago going through the villages pray that God fills the whole that the people were trying to fill with alcohol.

mount redoubt exploded all over us we had like a centimeter of ash fall on us but we are good to go haha, its cool to have been in a earthquake and a volcano, but im praying for nothing more like that haha.

Godbless
chad

overview attempt

2009-03-07T16:04:00.002-06:00

well i spent up most of the time i was going to write this responding to emails and now i only have a little amount of time to get through one of the longer posts i wanted to do.

well in summary, God is awesome.

as i am nearing the midway point of my school, I am really glad for all the prayers that have been sent our way because as a team we are starting to be very unified and really flowing with the unity of Christ and the holy spirit. I am really blessed to have all you people back home supporting and blessing me as I am here, and as I am moving on towards my outreach phase.

some of the main topics or ideas that I am starting to gain a foundation in are spiritual warfare, intercession, the father heart of God, the other aspects of Gods relationship with us like the bridegroom, the friend, king, lord, etc. if i had my notes with me i would give you biblical references. we also had a week of learning about world religions and a week of world view, where we learnt more about the way that the world sees things which really helped me gain a foundation of why i believe what i believe. (the bible), we had a week on relationships (marriage, friendship, etc.), one idea that is always coming up is finding Gods thumbprint in cultures and in people in general, often when we try to minister to other races we come with a white mans way of thinking and not a biblical understanding, while there most of the time is a heart change behind things that are cultural God sees importance in culture. guitar and singing is not what worship is. wow i am running out of time. i hope to go in depth with some of these things.

one thing that really hit me this week is this next statement.

every idea has consenquences. (good or bad) but it has a consequence.

so next time you have any ideas, make sure it is at the heart of what God wants.
a good way of figuring that out is through the bible.

grace and peace
chad

relationships

2009-02-21T16:02:00.002-06:00

I am really realizing the importance of relationships, I dont know why we as humans let little things cause such big disturbances. we take ourselfs too seriously and just push people off. God is so relational, he doesnt want us to be stuck in religion and not feeling his presence. he wants to hold us in his arms and embrace us but most of the time we choose to do it on our own. God is much bigger than denomenation, but we all see God a little different so there is a place for denomenations in a sense but if your denomenation stops you from being friends or working together with a different denomenation then you arent being the relational being that God meant you to be. God wants us to value relationships with others highly, he wants us to walk not just 1 mile but 2 miles with them, reality is that there is little to no chance that you can walk 2 miles so you always have to be open to forgivness, if it isnt healthy to keep walking you have the right to step back and tell them I"m here for you and i want to work this out but you have to be willing to work this out for me to continue walking right now, but i will be here waiting for you.

God wants us to be able to lay our lives down for others, in humility considering them better than yourself. but at the same time stand strong in what God has taught you dont be waviering on that, but in love show grace.

-chad

5 things i strongly dislike and 5 things i love

2009-02-05T23:11:00.003-06:00

love
1. God
2. What Hes doing in my life at YWAM
3. meeting new people/ new friends
4. ALASKA
5. Dreams for the future

Hate(strongly dislike)
1. How the devil likes to attack me in this place because he doesnt want to let me go
2. schedules
3. 3 minute showers
4. feeling alone even though i have lots of people around me/ missing people back home
5. the stuff that God makes me confront

-chad
pray for me,
God is good

its hard to fit life into one post

2009-01-31T15:53:00.002-06:00

well i am sitting in the library, didnt know about this until today that they have good internet and computers, still unsure if i will be able to upload pictures anytime soon but its ok i have summer to do that.

I want to talk about where our outreach is going, mostly because i didnt know anything about it before i came up here.

well it is a native island, has no trees is very close to russia. it has two villages on it, the people mostly live off the land and supliment it with some sort of assistance from the government(this last part is an assumtion, im sure it has been brought up and answered but i wasnt listening i guess)
its a pretty dark place during the winter, and a very bright place in the summer. it will be cold there even in may, it probably will have snow on it the whole time we are there. we will be involved in doing whatever needs to be done in the churches there are, which im sure will involve showing alot of love to the children.

-soory i realize that was short and vague but i dont have much time

-chad

im alive in alaska

2009-01-23T00:31:00.004-06:00

well i havent really had more than 20 minutes total internet time since ive been here total.

so here is my first post

well alaska is absolutly amazing, the mountains oh boy the mountains. there are 45 churches( population of the city is 5500) in this town which i view as a extreme disunity, but they each have there part i guess. God is amazing. there is a real divercity in our group here and its awesome, we all feel like we should be here and that is awesome. we dove into 2 weeks of lectures, which are like the most intense topics all week long then have a few days off and do it again. God is really stretching us all. we have a diverse student body a german a bolivian and two americans from different parts of the country.

dayna you would love the amount of german i am picking up, but its hard to pronounce all the extremes

mark you would love the yurt village on the shores of the ocean with a view of the mountains

everyone else would love everything about this place.

