Two Years in the Rear-View Mirror

In February of 2014 I decided to make a two-year commitment to Youth With A Mission (YWAM) in Honolulu, Hawaii.

I had just finished six months of missionary training through YWAM Honolulu’s Discipleship Training School (DTS), the latter half of which I had spent in Nepal with eight of my classmates. It had been a trying adventure in a new place far from the comforts of home but also a necessary experience from which I am still finding new value. Nepal was like a heaping pile of vegetables. Eating your vegetables at dinner is not just a good idea because Mom won’t let you have ice cream if you don’t, and also not just so you will be healthier later in life. But eating your vegetables is a good idea because one day you might have a child. And when your tiny tyrant throws a tantrum at the table, you can understand that though eating vegetables might seem like the end of the world for precious little Billy, it most assuredly is not the end of the world and you can rest easy knowing your son or daughter, who you love dearly, will grow up healthy and wise because you didn’t give in to their tears. I am ever so grateful to my outreach leaders, Greg and Corrie Burgers, for humbly serving and encouraging our team with unconditional love and for extending to me such utterly, undeserved grace and for ultimately being superb examples of Christ in a way that continues to impact my life. Thank you from the depths of my heart.

In September of 2014 I dove head-first into my commitment as an outreach leader-in-training and then co-lead my first trip to Asia in January of 2015. We took a team of seven students to Bali, Indonesia for four weeks and then traveled to Papua New Guinea for our remaining six weeks. This outreach was a test of love and faith. We believed and prayed relentlessly for our students’ growth and the Holy Spirit to work in the hearts of the locals . On the penultimate day of our outreach we witnessed incredible breakthroughs in our students and the following day an entire village received Jesus as their Lord and Savior. God is love and God is faithful..

Before I had left for Indonesia I had expressed to our base director that I was willing to volunteer in our accounting office and so after our students’ graduation in June I was granted extended leave for the summer to visit good friends back on the mainland and then returned to Honolulu in September as an assistant to our accountants. I quickly discovered that our accountants Dave Stone and Jhun Camacho work hard. All day. Not just in the office.
Dave has a family and runs a non-profit organization that provides people with computer and language skills so they can get jobs. He’s often up all night taking care of our base’s finances and processing support for missionaries across the globe. Somehow he still finds time to play basketball with his son and during tax season I doubt he sleeps.
Jhun served as a missionary in India for nearly two decades before God called him and his wife to YWAM Honolulu where he demonstrates faithfulness in everything he has been given and possesses an unparalleled work ethic. Jhun is a father of three sons, an auto-mechanic, and when he’s in the office he listens to the Bible online.

Above all, these men gain their strength through their Savior. They don’t do anything in their own power alone. They constantly rely on God for wisdom and provision and the ability to do what has been set before them. They don’t just do tasks for the sake of doing them. Everything they do is in servitude to, and for the glory of God, the Creator of all things and the One who gives us life abundantly. The woman in Cambodia that one of my students led to Christ this past spring may have never had the opportunity to hear the Gospel without these two men who pour out everything as a sacrifice for our King. I’m grateful for my dad and men like these that have shown me the value of hard-work and how to lean on God always.

After a quarter in our accounting office, I once again found myself poised to lead another group of students through their ten weeks in Asia. In April we set out for Cambodia where we spent seven weeks with local YWAMers sharing the Gospel and aiding the community in any way that we could. Our team of eleven students were remarkable testaments of the love of Jesus. Through their words as well as their actions, they chose to exhibit Christ to each other, to our contacts, and to their leaders. Through this love for one another, our work was made effective. From Cambodia, we flew to Tokyo, Japan for our final three weeks of outreach. There we worked with a sub-set of Campus Crusade focused on high school students through which our team was given the opportunity to speak with over two-hundred first year students in their classrooms about hope in Jesus Christ. Also, we rode the subway many, many times.

And that brings us to now. Our January students of 2016 have graduated and gone, though many are returning in September either as staff members or secondary school students. During the summer we take a break between schools to maintain our property and reach out to our community. Right now I’m fulfilling the last few weeks of my commitment by working in the kitchen and doing general tasks around base. Tuesday nights I help with an ESL class that we run in Chinatown as a way to connect with our ever-growing Asian population and Thursdays we host a worship night which is always a highlight during my week. Ben, our tech guru is home in Alaska for three weeks so I try to do things with our soundboard while he’s gone. To my knowledge, I have yet to set anything on fire.

