Saturday, March 5, 2011

I can't even remember everything that happened since the last time that I updated. So many things have happened obviously...its been like three weeks or even a month since I last wrote an update. 

I don't think I have much to say. I have learned many things. The interesting thing is that they are things that my brother had told me about, even my mom had said that I had problems with it. God had to use a really close friend to show me that he wanted to change that about my character.

We also helped the base to make possible "Baja and Beyond", which to my understanding is a program that the leaders organize to raise funds to support the base. It was craziness at the base! I got to hang out a lot with one of the teams, and ended up having a great conversation that was encouraging to keep pursuing ministry anywhere and to keep having hope for those people that seem really far away from God. 

I also had my debut as a kindergarten teacher! haha. Yes it happened. After telling myself that I would never teach because the kids never obey or listen to me, I ended up teaching. Amazingly the kids did exactly the opposite of what I thought they were going to do! YAY!! This means happiness to me! I love the kids they are amazing! 

Other than that, if you didn't know I wanted to do my DTS (Discipleship Training School) in Germany. Turns out that I am no longer going to do it there, my reference forms got there too late, so I was too late to start the Visa process. This has brought a great uncertainty about my future. I have not decided yet if I should do my DTS in the base in Ensenada, which is like an hour away from where I am right now, or wait a few months and do my DTS in June, or even September. Please help me out by praying for me, or supporting me financially, as I have a decision to make in a short amount of time. 

Thank you for everything! :)

This is a video of the class I gave to the kindergarten. I was teaching the ABC. :) 

http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=1659905214859 

Sunday, February 6, 2011

Hallo Everyone!

As I am getting into my third week of being here, I'm noticing that what I do every week is pretty much the same things. Clean, translating, Circulo and more cleaning. Even though, unfortunately I couldn't go to the Circulo Andante this week....sad. I am going to try to get more involved in other things, like the Zona Norte Ministry, of which I will describe in detail when I go this week. Pray for that ministry please.

I did learn something new this week,  before I left Honduras to come to Tijuana. I had been reading Psalms and David talks a lot about bringing God's justice. I asked God what does he mean by justice, what is justice? To my surprise the times I have translated for the DTS, the speaker had been talking about justice. I am not sure if I can give an accurate definition of it, but I have an idea of what it is and I want to be part of a justice movement for God. I hope and pray he helps me out with this. 

A comment on other things I have learned this week I can only say this: 

As missionaries I pray that we don't spend our money on expensive tea parties with those who think they are important because they have some kind of power. But rather, really humble ourselves and spend our money on things that will transcend. 

Other than that, I have been reminded of starting to work to do my Discipleship training school. Whenever I have my letter done, I will try to post it on the blog, or if you want to receive a letter from me just ask me, and I will send it to you. I still need your support in prayer and financially. 

I want to buy a travel insurance that is only 45 dollars, so if you want to help supporting me with this, you can send me money using the Donate button in the right column in this page. Other than that I have staff fee's that I need to pay, it's 50 dollars a week and I have been here three weeks, and there are more weeks left to be here. So if you can help me that would be amazing! 

Thanks for the prayers, they are really helping, believe me!

Thursday, January 27, 2011

Hey everyone!
So many things have happened in this second week. I still feel like I have been here in Tijuana in like forever! Well most of this week has been about service, actually everything about being in Tijuana is about service. Every Tuesday and Thursday we go to the "Circulo Andante" and what I do there is help out a friend with her kindergarten class. I just got back from it and today I started to get closer to the kids. I think that they are having problems remembering my name, so it it will be a little hard to start gaining a place in their hearts. I really want to have a place in their hearts and be an example of Christ to them. They are all just so full of joy, I can't help to look at them and not remember those days where I played all the time and how I loved to color, (I still like to color.) Overall being involved in this program is just a great blessing.

