DTS UPDATE...POST 1

Kia Orana everyone!

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year

Looking back on the past five months of DTS brings a mass of chaotic emotion to my heart and mind. God has been so good. As a team, we’ve seen the faithfulness of God in many different situations. We can’t say that the DTS has been easy, but it has been life-changing. Not just for the students, but for the staff as well. God has changed my heart in so many different ways.

I have been extremely blessed to serve alongside so many people from around the world. I have also been blessed to see God work and move in so many different ways.

Lecture Phase went really well. We sat under the teaching of various men and women of God, who were able to pour God’s heart and their wisdom and life experience into us. During Lecture Phase, our team began to meld together as we learned about each other and about God. God broke through various barriers in each of our lives and drew us closer to Him. We began to learn to worship together and to hear God’s voice together as a team.

As staff we began to organize and pray for Outreach from the beginning of the school. After the first month, we decided to go to Tahiti on outreach. In order to bring the whole team over, we found out we first had to travel to Wellington, New Zealand in order to get visas for a few of our team members. We applied for New Zealand visas during the second month of Lecture, and received those visas. We then began to organize places to stay and ministries for our team to join. We received virtually no word back, but we were sure this was what God wanted us to do. We started on the paperwork for our Tahitian visas and started fundraising for our flights. About 2 weeks before we left for New Zealand we finally had the funds to book our tickets. A week before we left, we still had no place to stay in Wellington, and we weren’t sure what we were going to do. I never told the school leader, but the Saturday before we flew out, I told God He had to do something, He had to come through, because I wasn’t going to take a team somewhere with no place to stay. The next morning, we were having breakfast before church, and a guy randomly popped by. He started asking about the trip and if we had a place to stay or not and the school leader said no. He then said his sister lived down there, and we could probably stay with her, not for the whole 3 weeks, but for a few days.

As that accommodation started getting organized, we started to look for places to stay in Auckland as well. One of the pastors we know offered us a place to stay and ministry for us to do. We left the Cook Islands on Saturday, and arrived in Auckland Monday morning (because of time difference). We spent a few hours in Auckland before driving to Wellington. The next day were the appointments for the Tahitian visas at the French Embassy. The visa process was supposed to take 15 working days. The team walked out of the Embassy 20 minutes later with their Tahitian visas. Praise God!

To Be Continued...