Just a few more days...

I can't believe that it's already Wednesday of the last week of training. So many things have happened in the last 2 months while at training, but like I shared with everyone on TREK this morning, this whole time, the most significant thing that has happened in my life has been looking at my life from the outside in (in a sense). So many times as Christians we can go on with life just okay with being okay, and not really realizing that being a Christian is a day to day decision to come under God's authority. After hearing all the speakers, I've realized that there is so much that I have learned, and there is even more stuff that I still have to learn. In a way, being on TREK is like getting taken out of "real life" and being able to look into our lives from the outside. TREK staff has really emphasized that these 6 months should not be it......but that it should be a lifetime commitment to becoming more like Christ, and this is just the beginning.
I've been able to see things in my life that I need to surrender to Him, give up to Him, ask Him, and praise Him for the grace that He has for me. I want to challenge you as you stay updated with me, that you may feel God calling you to a deeper relationship with Him and I pray that you come to that realization DAILY! I pray that you be encouraged to be "covered in the dust of your Rabbi."
As I'm preparing to go lead a team into a country that I have no idea about the language, culture, people, etc., I hope that I will be surrendering everything to Him in every second! I am praying that our team jump into this opportunity to jump alongside with God and into what He's already doing in Japan.
Please pray that as we leave Vancouver on Monday morning and get to Toyota City, Japan (city we'll be living in) 24 hours later, that we would have safe travel, stay healthy, patience for our team members, and most of all, be witnesses for Him wherever we're at. Thank you for all your support, love, prayer, etc. I feel so blessed to have people like you come alongside us in prayer! Blessings upon blessings!
In Christ abounding Love,
Joanna

That was Breanne

By the way...Breanne wrote that last blog update. Just so you know.

I was at "Tabor" today!

So today we went to Tabor home. It's a nursing home, and we went there for our work duties. We introduced our teams and sang 3 hymns. We were really feeding off the energy of the crowd, it was a great audience, and we only came to know this more as we engaged with our fan club later on. After putting Blue in the back, I moved towards a group of ladies as the staff handed out some sort of juice beverage. "Does this have beer??" asked one of the decrepid, elderly women. "No? Then I don't want it." Later she drank two glasses and when an attendant asked if she would like more she replied "NO I DON'T WANT ANY."
Later I met a cute little old lady with pink lipstick, pink nail polish and pink blush, and slightly unevenly drawn eyebrows. Her name is Emily and she almost made me cry from laughing. I don't really remember what we were talking about before Breanne came to join me and really get the conversation going, it was the best social experience I've had in Canada so far. Breanne kept asking about the cat fights and wrestling matches that probably happen at the nursing home, and about what another lady, named Mary, told her earlier. Emily put up her fluffy, sparse eyebrows and rolled her eyes, implying that Mary doesn't always tell the truth. Mary told Breanne (who is my favourite) that she was a famous tap dancer/actress and traveled Europe, and when asked how old she is she wasn't entirely sure, but suspected she was in her late 20s by now. Mary once told Emily as they sat by the window that she saw her sister coming to get her, but Emily said no body was there, and that made Mary angry. When telling this story for the third time, Emily laughed to herself and closed her eyes, saying she should've said there was only a bulldog outside.
When we finally left the home, we all laughed heartily in the afternoon sunshine about the senile (and sometimes creepy) old people we met.

There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations--these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit--immortal horrors or everlasting splendors. This does not mean that we are to be perpetually solemn. We must play. But our merriment must be of the kind (and it is, in fact, the merriest kind) which exists between people who have, from the outset, taken each other seriously--no flippancy, no superiority, no presumption. And our charity must be real and costly love, with deep feeling for the sins in spite of which we love the sinners--no mere tolerance, or indulgence which parodies love as flippancy parodies merriment. Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbor is the holiest object presented to your senses. If he is your Christian neighbour, he is holy in almost the same way, for in him also Christ vere latitat, the glorifier and the glorified, Glory Himself, is truly hidden.
-CS LEWIS (The Weight of Glory)

A 3-hour trip to the emergency room...