Other than that when I am at the base I have been working in hospitality. On Sunday there was a presidents meeting, presidents as in YWAM base presidents. Courtney, Haley and I agreed to work on our day off to prepare the rooms and the conference room so that they could get together and pray for all the bases. Today Brett Curtis, who is in charge of the three bases that are part of San Diego Baja, talked to us about what was being said in this meeting. He said that there have been prophecies of a second wave of missionaries to the world, he invited us to be part of this, I am in! I am glad he told us about this, but the highlight of this week was not that. I think it was on Tuesday when we had worship...WOW! It had been a long time since I have enjoyed worshiping God as good as that morning. We were all just into it, God was really moving our spirits with joy and he wanted us to get rid of our doubts. We wrote on a piece of paper all the doubts in our lives and we threw it to the ground, it might sound like a simple thing that we did but it felt so good, it was like a faith boost. I just know I am so glad to have God in my life, and praising him is just amazing, that is one thing I just can't wait till it happens, being in heaven and everything we will do is praise him, how awesome is that!

So, yes that was the highlight of the week. Other than that life in the base is great, I am safe here and people who are in charge of me are taking good care of me. Thank you so much for you prayers and support! God bless you! :)

Wednesday, January 19, 2011

So YEAH!! I made it!!
It has been practically a week since I got back to Tijuana. I am receiving the Perspectives class and I am also a Mission Builder at the base, which in other words it's a volunteer.
How has my week been? It has surely not felt as if I have been here for a week, it feels like I have been here more time. There is a lot to do in a base as big as this one. We have received teams that came to construct, four houses in one weekend...crazy! Unfortunately I couldn't build on those days, there was a lot of people who were here, 100 of them, or more. Well the point is that I have been making beds and cleaning rooms. I will also prepare the snacks, tomorrow I will be trained to work at the coffee shop. Overall I like this, I really like it that I am not doing the same thing every day, there is always a new thing to do. :)

So, yesterday I went to the "Circulo" which is an after school program where we give the kids bible lessons and also teach them. The kids that come to this program are the kids of the families in which the " Homes of Hope" teams have built a house for. It's really nice to go to this community and see all of these kids, and know that God has blessed them so much with a brand new house. It's even better to know that the relationships with these families are still there. So the fun thing about this is that I go there and if you didn't know, in Honduras where I am from we refer to other people as "vos" not as "tu" like they do in Mexico and most of the Latin American countries. So I was with my friend Dina who is the teacher for the kindergarten class. As she was presenting me to the class, well during almost all the class I was trying to remember to refer to the kids as "tu" and not as "vos" which was kind of weird for me haha.... well yeah hondurans understand this I think. :P
Today I received my first "Perspectives" class, I will be receiving them every Wednesday. It was a good class, we had a lot of reading to do and the class was basically a review of the homework. I also translated the class  for the DTS, which I really enjoyed it. The lesson that was given was a really good reminder, of my great friend Jesus! :D
This is what has been going on, I am not that inspired to write more haha
Talk to you guys next week!
God Bless you!

To those who donated money to me, I want to thank you so much. Thanks for letting God use you to bring a full of blessings experience. May God multiply it to you! :)

Friday, January 7, 2011

God is Good!! God is Good!! God is Good!! God is Good!! God is Good!!
I will never get tired of saying that, never!
You know that I was asking God to provide money for me to go to serve at Tijuana and receive the "Perspectives on a Christian World view" class. On Sunday I had a talk about this with my parents. They told me that the way we were going to figure out if I am going to go to Tijuana was if God provided the money for me. I made a budget of the whole trip and came up with a number, which was about $915, of this I only had  $257. I needed about $700 in total. I honestly got intimidated by that number. On top of that my dad said that if the money was not in by Friday then I was not going.

I started worrying about this, I felt my faith was really low. Then one day I figured out that what I needed was more time in the word. My dad preached that same Sunday and he said something interesting to me, "Faith comes from hearing". I usually thought about that as in people who don't know Christ as their savior. They need to hear the WORD in order to believe it. What my dad said after that was "...in order to have faith you need to read the bible". I was like oh my that is so true, I remembered that before I went to Mexico my faith was stronger because I was reading the bible constantly and I even wrote down bible verses that give confirmation on provision and that God is there with me. It is true you can make your faith stronger through reading the bible more, and getting to know God's nature. (Psalms is perfect to get to know him more)

What did I start doing?  I started dedicating more time to God. Not only sitting down for a period of time and praying, I started doing it all along the day. The distractions I used to have are no longer distracting me from God. They say "God honors those who honor him", and I felt I started honoring him, now he honored me! Yes God provided the money I needed. I just saw God provide $1,000 in less than a week. You can't tell me God isn't good.

