Jambo! 

Hello from Kenya :) I am in Nairobi right now, and have been in Kenya for the past five days. The travel here from Addis was exhausting, but thanks to God my team and I made it here safely in four long days of travelling.


During this past week, my team and I had the opportunity to travel south for four hours, near the border of Tanzania, and visit with a Masai tribe. We worked in the school for two days and it was amazing. It was definitely a God-filled time where we were able to sing songs and play games with all the children there and we taught them many Bible stories and told them more of the love that Jesus has for them. There is much to tell about this time, but unfortunately the battery on my laptop is dying so I do not have much time. It was an awesome experience; the people of this tribe had never seen any white people before so that was definitely really interesting and cool for them as well as me. 

Tomorrow I will be travelling to a town in western Kenya with three others on my team. We will stay there for one week working with ministries and churches there, and then will head to Uganda. The other part of my team will leave for Uganda tomorrow and will be there for the week I am staying in Kenya. Once we rejoin each other, we will have two weeks together again in Uganda and then will begin the long and tiring travel back to Ethiopia. 

I really appreciate all of your prayers and thoughts. They mean so much for they truly do make a difference. I was feeling quite sick last week, but I am definitely much better. God is always taking good care of me and this trip to Africa has already been a once-in-a-lifetime experience. Thank you again for your support; I pray that all of you reading this may continue to be blessed and to be a blessing as well. 

I will update you again once I have more battery life and more time. 
Take care. :) 

Love always, 
Fina

It's like walking into the past. 

This is what a fellow volunteer said to me as we were working side by side at a feeding center called HOPE Enterprise in the middle of Addis Ababa. The words seemed to fade and fell from my ears, but as the day went on, I kept thinking of how much truth is in that sentence. 
Being in Ethiopia is amazing and such a blessing from God, but sometimes it is hard to see such a great degree of poverty and the wretched circumstances that some people live in. 

Yet God is good. All the time. Every morning I wake up I do my best to remind myself of this and to ask Him to help me share that goodness and His love with everyone that I see and meet throughout the day. My team and I have been in Ethiopia for almost three weeks and time feels like it is flying by. We have breakfast at 730 every morning, then worship and devotions, and then from about 9 to 530 or so we spend doing ministry throughout Addis Ababa. At 6 we have dinner together as a team and then have a team meeting at 8, and then we all generally head to bed soon after. I am getting enough sleep and eating well enough here, there shouldn't be any worries about that. A lot of our team has gotten sick over the past weeks, but all are on the up and up and are feeling much better. I have not gotten sick yet, and I pray that I am able to say that at the end of outreach. Continued prayers for health and safety would be appreciated.  

There are many opportunities for ministry here in Addis, such as prayer walking and street ministry, where we go to different areas of the city in groups of three or four and pray and do our best to follow God's leading. We have met a lot of really awesome people and have been able to encourage and be encouraged. Another ministry we are involved in is called HOPE Enterprise, which I mentioned above, where we go for a couple hours to help serve enjera (which is the classic Ethiopian food) to about 700 homeless people that come through every day. We have had a lot of chances to get involved which a lot of the churches and youth groups here, which has been awesome. There are different ministries that we are continuing to contact and are hopefully going to be able to work with throughout the rest of the stay in Addis. 

An update on my team and what is going down for the remaining nine weeks that I am in Africa: well, to put it simply, I am heading to Kenya and Uganda! Our team of 14 students and 3 leaders are splitting up for about 5 weeks. One leader will stay in Addis with 6 of the students and continue with the ministries here and keep on discovering what God has for us here, and the other two leaders are taking the rest of the students to Uganda! I am part of that team and am incredibly excited for that! We will be travelling down to Kenya and then making our way to Uganda to spend two weeks Kampala, the capital city, and then one week in Gulu, a city in the northern part of Uganda. It will take a week of travel there and then also another week back, which will be interesting and exhausting and awesome and educational all at once. My team will be leaving on May 4, which is this Friday, and I am so excited!  A little bit scared, but mainly just stoked to be able to travel more and keep on chasing after God's heart for the people in these nations! 

After our travels, our team will hopefully and God willing reunite all as one big team again in a city in the south of Ethiopia called Jinka, where we will stay for about 3 weeks. After that we will only have about a week left for outreach and will make our way back up to Addis Ababa to fly back to Germany. These are our plans and they are not fully concrete, but God willing he will make them happen. I am so looking forward to the upcoming adventures still to be had in Addis, then in Kenya and Uganda and then also in Jinka! 

So although being here in Africa feels like I am living in the past at times because of the lack of many things that the "Western world" has attained, I know that I am walking into the future with every new day that I am blessed with. And this future is full of hope because I know that God will be walking with me. So I keep walking and my goal is to continue walking for the rest of my life into the future that God has planned for me. 

Prayers to live every day to the fullest so that my future can continue to be the best it can be would be great, and just to keep lifting up my team and I so that we are continually encouraged and able to keep sharing the Word of God. My prayers go out to all of you back home; again, rest assured that you are missed. I know that I will be home before I know it and will find myself missing Africa, yet I do look forward to being home once again. 
I will do my best to update you as much as possible, but what with travelling and uncertainty of access to internet I am unsure of how often that will be. May God continue to bless each of you in your daily walks with Him. 