i really have no time right now, i just found this place with free internet so i should be back but its cerfew in 20 minutes.

went on a cross walk which was like literally carrying a cross through the town which first came off to me as religious and crazy but it was a real good symbol of what God asks us to do

much
lovc

chad

seattle

2009-01-07T02:52:00.000-06:00

well here i am in seattle, my second stop, it is almost one local time which means that it is 3 in the morning home. flying was fun, we had a lot of turbulance coming into seattle. which to what i thought this is fun, its like 6 flags without all the lines. though its a little more scary when you are pretty close to the ground, i mean a mile up there is more room for correction. well i didnt have any inflight entertainment, no tvs, i had a sprite and a gingerale, and nothing else. haha i payed for about a hour of internet because i didnt have anything smaller than a 20 and i didnt read the part where it says it doesnt give change. as this is the first time ive flown since i was a kid, i didnt really know what i was doing and i went through uniteds thing before i wanted to leave and they wanted me to leave as soon as i went through it so i missed kurtis coming to say goodbye, which i am sad about.

my chicago seattle flight was a bit tricky to catch, i had about 12 minutes(due to little delays in my flight to chigago) to get from one terminal to the next( i hope you understand the retardedness of that sentance in itself) and then once i was at that terminal i had to run to the gate i was going to because it was all the way on the other side of the terminal, so i get there and find out that my flight is delayed about 30 min. so after all that effort i was sad.

this airport is a ghost town, im enjoying listening to my mp3 player and its really late and i dont htink i will be able to sleep.

well i should go do some other internet related things
thanks for praying for me

-chad

swarm like fish flies

2009-01-02T18:49:00.002-06:00

to the first square I go
leaping on to it
it isnt really a first square, its just a new pattern being layed
across the snow covered bare floor one i lay my last square down
my hands dont know the pattern of the cloth
i just follow the needle like thread
His own handy work

bear attack

2008-12-30T19:13:00.003-06:00

my sneeze traveled roughly 150 km- 1045km a hour (depending on which study)
yet im still sitting here motionless, pondering how fast my sneeze just went
ring ring goes the phone, bang bang goes the nail, zoom zoom goes my car and on and on
2 quarter tanks of gas gets me living in the past, but the future is inevitably not controllable
deciding on which jacket to bring with me to the future is my biggest concern

fast forward 12 hours

embassy, why are there borders
alaska, will you hold me
fear, this is Gods will, isnt it
life, should come with a 12 step plan
have i been wrestling with God or why does my hip hurt

beaver work

2008-12-29T19:15:00.002-06:00

up to my ears in to do
letters to give
things to find
friends to say goodbye
if only time stood still
trying to fathom the existence of;
self
Gods unendingness
an ability to pack clothing for 5 months into 2 suitcases
if only I could prove I exist

Merry Christmas

2008-12-25T15:05:00.002-06:00

support letter 1st draft

2008-12-21T01:05:00.001-06:00

this is just the rough draft which likely wont be edited at all, but i will look at it more in depth and probably keep it.

Merry Christmas,
From Chad Reimer

Friends and family,

Well here I am less than 3 weeks away from flying to Homer, Alaska. Yes on January 6th I am flying away from my Winnipeg home and spending the next 5 months in Alaska. I am pumped beyond pumped to see what God will do with me through these 5 months. I am going to Alaska to do a discipleship training school with the organization YWAM (youth with a mission) now you may ask what is DTS all about? Well in a few sentences I would say that its is a bible school with a focus on missions. the slogan that YWAM uses for DTS’s is “know God, and make Him known” and that is really what I am pumped for. So basically there is a 3 month “lecture” phase that teaches us more about God and how to serve him with topics such as The Father heart of God, Clear conscious Christianity, Spiritual warfare, Relationships, Christian worldview and much much more. After the lecture phase there is a 2 month outreach where we are going to a Alaskan island with 2 villages on it and we just pretty much applying everything that we have learnt.

Now for some fun facts about Homer Alaska the average temperature in January is -4 C the time from sunrise to sunset is roughly 6 hours in January. The average temperature in June is +10 and sunrise to sunset is approximately 19 hours. Homer also has a population of around 5,500.

I am excited to learn things about God that are so easy to put to the side in a comfortable daily grind kind of life. I am very blessed to be able to have this opportunity, and thank God for everything I have. I’ve put a lot of hard work in this fall/ winter to be able to go, and have been blessed with a little bit of a education fund that I’m using for most of the lecture phase. So at this point I’m not in dire need of financial support but if you feel God calling you to support me in a monetary way I wont deny you. If you do decide to support me in that way it is not tax deductible(though I can find ways around that if your willing to wait till summer) and you can email me or call me to figure more out. I am however asking for support through prayer and encouragement, as that will probably be the best way to support me through this.

I am grateful for the continued support I will receive through my family, friends, and church and would very much appreciate your prayers. If you email me I will probably email you back, I’m not sure if I’m going to do mass emails or not, I do have a Blog that I will probably update sporadically. I am currently looking for a cheap laptop and by cheap I mean cheap so if you know of a laptop with wifi and 40- 60 GB for under $300 which needs a good home let me know.