One of the things that we do twice weekly while on TREK is "work duties," which is basically serving God and His people in practical ways like doing gardening, cleaning gutters, rake leaves, pull weeds, etc.
So today, while doing some work duties around the MARK Centre, Dave (the only guy on TREK) carried a heavy broken pot that was filled with soil and while he was lifting it up to place it in the trailer, it slipped and a chunk of the pot cut into his left hand and made it bleed profusely. I, along with Lisa (another fellow TREKer), took him into the Abbotsford Emergency room. I would say that the gash in his hand was about 2-3 inches long. It was also about half an inch wide. It was bleeding a lot (did I already mention that?). But once the doctor gave him that sweet shot, Dave was all good! The doctor told us, "You guys can watch this...but I don't want for you faint!" So I got to see everything! Lisa chose not to watch most of it. It was awesome! Stitching is such an art...I kinda figured that out seeing the doctor give him the 10 stitches on his hand.
We praise God that it wasn't a deeper cut because that would've really been a lot worse for Dave and all of us! Please join us in praising God for keeping Dave safe, and pray that this will heal properly, not get infected, and not stop Dave from learning and growing everything that God has for him at this point.
Thank you for keeping up with me on this blog! This week, Randy Friesen (General Director of MBMSI, the organization TREK is under) is speaking to us about "Spiritual Authority." We have already learned so much, and we still have 2 more sessions with him. One of the main statements that has really stayed with me since he said it on Monday, was "Satan knows how much authority Christians have. But Christians don't know how much authority they have!" Wow, there have been so many things that Randy has said, that I'm just amazed! I have written things down, and once he finishes tomorrow (Wednesday), I will write a more in depth description on here.
Once again, thank you for your prayers and support! Blessings upon blessings!
In Christ,
Joanna

The Amazing TREK

So Saturday morning, the TREK leaders and interns came banging on our doors at 5 in the morning, and were yelling, "GET UP! You have 7 minutes to be downstairs and ready for breakfast or there will be a penalty!" Little did we know that it was ready for the day! As we came out to the rainy dark morning, they told us that we were going to be doing the Amazing Race all day and we had 5 minutes to go back to our room to get a change of clothes for later, a backpack, a water bottle, and a toothbrush. So just imagine how hilarious we all looked with our disorganized faces and bodies. Yeah, we looked hott all day (I was sarcastic right there)!
The Amazing Race, for those of you who don't know what it is, is a game where teams compete with each other by completing different missions and after every mission, you receive a clue that leads you to the next mission.
We did about 20 some missions throughout the whole day. Close to half of our missions we had to walk/run through the misty day, and so we were pretty wet. And since I injured my knee this past summer, it was really painful at times, but it was worth it! We had an assigned driver, and we had to tell her where to go. I was appointed the navigator because "I have good direction," or at least that's what people around here say. So it was a fun day of figuring things out as a team.
In our team we discovered that everyone rose to the level and excelled in what they are good at. It was awesome to see how our team fit together and how everyone had different talents that we needed at certain points of the day.
These are a few of the things that we did throughout the day:
search for 6 bandannas (1 per team member) outside at 5 o'clock in the morning when it was dark and raining, eat rice, sardines, and drink a liter of Coke for breakfast, literally search for a needle in a haystack, do a firemen work-out outside in the wet and cold day, each person dip there face in a bowl of chocolate pudding and get a gummy worm with our mouth, and before wiping the pudding off our faces, dip our faces into a bowl of Rice Krispies cereal to get another gummy worm, as a team eat about 2 really dehydrated squids (tentacles and all), eat lunch at a Sikh temple (an Indian religion that branch off of Hinduism) and some of the food was good, but some of it made me gag (but it was a good experience to be in a different culture, religion, and see the hospitality that these people offered us), take the SkyTrain from Surrey to Vancouver, and our final mission, take the SkyTrain to the SeaBus, and then run a huge flight of stairs to find the 3 TREK interns screaming, "YEAH, team Japan! Go team Japan! You got it!"
Yup, our team won! After a long, wet, tiresome, crazy, gagging, adventurous day, we won! But even if we hadn't won, our team would've been just as happy with the day, because of the memories and how we worked together.
Some of you might be asking, "Why did they make you do this? What does this have to do with missions?" Well, it has everything to do with missions. You see, sometimes, while on the mission field, we will be thrown into situations that are unusual, uncomfortable, and sometimes, not rational. We will have to eat food that we are not used to eating, we will have to run to get to some places, we will have to work together as a team, and we have to figure how we will resolve problems or in the Amazing TREK was the clues or hints.
We learned a lot from this day. We learned a lot about each other and got a glimpse of how we will work as a team in Japan and the other team in Peru. God is going to do some amazing things through both of the teams, because both teams have discovered that as we join our talents and gifts together for the sole purpose of furthering His Kingdom, there is no stopping!

God speaks when we become silent...