So what’s next? Before I became a volunteer with YWAM, I believe that God said to go to YWAM Honolulu so that He could prepare me for the rest of my life and as far as I know, He hasn’t told me to leave. In the fall I’ll be filling the role of DTS Administrator for a yet to be determined amount of time. Right now, Spencer and Madison Lemer co-direct our DTS and have been doing the jobs of three people since they stepped into leadership. They are two of the most remarkable people I’ve ever had the privelige to work with and I’m thrilled with the opportunity to continue serving under them. Madison is also pregnant with their first child, due in October,

I’m excited to be here in Honolulu. I’m grateful for the people that God has used to teach me, and I appreciate their passion to follow God with everything they have. The next portion of this entry is something I wrote while I was in Cambodia as part of a larger collection of other stuff I’ve been writing and hope to write in the future.

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"It wasn’t until my DTS that I discovered my love for America. What I found during my missions school in Honolulu was not something that caused me to fall in love with my nation. What I found were kind, good-humored people from other countries all around the world that sometimes poked fun at the country in which I was raised. At some point during my youth I had decided patriotism was a little bit uncool and therefore decided that I would have nothing to do with it. Nothing overtly American appealed to me; I didn’t even like the colors red, white and blue. But when I first heard a Canadian take a crack at the USA, my first reaction was not to laugh good-naturedly as I’ve learned to do now. Instead my reaction was one of indignation. I wanted to educate my Canadian comrade in how thoroughly ridiculous his home was with its moose and mounted police and how he must be equally ridiculous for living there and how he should feel inferior for using Monopoly money to buy maple syrup and fake bacon.
It turns out that I was very proud. I possessed the kind of pride that is in direct opposition to God and everything that He would have me be. In addition to this cancer, I also had what I now like to think of as a "healthy sense of pride" in my country. I’m not really sure if there is such a thing as a "healthy sense of pride" and it’s probably worth noting that I think God has redeemed my patriotism by transforming it into a passion for my nation and a desire to see America worship God once again instead of itself, but what I actually want to point out is this: I didn’t know I loved something until it was poked; what I thought didn’t exist within me was merely hiding. A few years later something would happen of the same sort.

I was nearing the end of my first two-year commitment with YWAM and weighing my options. I was interested in finishing school and moving back home to New York but God had been gently working in my heart and so I found myself considering another commitment to YWAM Honolulu. It was during this time that I met Marvin. I don’t know where Marvin is from, whether or not he is married, if he has children nor his last name. But I am thankful for Marvin and this is why.

I was sitting with ten of my students in a well-lit classroom on the third floor of what was called The Yellow House in sweltering Battambang, Cambodia when Marvin told us he used to be a staff member at YWAM Honolulu but then wanted to actually do something with his life so he decided to leave. He then alluded to the possibility that we could also do something with our lives, but most certainly not at YWAM Honolulu. We all sort of laughed and several of my students glanced at me to see my reaction. I chuckled and mustered a smile. But my smile probably looked more like a grimace because I’m not good at faking smiles and the reason I was faking this one was because I was both shocked and angry, but mostly angry. Clearly Marvin had had a bad experience with YWAM Honolulu and it’s probable that his misgivings could be justified, but any Christian should know that Jesus didn’t pay for our new lives in Him so that we could have bad experiences and especially not so we would hold on to them for nearly fifteen years. When we become Christians we give up the right to have bad experiences and we certainly give up the right to be wounded and then harbor unforgiveness in our heart; which is exactly what I had to remind myself of later that afternoon. How dare he say those things, and how dare he say them in front of my students? I was angry at Marvin but I decided to forgive him. He had poked my pride which was probably a good thing and maybe he was just bad at sarcasm. It was then that I realized I loved YWAM Honolulu. In addition to illuminating my pride, I had discovered a passion for my YWAM base and hearing someone drag its name through the mud made me a little bit furious. Today, I’m thankful for Marvin. I’m thankful for Marvin because from that moment forward I no longer looked at YWAM Honolulu as a stepping stone in the staircase of my own life but instead I understood that my life should be laid down in obedience at the foot of a cross bathed in my King’s blood where others might step on me to meet their royal Father. Through God’s gentle prodding and Marvin’s salty remarks I came to realize that the place I had been lead to was a place I loved. And by God’s grace, it’s where I was allowed to stay. The very next day I told our DTS Director that I would be with him as long as he needed me."
Thanks for reading! If you've made it this far, you should know that it is not my intention to offend our frozen friends in the North. Canada is a beautiful place with splendid people that possess kindness and courtesy far greater than their neighbors to the South. As for Marvin, I love him. He is serving God in a great way and has no doubt made vast sacrifices and impacted many people for the benefit of our King and this world. I'm sure he could teach me a great deal on what it means to live a life worthy of Christ's call.