Grace and peace
-chad

Mailing address: email address: chad.reimer@gmail.com
Chad Reimer chad_has_a_really_long_address@hotmail.com
DTS winter 09
c/o YWAM Artic mercy Blog: withgracealone.blogspot.com
PO box 959
Homer AK 99603 Arctic Mercy Homepage: www.ywamalaska.com

howdy do ya

2008-12-16T19:37:00.002-06:00

well I am a bad blogger, no lying on that one, there are a million excuses that I will not make.

i wouldn't have had time today to blog, but my college and career was canceled and i didnt find that out until i got to my church so i didnt have time to really do anything else so I decided to stay home and start writing a letter to friends and family concerning the next 6 months of my life, and write a blog.

well the past 7ish days have been really cold... i work outside. its a good time, i wear a tshirt, 2 sweaters, two jackets, long johns, jeans, snowpants, 3 pairs of socks 2 tuques 2 hoods, 2 pairs of gloves. and actually then its not too bad.

speaking of weather, i looked at the forcast for homer alaska and its supposed to be like +2 celcius tomorrow.

i have 3 weeks left here , which really, one week work, one week christmas holidays, and then i might work for another week.

today i was going to go buy the rest of the american money i need at lunch time, like 750 plus some of the spending moneyi plan on getting but then i had to go get gas first and then i decided i would wait because i heard on the radio that the canadian dollar had gone up a tiny bit, but by the end of the day it had gone up more than 2 cents, so im glad i didnt buy today.

on the topic of money, the reason i kinda delayed writing a blog was because i had a plan to write this big post on the evils of money and how i hate that its what makes the world go round, i mean we need money for almost everything physical. money can be used for good, but the drive of this world is money, i need money you need money, this is what society is. its a big topic. and its hard to know how i feel. money has given me opportunities up the ying yang.

as of right now i am just asking for support through prayer and taking time to encourage me while im away. though i really wouldnt deny finacial support, mostly just if you feel God urging you to support me in that way. i will have enough money. i just might be living on my income tax return when i get back and may be unable to insure my car, but you know what if thats the worst thing that can happen to me then i am in the top few percent of people in the world finacially speaking. I am also dipping my whole education fund right now, which in a perfect world would be saved for a different day, but im going to stop talking because it sounds like im trying to be a sob story to get people to give me money haha. if you do choose to donate money to me either talk to me sometime before jan 6th or send me a email (chad_has_a_really_long_address@hotmail.com)

grace and peace
chad

Gods not dead. NO WAY. hes alive

2008-12-02T22:19:00.002-06:00

well i only have a short time to blog as i should be in bed right now

i was procrastinating on booking a flight mostly because i didnt like the price, but today i kinda decided that the price wasnt really going to move that much downward in the next couple weeks. so i put in the dates and searched for my flight it was the same price as it was previous days. so i basically prayed that it would go lower and that if it didnt then i would be fine with the price that i payed and it showed up as about $100 less which is awesome.

yesterday i fell from the second floor to the first floor i was stacking sheets of osb and was walking backwards and fell through a stairway that had no stairs, fell down sideways dragged my feet a tiny bit on the ladder but other than that fell straight down landed on my knee and sholder, broke the floorboard with my knee, but that was pretty much the only damage. it was God protecting me, there are so many bones i could have broken, lots of different senarios that could have been played out but i landed pretty much the best way i could land other than a controled jump. i didnt even have time to think as i dropped down, which is probably good as i didnt stick out my arm, which i probably would have broke. that being said i walked it off and was working 5 minutes later.

grace and peace
chad

mustache monday

2008-12-01T20:21:00.003-06:00

nuff said

drop your nets and run (rise up)

2008-11-29T13:05:00.002-06:00

the trees are guiding me
the oceans are calling me
the flame is refining me
and I am gaining speed
so I can rise up (rise up)

but I am falling further
to the place You want me
so we can rise up (rise up)

fear no longer defines me
hope has taken hold of me
grace is falling on me
so we can rise up (rise up)

but I am falling further
to the place You want me
so we can rise up (rise up)

of dread and dreams

2008-11-27T22:09:00.002-06:00

Rant #'s 2, 4, and 7 of the day all combined:
I hate the internet, with travel websites, and youtube taking the top hatred levels. so i am trying to book a flight to homer, alaska. as i have figured out homer isnt a very popular destination so there arent alot of flights there no problem i figured it out and there is at least one flight to homer from anchorage a day so ive been looking at plane tickets for a while, wish i would have gotten my tickets a while ago as they were cheaper but oh well ill pay the extra amount. now here is where the hate starts, i got to book my flight and pretty much every flight i click give me this same messege "We're sorry. Due to changes in airline availability, the fare for your selected trip is no longer available. We have adjusted the fares for all affected flights. The fare for your selected trip is now $ 2360 total. See below." and i get this same thing for pretty much all the flights except for one, it costs about $100 more than the others and thats not a huge probelm but it really ticks me off. oh and why does it take 20 hours to fly to alaska with almost half of it being sitting in airports like seriously. luggage fees dont even get me started on luggage fees 15 bucks for the first bag 25 for the second what is that. thats what i get for flying with united.

alaska or bust

2008-11-18T21:23:00.002-06:00

I'm accepted to ywam alaska homer- arctic mercy!

it starts january 1st so thats like 6 weeks which is craazzy.