I still need your prayers, keep praying for me please, and thank you so much if you have been praying for me.

God bless,
Steph

Thursday, December 23, 2010

I wish I had more to say right now. I haven't posted anything since the whole lesson that God was teaching me to love myself and to not feel bad for the way he made me. It was a life-changing life lesson. Hope you can get something good out of it. :)

Sooooooooooooooooo....
I just finished the three months in which I was in YWAM Tijuana Del Mar taking care of that lovely little boy I am within the picture. His name is Angelo, he was a joy in my life, so young and God already used him to teach me things like patience and how to love and trust him more.
Now I am moving to the next phase in my life. Before I left Honduras to spend three months in Tijuana, I remember my brother trying to convince me to go to Mexico instead of going to Germany and doing my DTS at that moment. Which I did not like at the moment ¬_¬ He told me that if I go to Tijuana, there would be a lot of doors opening up for me there and that I just never know when someone is going to be like hey you should come with me and I will help you out. He is a wise man and he knew that things like that could happen, I didn't think about that before. As a matter of fact he was right, it did happen. The last Friday I spent in Tijuana I actually got into a very interesting conversation with a friend. We were talking about my future and how I felt God wants me to do missions. So she told me about a class that they were going to have in Tijuana for the next three months. It’s a class about worldview perspectives; it overall teaches you about evangelizing the different cultures of the world. I got really excited about this class and I really wanted to do it. I was even more shocked when she said she was going to give me a donation so that I could do the class. I couldn't believe it! God had totally changed my plans now, I was not planning on going back to Tijuana the original idea was to go back to Honduras and since I didn't have a thing to do I would do college for one semester. NO WAY! That’s what God just said through that. I love this about God he changes your plans when you least expect it! So my new plans are

1. Go back to Tijuana, be a volunteer and take the class.

2. Fly to Germany and do my DTS. (Discipleship training School)

3. Start my career in the University of the Nations.

What I like about all this is that God is preparing me to do missions and I know that I may break down the next steps in my life into three different points that may change in the future. God may have better things for me who knows. I am really excited to go back to Tijuana and see my friends. I found a family over there and I am so happy I did, they made my days happier! I can't stop quoting the things we said all the time. Haha!

So I want to ask you for your prayers. I need a whole army of prayer warriors praying for my protection, praying for my family and also for financial support. Thank you so much! 

God Bless you!  

Friday, November 5, 2010

I actually had one of the most amazing weekends. I had so much fun, building up my new friendships, games night laughs, pizza, tacos, and an amazing sermon preached on Sunday.  I mean all my weekend was just fun, God has blessed me with my cafe family.  

Today that is not the case. I had a good day if you look at it at a superficial perspective. Today Angelo and I bonded even more, we play a whole lot more, and he trusts me more. I am really happy about this. Now looking back at my weekend I made some decisions that were probably not the ones I should have made. It is not the bad decisions that are making me feel bad. Well actually they are in a way, I feel like I want to talk with God, and as a matter of fact I do talk to him. But there is something that is separating us; I feel that is my sin. I actually hate feeling this way, because it is not the way that God wants me to feel after I ask him for forgiveness, it's as if I did not believe that he is merciful.

