DTS Week 3

We added some pictures to our picasa site.
This week a missionary from China was here speaking on the Fear of God. It was very challenging. Everyone here is a little worn out now from the intensity of the week, but we are also very excited at what God is doing in our lives. The fear of God is essentially 2 things: 1. to hate sin like God does and 2. to respect and recognize God as God in every area of our life.

The highlight of the week was when we all were asked to confess our sins to each other in our small groups, believing that confessing them to God in front of people would bring them into light and release us from any shame or guilt. It was a little scary, but it did have a very freeing feeling. It brought each small group closer together. It is a good feeling to know that you can share your darkest secrets with friends and that their opinion of you is not lessened. It was painful, but it allowed a healing and purifying process to take place that was very good. God was faithful to give each of us a renewed sense of forgiveness, and also worked in us to point out some different areas in our lives that we need Him to renew our minds.

We have finalized plans for going on our outreach trip to China now. We will fly to Kunming in southern China on Nov. 4-Nov.18. Then we will split into 2 groups. Some will stay in Kunming and some will go to a different city by bus. We’ll get more details this week.

We finished the smell less pig pen finally. It was hard to communicate with everyone when there was 7 different people in charge and everyone spoke a different language. But, it was fun to build anyway. The pig is named Tinkerbell, and right now it is small and strong. We built the wall of the pen about 2’ high at first, and the pig climbed out of there pretty easily. Today, after an engineering analysis of how many bamboo “dowels” to use, we built the wall 8” higher. We just need to get the pig fat so that he can’t jump any more.

Another highlight was watching the movie Mr. Bean in Thai. It seems that they dubbed the words over into thai, and then translated the thai back into English for the subtitles. The translated subtitles had so many mistakes. “Go he to popcorn ate”, was what it would say for He went to eat popcorn.