I am so pumped to be attending a DTS (disciple training school), it will be a life changing experience.

as to those who say im crazy to go to alaska in winter, mean temperature for anchorage( about 5 hours north but costal and pretty much the same im hoping) alaska in january -9 , mean temperature for winnipeg in january -17 so now whos crazy.

www.ywamalaska.com
www.ywam.org

thank you for your prayers , and continued prayer

-chad

dreams

2008-11-16T18:36:00.002-06:00

I'm kinda fascinated about dreams, mostly just weird dreams. Both dreams dreamt while awake giving some strong purpose to your life, and dreams of the sleep.

I find it interesting that both our fears and our hopes can be explored in a dream. Some people have visions in there dreams, something that will happen, and some dreams are complete halucinations and really have no bearing on anything. dreams can be recurring, these can be the most terrorizing if they arent good dreams. theres so much about dreams that is just weird.

I have alot of weird dreams, lots of dreams that make me sad, lots of dreams that i dont remember anything but the emotions I was feeling, some dreams that i have a hard time figuring out if it was a dream or reality, used to have alot of dreams about work.

recently i have had 2 bad dreams that are somewhat similar in a sense, both with my teeth falling out, which as i just searched dreams is a common dream. first I will tell the dreams and then i will say what the internet says that the teeth falling out means.

first dream: It occurs in a hot tub, not a regular hot tub but one that fits like 30 people, may have been hot springs, i start losing my teeth sometime before i get in the hot tub, there are about 15 people from camp in this hot tub, i keep on feeling my bottom teeth get looser and looser and some snap off, im not really worring about the physical appearance in the dream but am worried about having to go to a dentist. then some of the people start singing a song, which i dont remember the words it has nothing to do about my teeth but its a song that leaves me feeling emmbarrased cant remember the words, and thats the end of the dream.

second dream(more terrorizing): I am at a pool, my mom is there, there are kids I think her daycare kids, one of my moms daycare kids(1 year old) falls into the pool, sinks right to the bottom. i jump in the pool to rescue him though i cant get past the surface of the water, i scramble up to take another dive, same thing i am unable to break the plane of water, like i am floating some point in this struggle my teeth all start to get loose and fall out, i scramble up to dive in , i do this like 4 times all a failure, eventually i am able to break the surface of the water and save this kid, though i felt the full emotion of the struggle to save this kid.

now heres what the website says is a biblical explanation of the teeth falling out..

"A scriptural interpretation for bad or falling teeth indicate that you are putting your faith, trust, and beliefs in what man thinks rather than in the word of God. The bible says that God speaks once, yea twice in a dream or a vision in order to hide pride from us, to keep us back from the pit, to open our ears (spiritually) and to instruct and correct us."

-www.dreammoods.com

i often wake up in the middle of a dream and go back to sleep with the intention of finishing that dream and often i do finish the dream. thats what i find weird. dreams arent all random and it seems as though sometimes you can control your dreams.

one time about 7 years ago i had a dream that i died, there was a hold up at a dollar store and i played hero and got shot thats when i woke up, and thought i was dead, walked around my house thinking i was dead. took about 5 minutes to come to the conclusion that i wasnt dead.

earlier this year i had a dream that i hijacked a oreo truck and licked out the insides of all the oreos

interesting fact: in the 1915s to 1950's half of people in the states only dreamt in black and white

I had a recurring dream that i had for years and years probably from age 8-16 that cant really be explained other than as a tetris game, though it was more horizontal, colours, patterns, and emotions all combined into one dream that often left me very confused when i woke up, and i probably have had that dream like 30 times. same patterns some patterns meant good and some patterns meant bad.

in conclusion dreams are weird

i want you to comment with your weirdest dream

-chad

year in review part 2

2008-11-03T21:19:00.002-06:00

lets try to get back at this..

Got home at 8 in the morning after being up for like 28 hours except for the couple hours of parking lot sleep. pretty much passed out as soon as I got home and slept for a few hours, went to a beaver creek bible camp staff reunion either that day or the day after. oh by the way i didnt shower the whole time i was tree planting so it was from like saturday to next monday with out shower or shave hahaha. I lost 15 lbs within that month of sickness, which if you know me, really isnt good, so I had to make up some weight, i gained 10 lbs a week for the next two weeks. I had a few weeks of good rest and went back to red river soils for a month, really felt God calling me out of my shell and i started talking to the people at work a little more, had a conversation with one guy about biblical conspiracy, guess he watched davinci code or something. took a week off before i left for camp went on a personal quest into the woods for myself from monday to tuesday with my canoe and me, I really had alot of personal stuff to get through before I left for camp and figured i should do it alone. I (accidentally) left my tent at home so i slept(not really) wrapped in a tarp to try to get the mosquitos at bay, but they buzzed so loud that i heard them buzzing even when they wernt there.

