Week One!!!

            Hello everyone! We are now done with our first week of class here at YWAM Minneapolis. It was a great first week. It has been wonderful to just meet and start to get to know all the other students and the staff. We want to apologize for not posting sooner. The Internet at the base is too slow for us to update often. We’re hoping to get an update out once a week.

            This week in class we learned about cross-cultural communication. We talked about warm and cold cultures, the many differences between them, and how we can communicate what we want to communicate without offending someone of another culture. We also talked about some non-cultural differences like differences between men and woman in the way they think about things. It even helped us to better understand one another.

            Friday night our school did what we call a treasure hunt. We were going to go to the Mall of America and “find” some people whom God wanted us to talk to. We all got together after dinner and spent some time praying and asking God to give us some information like colors, clothes, names, injuries, really just anything that He knew we could use to find those people that God wanted us to talk to and pray for. We split into teams of 2-3 people. Julianne and I made our own team. We wrote down the list of things we each felt like God was telling us. Then we all headed out to go to the Mall of America. Once we were there we just walked about looking for the signs and people we got in prayer. When we would find one we would just approach them and tell them pretty straightforward what we were doing. We would tell them that we are Christians who believe in God and that we had been praying earlier and that we had felt like God wanted us to pray for them and would just talk to them. We would ask them if that would be okay if we prayed for them right there in the mall and, if they said yes, we would pray for them. If they said no, then we wouldn’t pray for them. We would then go and look for the next person. It was a great way to spend a Friday night.

When Julianne and I were praying and asking God for information to lead us to people on His heart, I felt like we were suppose to talk to someone with a broken arm and with the color neon green. Julianne got that we would talk to someone who was Korean, and she got bright colored socks. So while we were walking around in the mall, we found this store that sold a bunch of bright colored socks. But they were closed. So we looked around, and I saw a girl who had a broken arm and who was wearing a neon green shirt and who was also Korean. Julianne and I were on the second floor, and this girl was on the first.  We just followed her a bit until we noticed she was heading towards the escalators to come up to the second floor. Once she got up on the second floor she walked to one of the little mall map things and stopped and looked at it with her mom and another woman. Julianne and I went up to her and just told her that we basically felt like God wanted us to pray for her. We talked to her for a bit and found out her name was Allie and that she was a Christian. Then after talking with her a bit we prayed for her and told her God loved her very much and left to go look for the next person. It was a really great experience.

            It was an amazing first week of class, and we are very much looking forward to next week when we will be learning about faith and finances. We really want to thank you so much for all of your prayers and support. Some prayer requests we have are for everyone in our class to know where God is leading them to go for their outreach and for finances for everyone to come in. Thank you again.

                                                                                                Love in Christ,

                                                                                                Nate and Julianne