Seventh Week?

This is the seventh week right? Okay... Well to start off the week we had the DTS team from LA to stay with us for a week. There are 45 of them and that's only half of them that's here, the other half is in another DTS base. It was just unreal to me to have that many people doing the same thing as me, but in the same time it's great because that means more friends. LA base have more international students. They have people from Finland, Russia, Kazakhstan, Germany, Sweden, and somewhere else that I forgot, but it was really cool.

The speaker this week is Peter Iliyn. He's a Russian descendant. He starts the first day with the story of his dad's childhood. It was really heart-breaking to hear it. I'm going to try to make the short, but here it goes. His father lost both of his parents when he was only four. He was adopted to a family and worked making whiskey. His brother kidnapped him and brings him back. He's adopted again to a family, but the lady of the house wants a little girl not a little boy. He works in the farm and the barn. He has to be awake four o'clock in the morning to collect chicken eggs and if he miss one he gets beat up, which happens very often. Remember that he's still four when he does all this. He lives with the lady for four years and when her husband died the lady brought him back to the church and said in front of the congregation that he's a good for nothing and all he does is make trouble. He got adopted again by a family and he works the same job as he did before, but this time the family really wants to adopts him. But an unexpected thing happen, his brother found him and told him that they're uncle is going to adopt them. He had to make a choice and decided to go with his brother.

Peter's father always tell his life story when he used to be small, but instead of planting the seeds of bitterness to Peter, his father planted the seeds of gratefulness. THAT left me speechless. The life that he goes through is enough to leave God, but it didn't. He was grateful. You can focus on "I" and you can be bItter, or you can choose to focus on "Emmanuel" and you can be bEtter. Tragedy happens and it's up to us if we're going to live in it or move on and let God do great things through it. God can take the most broken people and turn their life around. Would you want to be that person?

I just finished my book report and the book is titled "Blue Like Jazz." "Our behavior will not changed long with self-discipline, but fall in love and a human will accomplish what he never thought possible." God changes our character with the passion of His love and the statement above shows that we can’t do anything without Him. It’s hard to do something for someone when we don’t like the person, and when we fall in love with God, only then do we have the fuel we need to obey.

God is so generous. The fact that He gave His son only was proving enough, but one thing from the book that stuck out to me how prideful we are sometimes to think that we don’t deserve His love. “In exchange for our humility and willingness to accept the charity of God, we are given a kingdom. And a beggar’s kingdom is better than a proud man’s delusion.” That statement just described what I want to have and the only way to have that kingdom is to be humble and be willing to accept His love.

Well... Now moving on to ministry... Basketball ministry is making a really good progress. We're able to finally talk to the Chinese kids. It was hard just to talk to them, but now they're starting to open up a little bit more. The goal by the end of DTS is just to be able to pray for them.

Today is Halloween and we're going to have a dance party for the people in the base. We made our costumes and I'm dressed as a sack of potatoes. It's going to be fun and it's been a great time. I heard that next week will be the best lecture week. So I'm looking forward to do that.

I love you all and God bless you all. Thank you for reading this and thank you for the support and prayer. I will be seeing you soon.