Got home, found out my dad was in the hospital with a pulmonary embolism which is blood clots in the lungs and which equalled death if he had gone to the hospital any later. it was a weird week, i wasnt sure how to feel, i spent quite a bit of the week at the hospital. left to go to staff camp at beaver creek bible camp on that friday.

im going to leave camp out and talk about it some other time.

Got home from camp took two weeks off to figure a few things. got a job doing renovations with my friend scott's old boss and have learned a lot from that and am planning on doing it until january. throughout this time i have been trying to let God work through me and show me where he wants me next and at first he was showing me that i should go with ywam and do a dts(dicipleship training school) south africa and then visas wouldnt have worked out for that so i checked for other ones and spain was the next one that was set appon my heart, and now alaska is my final destination (God willing) I think God showed me spain because he wanted me to get my best friend jeremiah interested in going out and doing something, and now he plans on going to spain.

camp review and
Why alaska to come soon
-chad

heart to heart

2008-10-31T15:38:00.002-05:00

Well as it seems my mom could use some prayer for her heart, she went to the hospital yesterday to get a ultrasound on her lungs and heart because there was fluid around her lungs and her heart was enlarged so she left me with the kids, ended up having 11 kids to look after throughout a day. So she went to St. Boniface hospital to get her tests done and it turns out she has congestive heart failure. which is treatable but its chronic, as in her heart is damaged. they think that a virus attacked her heart and that that is the cause for it. she is doing good, but she is under bed rest, which drives her crazy. i think they should probably give her ritalin or something. I told her this is what she gets for claiming that shes going to live to a 100, she replied that she still plans on doing it if shes a healthy 100.

Thank you for your prayers
and a big thanks to doctors and nurses, I think they deserve alot more recognition for what they do

year in review part 1

2008-10-28T20:14:00.000-05:00

I dont know why i felt like i wanted to do this, I assume because it feels like ive done alot of random jobs and grown in alot of different ways in this past year. A year is a funny think to look back at, ill start last september.
So after camp I took a pretty long break which was good and bad, I think I had a month of doing nothing, and most of really was spent doing nothing which was probably detrimental in quite a few ways. I started a job at the beginning of september at Nutri- lawn, I started off mowing lawns but within a week i was driving a truck around and spraying liquid fertilizer, this was actually one of my funner jobs, i enjoyed the driving around and mapwork, and spraying fertilizer was pretty easy ( except for environmental implication) i stayed there for about a month but winter was coming so i started a new job at iron mountain working with pinnacle staffing solutions with the help of my brother-inlaw. This was a job that made me insane, boxes boxes boxes boxes boxes, go there find a box go there find another box my job was finding boxes and since it was all in a very easy system it required no thought. no running, no stepping on boxes, no free thought, ok it wasnt that bad but it was boring, at least i had by brother in law steve to entertain me with his antics. ok so we terrorized through three months of box destruction(sucky part was that i had no part in this destruction) in a couple weeks, and within a month of it I was out of a job, there were 4 of us and they cut 2, i saw it coming for a week and then they told me they had no more work for me, i was sad for some reason, i dont know why.

I was unemployed from mid november to january, I was teaching pioneer clubs on wednesday nights( which is starting again soon) but wasnt really putting my whole heart into it, which is something I have to remember to work on when I start teaching it again. I was grasping for answers about God probably trying to put him in a box I could understand on my own, really was in a downward spiral, usually found sitting around doing nothing, im all for being unemployed to take some time to figure stuff out but I think I should have kept myself busy, it seemed like a downward spiral, which was the opposite of what I wanted from this time off. God wanted to teach me but I was too busy trying to figure it out on my own. in december sometime, I think I broke down and finally stopped trying to build a safe God.

January came and I started a new job at Vita Health Products, a pharmaceutical manufacturing company, not a health food store. So I was a coating machine operator(coated pills with various substances, my machine was in a ten by 12ish room and i had little to none social interaction), pretty much I had three standard operations(which include about 20-30 processes) that I had to remember Operating/ Product Safety/ Cleaning. This wasn't a bad job, it was perpetually boring sometimes, and perpetually annoying other times, i was sick for the first month it seemed. I coated about 3 million pills a day usually depending on whether it took 1 hour or 7 hours to do one batch(when it takes 7 hours to do one batch, you sit and watch the machine for about 3/4 of your shift) everything had to be completely clean and sterilized, surgical mask, hair net, white uniform(mine always got dirty with pill residue somehow or dirty when i cleaned stuff. ive always known how to get dirty, doesnt really matter what im doing. all this in the box work drove me crazy, if you want stories of how crazy it made me i will tell you, i had some very random thoughs going through my mind when I sat for hours and hours most of them illegal.