So, I wrote this two days ago. So that you can understand this better I was struggling a lot because I was feeling guilty. I felt guilty because many people had said that the way that I had been dressing was not appropriate. As you know the bible says that it is better for you not to be a reason to make others stumble. So this was killing me, one of the desires in my heart is to honor God, and knowing that I was a reason for others to sin was the worst thought for me. In a talk I had with my temporary father he mentioned that someone had talked with him about the way I dress. After he said that all I could do is cry and cry, he said I should have some time with God. I went to the back of the main building of the base and cried, even if I tried to stop crying I couldn't stop. The worst of all of this was that I felt that there is no one in this place who actually knows me and can talk to me about this. I prayed, I kept asking God, what is it that you want to teach me, what do you want me to do about this? I did not get an answer that night. I just knew that whatever it is that he did it was for my good.

Two days later I finally got the opportunity to talk about my feelings with friends who know me. My girl friends after I told them about it, they were like STEPH!!! Come on! You cannot let others bring you down like that. God made you perfect just the way you are you don't have to feel bad about it. You know that you don't do things with bad intentions. Actually an amazing girl I met here told me that too. It is really comforting to hear this.

I think that I actually knew about this before, it still hits me how important it is that God repeats things to us. Many times as others pray for us we listen to what they say and we think oh I already know what they are talking about and we kind of receive what they are saying but we are actually tuning out on what they say, we don't really open up our hearts. Why is it that we can't realize that it is GOD who is telling us this, if he is saying this, then it is because it is helpful for us in the moment or because he will soon put us through a test and we need this scripture to hold on to.

I find it very fascinating the way that God works through things. I had to go through all this pain to learn this, and actually I think that part of my pain was part of the devil's lie. He made me believe that it was my fault that some guys find themselves in sin because of the way God made me. I have a responsibility with this; I know it and understand it. At the same time the devil made me believe that it was completely my responsibility to make sure that no guy sins because of the way God made me. Now I know that it is also those guys who have to start controlling their thoughts. I know that there are many beautiful women out there, they cannot control the way they dress so that they don't sin. The evil one has bombarded our world by selling out image, beautiful women with hardly any clothes on. I know I am not a guy but I think it must be hard for them to contain themselves. But I don't think it is impossible for them to stop seeing these women and falling into the sin of lust.
This is all about where you have your eyes put on at the moment, if someone is concentrated on women rather than on God then it is very likely for them to fall into this kind of sin of lust. But when you have your eyes where they are supposed to be, looking at God, then it is easy to fall out of this sin; it is easy to look at other women in the way God looks at them. Obviously because if you look at others through God's eyes then there is no way that you will be sinful. I know this is true because I have asked my friends about this whole issue and they have told me that they have never seen me in that way, and when I look at the type of testimony that they have, I know and I can see that they are men who are in search of God's heart, in search of God's thoughts.
This doesn't have to be only about lust, it is about ANY sin. When we start looking at any situation in our life, anything that God has created through God's eyes then there is no way that we will be sinful. As humans this is a very hard but important task that we need to do, because the devil is out there looking for any way possible to make your thoughts be the thought that he wants you to think. Remember when the devil was tempting Jesus, he was using scripture to try to make what he was saying as if it was Godly said. I feel that, that is what the devil did with me; he used scripture to make me feel like I was the worst.
What I immediately think after I say all this is prayer and fasting. It's so important prayer, prayer, prayer. This is one of those things that God repeats all the time, one of those thing that I have a lot of trouble getting some discipline on, but it is true that if you don't pray to God to protect your thoughts then even if you pray and pray and are really close to God, on the moments you are not talking to him you might fall in sin because of the evil thoughts the devil puts in our minds. This is just basic things that all of us should know, and not only know but understand and take action. I pray to the Lord to help us all out with this, that we may always walk with him and see everything and everyone through his eyes.


There are a few things that God taught or re-taught me in the past week and these were:
1. You are good just the way that you are, you don't have to feel bad around others just because of the way God made you. 
2. be careful of what you wear.
3. Learn to love others even if you think that they are the reason for your pain.
4. Keep praying and asking God to protect your thoughts from the evil one.

 When tempted, no-one should say, "God is tempting me."  For God cannot be tempted by evil, nor does he tempt anyone.  James 1:13

“You knit me together in my mother’s womb. I
praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully
made; your works are wonderful, I know
that full well”       Psalm 139:13-14