It has been a good week. A very stretching week, but a good week. In the mornings, we had Linda Walker talk to us about our identity in Christ and listening to the voice of God. Now, I think that Linda Walker and I are about as different as two Christ-followers can be. Linda is a “big Texas girl” who regularly bursts into tears, declares her love for us, and lets out a piercing rebel whoop whenever she gets excited about something (which is at least every 15 minutes). I must admit that after about the third “WHOO—EE!” on Monday morning, I grimaced to myself and thought that it would be a long week. She is very big into object lessons; for example, one day, at the end of the session, she got a bag filled with random household items and handed them out to the class. I got a tea bag. She said that often God speaks to us through random everyday items, and she wanted us to listen to what God was telling us through these. She then went around the class and asked individual people what God had told them through these items. For a large percentage of the class, the items did seem to have highly personalized prophetic significance. However, while my well-trained imagination could ascribe some cosmic significance to the tea bag, my heart remained convinced it was just a tea bag.

Still, I think that both as individuals and as a group, we learned a lot from her, and by the end of the week, we were sad to see her go. Linda’s strengths compliment my own. Linda is one of the most passionate people I’ve ever met, and a good reminder that true faith centers around the heart, not just the head.

Then, in the afternoons, we did dance. Any of you who have ever seen me try to dance know that it’s not pretty, and I was looking forward to this just about as much as my annual flu vaccination. The first few days felt like that. Since learning has always come fairly easily to me, it was a bit of a novel experience to be the slowest one in the classroom: to not know what I was doing, to not even know what I was doing wrong, and to be unable to understand when people would try to explain what I was doing wrong. Still, by the end of the week, I had discovered that, while dance is not something that comes at all naturally to me, God can and does speak through movement as well as words.

Making all of this week a bit more of a stretch was just being tired. While I have on the whole been sleeping much better (thanks to all for your prayers), I just feel exhausted. I think a large part of this is just because of the sheer amount of socialization inherent to living on a base with YWAM. The vast majority of every single day is devoted to social events, and as an extreme introvert, it gets very draining after a while. Thursday morning was the turning point. I was frustrated with dance, I was frustrated with Linda, I was frustrated most of all with feeling always like I was half-drunk with sleep deprivation, I was tired of the rain and having a small lake in the middle of our floor, and I was tired of always having to be doing things with people and never having the chance to catch my breath. I was out on our porch watching the palm trees get walloped by the winds and rain, drinking tea, and thinking that there was no way I’d make it another five minutes without sleep. All of a sudden, I remembered the tea bag from earlier in the week, and it became clear. Through that tea bag, God was telling me that when I felt most exhausted, when I knew I couldn’t make it the rest of the day on my own, he would give me strength for the journey. I started laughing. God is funny that way.

I guess that the single lesson I would take from this week is that my understanding of God got expanded a bit. God is present as much in what makes me uncomfortable as what makes me comfortable. God is present in the natural as well as the supernatural. God can be present in a dance as much as a sermon. God can speak through a loud Texan as much as a soft-spoken Canadian. It makes you feel small, but a good kind of small: you know you’ve got a REALLY big friend who knows a lot more than you and who’s got your back. And front. And sides.

In conclusion, prayer requests: thank you for all of those who were praying for Haiti and the storm here earlier. They anticipate that the worst of the storm has passed, although we are anticipated to get more rain this week. One of the most exciting things about last week was being able to go into one of the colonias and hand out clothes, hot oatmeal, and tarps to the families there. Please continue to pray for me and rest. While, as I mentioned, I have been sleeping better, I have not been feeling rested. Please also pray for Spanish. Part of being tired means that my Spanish brain stops functioning well, and it’s very frustrating as two of the guys on-base that I’ve been getting close to (Iván and Japet) only speak Spanish and are particularly difficult to understand.