February 26 a day that all of us would probably rather have never happened, My cousin Renee passed away from organ failure due to her luekemia. It was(is) very hard on alot of people, including me, i was questioning God and why he would take away someone so alive in him, I mean as tragic as it is, death is inevitable, but that doesnt really ease the pain of loss. God has conquered death, giving us hope, and renee would have remind us of that when we question God.

all this in the box work made me want to get out into the bush, that job was the bane of my existence. so i thought tree planting would be a great fit, in the bush, suposivly great money, did I mention in the bush. so I found a company and then I quit my job. so I had about a month inbetween vita health and treeplanting so I was thinking about jobs that I could do for a month and I started a job at red river soils taking bags of soil (30 40 lbs) off a conveyor belt and putting them on to pallets in susquensial order and packing them flat. my brother worked this job a few years before me and lasted all of 4 hours before he quit. I already was starting to feel sick within the first couple days of starting this job, the 10- 12 hour days didnt help very much, i pretty much slept, ate and worked, but I continued to run my body down, I thought it was cold and it would go away, I remember one night where I fell asleep sometime after my dad woke up, I mean he wakes up at 4:30ish but I still went to work, I really have no clue why I did, no one else there worked the full month I was there, most of them just showed up when they felt like it. I think I quit about a week before tree planting because I wanted to get rid of this "cold" which drained the life out of me, gave me a sore throat, made breathing a little harder, gave me a fever, chills, made my mucus greener than green. I ended up working monday and tuesday for my friendly neighborhood strawberry farmer henry epp laying irrigation pipe and planting strawberries, wednesday I power raked for some people from my church, i got home and pretty much passed out for the rest of the day, could really move because of the lack of energy, I went to the doctor on thursday and he told me I had pneumonia, i avoided telling him that i was leaving to go tree planting in 3 days because i knew he would tell me not to go, so I left feeling a little better because of anti biotics.

I left for ontario may 10th I believe, drove the 1100 kms to a small town called nakina, stoping in thunder bay for night. I set up my tent in the rain, met some fairly nice people. started learning tree planting the next day, it took a few days to get the tree depth and spacing down pat and i didnt really excel at anything, I was scarily close to lowballing( least production) our group, the first few days i felt decent but as the week was going on my body was detiriating. I didnt find any Christians within the camp which made me feel lonely in that regard, it was minus 5 during most of the nights, i experienced some cold sweats, alot of blowing my nose, the days were very random weather youd go from snow to rain to sun within a hour it seemed. i got through 1 4 day shift, and would have made more money at mcdonalds. it was "night off" so everyone(besides me, and possibly a couple other people i didnt know) got drunk, i went to my tent and slept through most of it, i was pretty dead. woke up the next day not really feeling any better, had a day off, pretty much asked God to help me not drag this out if it wasnt meant to be. woke up and got on the bus the next day, the bible verses someone before me wrote on the bus roof screamed at me in some ways romans 5:3-4 rejoice in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope. I dont think God had this suffering in mind for me though. i planted trees for maybe 2 hours, each step harder than the last until i could no longer do it, i just went to the cache(place where you leave the boxes of trees)i basically told everyone that I was done and everyone pretty much couldnt argue with me. long story short the boss (probably the only person in the camp who didnt know i had pneumonia) tells me he doesnt want me there, mostly because he doesnt want me spreading anything. i pack up and go home i planned on leaving in the morning but he seemed to want me out of there . I try to sleep in a walmart parking lot in dryden, fail at doing so, so i keep on trucking, up for more than 24 hours with maybe a hour of sleep, arrive home safe and sound, even though i should have probably hit a couple deer on the way home, i definatly drove by alot of them.

lotss of writing, i dont know how many people will read through this all but it is sort of a way for me to learn more about myself by putting this all in words.
part two should be soon..

year in review..

2008-10-27T22:25:00.003-05:00

i am currently writing a post pertaining to the last year of my life, its going to be pretty long..
very long.. i have had alot of experiences this past year, and this upcoming year will hold alot of new experiences..
expect it tomorrow probably

so heres to experiences.
to disregard of boxes.
and to the adventurous heart.

-chad

everest

2008-10-19T17:42:00.003-05:00

Well now that ive waited so long to post I dont really remebmer what"drawing lines in the sand" was I think it had something to do with a conversation around a firepit where me and a few brothers talked alot about how depressing it is to have to say that Jesus is the only way to heaven, we all believe it to the depths of our being, but that line is just utterly depressing, but thats as far as I can develop that thought 3 weeks later. Hope is still the only thing that keeps me going, and I'm glad that God gives us a hope through Jesus.

