Anyway, our newly established weekly breakfast tradition and pancakes is not what this update is supposed to be about. Rather, I wanted to update you on what I’ve been doing over the past several months and share about what has been happening here on base.
A few of you may recall receiving an update I sent out at the start of the year, in which I said that I was going to be attending, not staffing, another YWAM course – the BCC (Bible Core Course), which started at the end of February and ended in the middle of May. I can honestly say that those three months were simultaneously the best and worst, and hardest, and most intense three months I’ve had in a while. It would seem that I didn’t really know what I was getting myself into when I signed up to do it, which is a good thing because I don’t know if I would have done it had I known what it was actually going to be like. However, after having gone through it, and learning everything that I have, I’m glad I did it and have no regrets about it. But man it was hard.
The workload was such that, unless you were really, really, focused and on top of things and were super efficient and an ace at time management, you would be working six days a week, easy. I don’t know if you noticed or if you know me that well but none of those qualities really describe me. Not that I try to use that as an excuse for anything, it’s just that none of those skills/qualities are strengths of mine. I found it really hard trying to be disciplined and open to working on those areas of weakness and receive correction while understanding and acknowledging and accepting the fact that those areas of weakness are just that, an area of weakness, an area in which I don’t excel, a quality or skill that just doesn’t come easily or naturally to me. Anyhow, I could go further into detail and explain more about it, about my difficulties with it, but that’s not the point of this update. However, I’m not opposed to talking about it, so if you’d like to know more just let me know and I won’t hesitate to talk.
Moving on. Difficulties aside, what did I come away from it with? I came away with a much better understanding and appreciation of the bible, the times and the people it is written about, and a passion to continue to study and read it. Probably one of the biggest and most meaningful things it did for me was that it helped me to see how and where ‘biblical history’ and the rest of ‘world history’ intertwine and come together. It seems that as you grow up in the church you can start to sub-consciously develop a split mindset or understanding of world history. In Sunday school, all you hear and read about are the bible stories of the Israelites and in regular school all you hear about are the old world empires and kingdoms like the Egyptians and Assyrians, and while these are mentioned in the bible stories, the focus is never on them, so it can feel like there are two lines of history that never cross paths. However, we never realize, or at least I never did until recently, that the lines are one and the same. It was so cool when we laid stuff out on timelines and put dates to the stories, events, and people of the bible and saw how they interacted with the empires and kings and kingdoms of their time. It was super cool when we saw pictures of a wall that had been removed from an ancient Assyrian palace and put on display in the British history museum that had etched out in stone, in hieroglyphics, a story from the bible. A bible story recorded on what is a piece of ‘secular’ world history! So cool. It really made everything come to life for me.
While I was doing the BCC, there was another school going on as well here on base – the AW80 DTS, and while both of those were going on, there was a new building going in, so it was a bit crowded here for a while. It was a really cool time to be here though, so much change and growth was happening. It seems as though we are in a transitional season here, going through growing pains of sorts. The new building is to permanently hold the offices, as to this point they’ve been running out of some mobiles behind the main house. It also is where we’ll have the lecture hall and dining room and kitchen. The office and lecture portion are fully functioning and being put to use, but the kitchen has yet to be put in and probably wont be for maybe a year. Until then, we will continue to use the kitchen and dining facilities of the main house.
So the new building is finished for now. All that needs to happen to it for it to be ‘complete’ is for the kitchen to be put in and the heating system hooked up, both of which again will happen eventually in the next year or so. They went with a radiant floor heating system, which if you’ve had any experience with Kiwi building is a really, really big deal. I imagine it could easily be the only building in the North Canterbury region to have radiant floor heating. Their heating and insulating systems here are not impressive to say the least, if even in some cases existent. However, that is something that they are working on. The government is providing incentives to families that get their homes properly insulated. Funny thing though, I would’ve thought heating practices and technology to be the same worldwide, but I have come to find that they are not.
Another funny thing, while the building and the schools were going on, all of the builders made their residence on a plot of land behind the staff apartment mobiles. Basically, they created a little gypsy village! I’m deadly serious. The lived in these fifth wheel trailers and mobile homes of sorts, which were quite impressively remodeled I must say. The builders were volunteers from another missions oriented group and lived off of support as well during the span of their projects. They were some really cool individuals and families and I learned a lot from them and feel honored to have met and known them.
Well, I guess that brings us to now. Things have settled down a bit, there’s just one school going on, the Snowboarders DTS, of which I am part of, and excited to be so. We are already starting week 4 of the lecture phase, which is difficult to believe – man time goes so quickly when you are busy. But I will save that update for another day.
Take care guys,
peaceandlove,
jon