There are a lot of things that I learned over the Silent Retreat. But I will highlight on the ones that really stuck out for me. The first few hours, I took a nap. Then woke up 5 minutes before dinner was over......not too much fun to jet out of bed and eat cold, dry hamburgers. After dinner, I wrote in my journal for a while and it was awesome. I read a lot of my Bible and had some awesome down time with God.
Then........I fell asleep on Wednesday night.......and woke up at around 1:30 p.m. on Thursday. If you're wondering, it was around a 15 hour sleep. Yeah, I'm a good sleeper, what can I say, it's my gift.
From around 2:30 until 5, I read some more of my Bible, wrote in my journal, prayed, and sat in silence. At 5, I, along with everyone else headed down to the Great Room for dinner. We didn't start eating until around 5:20ish, so we sat around for 20 some minutes in silence, with everyone else sitting around each other. Some people might have felt weird, but there is something powerful about enjoying each other's company without feeling like we had to talk, be crazy, or funny (that was hard for me). After an amazing dinner that SonJa prepared, I went out with my mentor, Joanna (yes, we are both named Joanna and she is my mentor) for about an hour. MBMSI has set us up with mentors from the Abbotsford area, and they assigned Joanna Shantz as my mentor. She's awesome! She did TREK about 4 years ago, and she was the leader of her group as well. It has been awesome to get insight and wisdom from someone who has been in the same position as me. And so during the Silent Retreat, TREK set us up to meet with our mentors for about an hour and talk through stuff half-way through the retreat. It was really good to get some thoughts straightened out by verbalizing them and Joanna helping me. As she prayed for me, she quoted some verses from Psalm 23, and after she finished praying she told me that she felt like I should read and look into Psalm 23. So I got back to my room and did that. I drew a line down the middle of my journal, wrote one verse of the Psalm on one side and then wrote some things that really stuck out at me about the verse on the other side of the line. Then went on to the next verse. I did that to all 6 verses of the Psalm and it was a very affirming time from God. The main thing that I got out of that, and it was probably the highlight of the whole Silent Retreat was that "I will not fear evil, for You [God] are with me." Even though there have been some very hard times in life, God has always been there for me, He's here for me right now, and He will be there for me later. And that was very evident as I went through the Psalm.
After I finished with that Psalm, I fell asleep. I woke up the next morning and we had our debrief with Steve Klassen (TREK founder and MARK Centre owner), and it was really good to hear everyone else share a bit about what they had experienced throughout the retreat. I love the people here. I think I've mentioned that before on my blog, but in case you missed it, I love the people here! God is evident in everyone of us and it's awesome to dive into this time of my life with them.
That's kinda a small overview of the Silent Retreat from my perspective. I will be writing about our "adventure" that we had yesterday and it started at 5 a.m. Stay tuned.......

Silent Retreat!

Tomorrow we start our Silent Retreat! We are all a little tired, exhausted, and ready for this Silent Retreat. We have been learning so much and have had so much wisdom and knowledge poured out to us that we are really looking forward to these next few days so that we can process what God is trying to teach us. We can't have any form of communication with anyone. So that means not talking to people here or people at home. So no internet. Just so you know that I will not be on here or Facebook and MySpace for the next few days. We can only read our Bible, use our journal, and be with God from 12 pm Wednesday thru 12 pm Friday. We're staying here at the MARK Centre and we will have the whole Centre to spread out in. It will probably be raining all week so we can't really go outside much, unless we don't mind getting wet, which is not really cool. We all really wanted to be outside, but we'll see what happens.
Please pray that God shows me what He wants for me to grasp on to right now, and what He wants for me to let go of. I'll be praying for a lot of things and most of all, people. I'm really looking forward to just having it be God and me to communicate with each other. Thank you for your prayers! Blessings!

Some pics...

This is most of the people that are here on TREK .
Some introductions of who is who and what team they're on: Me (Japan), Amber-Lee (Japan), Roxie (Peru), Simone (Japan), Brianna (Japan), Lisa (Peru), Amber (Japan), Dave (Peru). We crammed into an elevator, after I forced some of them, and took this picture after we met with all the people that work at the MBMSI office here in Abbotsford.

Lisa, me, and Amber-Lee after church.

Simone, me, and Darlene......Darlene likes to be down with her bad self.

Brianna, me, and Amber-Lee at After Thoughts (an amazing "dessert cafe" that is known all over Abbotsford for their desserts like amazing cheesecakes, etc.) at our first Team Time.

So one night, Amber-Lee, Breanne, and I wanted to write a poem for our cooks, Gay and SonJa, so we wrote this one. Their names were cut off when the picture was taken, but the poem starts with: Gay and SonJa...and then you have the rest.
And the part of them using the rice "thrice" is because they know how to use leftovers to where we can't even tell....and it's amazing food! We love them......a lot!