Before I forget to mention it all together, I am pleased to announce that I am in the final stages of an application to attend a DTS (discipleship training school) at the ywam in Homer Alaska, it all sounds good at this point. I am excited for this next stage in my life, I think it will be a experience of a lifetime, I am ready to be stretched out and learn what it means to be a disciple, it starts in january so it will arrive sooner than I probably think. So continue to support me through prayer.

I got a gift certificate for "the light" a christian book store from my sister for my birthday, and I purchased two books "the barbarian way" and "death by love". I just finished reading "the barbarian way" which I thought was a really good book ( maybe its because in the first few chapters he has a few references to the movie braveheart) it really showed me how complacent and domesticated we have become. I would give it a 4.5 out of 5. heres a few powerful quotes from it "The claim to believe is simply not enough. The call of Jesus is one to action" "your life is unique before God, and your path is yours and yours alone." "Perhaps the tragedy of our time is that such an overwhelming number of us who declare Jesus as Lord have become domesticated - or, if you will, civilized. We have lost the simplicity of our early faith. Beyond that, we have lost the passion and power of that raw, untamed, and primal faith."

life, politics, and drawing lines in the sand

2008-10-08T18:12:00.000-05:00

well this post will kind of start off not very deep and probably end in a very big hole.

well life has been pretty good, and pretty busy lately, mostly just working and hanging out with friends, adventures to friends houses. it was my birthday on sunday and my family went out for thai food for supper, i ate like 2/3 of my supper because jeremiah took me out for lunch. so i talked about how i got into a accident, they arent totaling my car which i would have preferred they do but they are spending 2200 to fix it(but i think that they didnt see something that they need to fix), it drives so im not too worried about it, i would just like for them to toal it so i can get something more me instead of just blah. my life with God has been a little hit and miss lately, i have to put in a conscious effort for anything to feel the way it should be and it seems like i get sidetracked easily, i feel Him leading me to go to a dts in alaska instead of spain now but i just need a tiny bit more of a decision maker from God. thanksgiving family gathering tomorrow which i am pumped about, get to see dayna before she flies away again.

-DISCLAIMER-if you strongly support a political party and take things personal dont read any further

engage rant(mostly unintelligent)
politics are annoying me so much these days. there isnt a political party that isnt on my nerves right now, they all suck. watching the political debate was funny for a few minutes, all the bantering was a little comical, but then i realized that these arent 4 year olds in a sandbox these are LEADERS who are trying to LEAD a country through economic and social disaster. the conservatives are just a bunch of opportunistic close minded wieners, the liberals dont even get me started about the liberals, NDP well in a perfect world i wouldnt mind there social and environmental programs but there economic and left wing loosey goosy morals. bloc party(good band) bloc quebecois(stupidity) green(show me more than just green plans and then i can call you a political party)

one more shot at the conservatives- people still vote for them because they think that they will do something about abortion and the definition of marriage when reality is that they got rid of that stuff from there platform well before the last election.
disengage rant
as this is said i am voting for my christian heritage party candidate Heidi Loewen-Steffano even though she has no chance of winning our riding i want to vote even though i dont agree with everything on there platform it is pretty solid

... drawing lines in the sand to be posted when i have time

2008-10-06T18:01:00.003-05:00

funny story, and answers some of your questions mark.

so on saturday my friend paul wanted some help weeding his strawberry field, and I wanted to go canoeing, so i combined the two and canoed to my friend pauls house. so i set out early afternoon, load up my canoe(found a better technique that doesnt end with my roof all scratched up. going from behind) and set out by myself. about a 2.5km drive to labarrier park, so i get there unload my canoe and set off, now i was launching from about where i took the picture of the dam/spillway whatever its called, so i am kinda stuck on rocks as i am pushing off(disadvantage of my aluminum canoe) using my butt end to push off, so i push off and the paddle blade slips out of my hand and as i start floating further away from it all i cant say is "oh no". now here i have no paddle i am about 10 feet from this dam, i mean its not really pulling that much water over it but still its sucking me a bit, so i have to jump out of my canoe, about waist high, i bring it back to shore as i see someone 50 feet away looking at me and probably wondering what the heck is going on. i launch again, this time success paddle 4 km each way, help weed, take about 80 pictures, spend time with God.

"canoeing hat"

paul epps strawberry fields forever

i started writing a blog post on friday that i probably wont have time to finish until maybe if im lucky later tonight but probably later in the week titled "life, politics, and drawing lines in the sand" so stay tuned for that...

grace and peace
-chad-

p.s. 17 foot canoes arent made for solo paddling, if anyone wants to go for a paddle and im not busy i really could use a good canoeing. i need to make some repairs this week shes not doing so well.

canoing

2008-10-05T14:38:00.002-05:00

its been a while

2008-09-27T20:07:00.002-05:00

I think if I blogged more often it would be easier but as I already spent too much time on the computer usually doing nothing im not sure I can spend more time blogging, I guess I could spend less time on facebook.

Ok where to start, I don't really know where to start but here it goes...
I have been very busy in the past couple of days with my good friend Michael and Ashley's wedding that was yesterday, but before I go any further with that story I should probably talk about Jeremiah's health situation. Ok so tuesday night me michael and jeremiah are hanging out jeremiah complains about naseau he thinks he has food poisoning, well i wont go into the detail details but he goes to the hospital at 3 in the morning of wednesday, doesnt see a doctor for about 4 hours, well ill skip to the end... he had a inflammed appendix and got emergency surgery to remove it it wednesday night, and is still recovering from it, got out of the hospital thursday afternoon, came to the ceremony of michaels wedding, we were both his groomsmen jeremiah stayed for most of the reception but was in a lot of pain and had to leave.

today has been a very lazy day, i dont know what to say about it. i was supposed to drop off my tux before 6 but at about 6:10 i looked at the clock and said "crap" so i have to pay $20 late fee. I caught up on a few tv shows, and watched the capitals game online. this is my day so far and its 8:30pm.
and now im doing nothing and its not very fun
i could go for a fire right now, maybe a late night canoe, a warm summer night would be sweet too. i think im going to go play some guitar and drink some tea on my deck or something like that though. i might just end up watching a movie, i like hanging out with people and stuff but i have been too busy busy this past week that a night alone is alright.

-chad

dont know where to begin and even have less of a clue of where to end

2008-09-17T21:10:00.002-05:00

well its been a while since my last post, and it seems like every day is a whole new set of occurrences, feelings, dreams, nightmares, etc.

In alot of my choices in the past year have been confident and bold and have dived headfirst into them, but sitting here deciding about going to spain with ywam has become something that has made me so unsure of myself, my intentions, my dreams, and God. my brain seems to go ten thousand miles a hour whenever i start to weigh my options and count the costs, i have some real soul searching to do about this I guess. Jeremiah is so sure of going and he will go without me but originally it was me going by myself and so now its a little weird talking to him about it because my decision changes every day.

i dont know how to feel about the last week or so, there was a lot of good times,visiting joel at sbc, a birthday party and a camp staff meeting. but also on the way to the camp staff dealio i got into a accident and now i have some decisions to make about my car and how much i like it and if i can get a new one (alot of money stuff) so far all i have to pay is $400 extra for my drivers but if i have to pay my deductible( if i decided to get a new car) its 200 more, they probably will total my car just because they like to total older cars. so i have decisions to make.

its kind of funny that this money stuff comes up, because me and sophia picked up janette and were sitting in my car waiting for jeremiah to show up and at first i was discussing how i was working very short hours and wasnt sure if i should quit my job or not then sophia offered to pay me gas money and i said i dont care about money janette piped in saying that i was just talking about deciding to quit a job over money which made me think a bit. lets start off with saying that i am 100% mennonite, i think that my statement "i dont care about money" is only half true. when it comes to making the most i can make without big compromises, pinching my pennies, not paying more than i have to, general stewardship of Gods money I care about money. when it comes to stuff i cant control, missed income from volunteering, friends paying me back, i dont really care about money. that being said i still think subconsciously i worry about it.

ive had a really good time with some people who i dont get to see all the time but have seen quite a bit lately especially my dearest germanized cousin dayna who has been a real encouragement and also had alot of fun being crazy with you even though it was mostly just you being crazy haha.

please pray for me as im making alot of decisions, i hope some things fall into place easily but i know that alot of it will take effort and me stepping out of the boat.

grace and peace
chad

God's not safe. but he is good.

2008-09-02T09:40:00.002-05:00

this past weekend my church had family camp. it was at turtle mountain bible camp, which is south west manitoba. I had a really good time, didnt get alot of sleep, learned a bit more about God, did some wakeboarding.

I was going to write about what the speaker was talking about but now i think im just going to talk about a few personal interactions.

As i have written in my blog I was thinking of going to ywam in spain this coming february. Jeremiah is now really wanting to come with me now so i think we will do it together, we prayed about it alot saturday evening. i had emailed them a couple times like 3 weeks ago and they finaly decided to email me back on monday with some great information. im a little heartbroken though, if we go to do a dts in spain it is over at the end of july which pretty much means that there is only a possibility of being at camp for one week.

saturday night we decided we wanted to go sleep in a nearby farmers field under the stars because it was nice out and there werent any bugs, so me, jeremiah, and scott penner slept out there. so we were inbetween swaths lying under the stars with a lighting storm far off in the north( it was a really beautiful moment). jeremiah was pretty much asleep almost right aways but me and scott chatted for a while, wondering how people could put God in a box and discussing how we put God in a box too. it was kinda funny, i was so tired and i started rambling a bit and kept on saying stuff that made sense in my head but it definatly didnt make sense anywhere else. we went to bed and it was good, i tend to be really out of it if i wake up in the middle of the night and that night was no different because when i woke up in the middle of the night i could swear that there was a tractor coming for us ready to make us into bales.

well the reason im home right now writing this blog would be because i cant get ahold of my boss and have no idea where im supposed to be right now, so im going to try to make the most out of this time off and go take a nap and wait for the phone to ring.