Love always, 
Fina

Greetings from Africa! :) 

So here I am. Sitting in an internet cafe in the middle of Addis Ababa, the capital city of Ethiopia. How crazy that I am here in Africa. Everything here is going so well, for God is good!

My journey began on April 7, taking a van from the Castle in Herrnhut to Lobau, a train from Lobau to Dresden, another train from Dresden to Frankfurt, then flying out of Frankfurt, Germany all the way to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. We arrived here Sunday morning, all very tired. My first African experience wasn't such a good one.. I went outside of the airport to get some fresh air and as I was going back inside, a man in a military uniform stopped me. He began to get frustrated and then decided to kick me out of the airport; I was not allowed to go back inside. I told him my bags and my friends were just inside, but he began to yell at me and would not let me inside. One of my outreach leaders, Corey, came over at the perfect time and tried to help me out, but the man was obviously angry, so Corey went outside with me. We went over to the visitors entrance and were graciously allowed back in after going through security once again. Thanks be to God for Corey for helping me out and for allowing us back into the airport. I learned my lesson to always stick with the group and just wait patiently for fresh air. It was not the best start to my time in Ethiopia, but God is good and he is gracious and everything else has been going really well! 

The weather has been great! It has rained a few times, and it has not been nearly as hot as I expected, which is nice. The food is also quite good and the place we are staying is also much nicer than I was prepared for. My team and I are quite blessed with all that we have here! 

During the last few days we have been spending time doing prayer walks, homeless ministry, working with YWAM Ethiopia and also working with a project that our YWAM Herrnhut base started. Our team is getting along well. One of us is quite sick, but hopefully he is on the mend. And one of our leaders is still on his way; he is just working out some finances. One girl on our team went home, back to Hong Kong, on Saturday instead of joining us in Ethiopia, because her father is very sick and she felt it was best to be with her family at this time. We are keeping these three in our prayers and are just continuing to do our best to follow God's leading in all that we do. Our mission here is simply to love God and love people. Prayers for a constant increase in that love and for deeper hearts for the people of Ethiopia would be amazing. 

Know that I am keeping you all in my prayers and I hope all is well back home. I miss home, but being here is so good for me; it truly is a dream come true. Sometimes it is difficult being here for there are tough things to see and to be surrounded by, but I know that God is good and I am doing my best to share his goodness and his love with those around me. It is hard to express what exactly I am feeling whilst being in the midst of Africa, but when I can put to words what I am feeling in my heart and soul I will hopefully be able to let you know. I will have very little access to the internet during outreach, which is for the best, but I will try to update you here as much as possible. 

Take care and God bless. I will hopefully be in touch sometime within the next three months! :)

Love always, 
Fina

Hello all :) 

I just realized that I have not blogged in a few weeks, and so much has happened since then. Last week and the week before we had David Gava speaking to us about the Holy Spirit and evangelism. With the help of the Spirit, those two weeks were vital in strengthening the unity within our team and for turning our group into a team that, when we are connected with God, will be able to represent our Lord and Saviour in the best way as we journey across African soil. I learned a lot from David Gava, but I think that the thing that stood out to me most came not from his words in lecture, but rather from his actions. He is a man whom is extremely sensitive to the Spirit and His leading, and I saw that first hand as he taught our class for two weeks. His example of this led me to a deeper desire to want that in my own life. To walk in obedience at all times, to live with a fear of the Lord inside of me that guides me through everything: this is what I want for my life. Every speaker has been telling me that this does not happen overnight, it is a journey. So therefore I am happy to say it is a journey that I have started and already I am seeing more and more the goodness and faithfulness of God.

David also taught us that we need to be ready in all seasons and at all times to speak about the message of the kingdom and to spread the love of God. As an exercise to prepare us all for outreach, each of us on my DTS had to prepare a ten-minute sermon on the kingdom of God, using Matthew 13 as our main reference. It was incredible to see that each of us spoke on different aspects of the kingdom and how it all applies to our lives. I encourage you all to read into Matthew 13 and look at the parables that Jesus told that describe the kingdom of God, for this is what our mission is: to spread the kingdom. We are serving the King, and we must be able to know and understand what exactly that means and how to go about doing that.

During our last week of lecture, our speaker Dan Baumann, has been teaching me and our whole team so much. He is incredibly funny and had so many awesome stories. His goal for this week was for all of us to fall more in love with Jesus by the end of the week. Through his stories I have laughed so much and learned more about what it means to walk in a relationship with God. God loves us so much, he is good, and he is always for us, and I see evidence of that in Dan’s life as well as my own. It is exciting and such a wonderful feeling to begin to really experience and enjoy the love of God.

By the end of today, lecture phase will be over and our team will be leaving for Ethiopia tomorrow. How crazy that I have been here for twelve weeks already! Having Dan as our speaker was the perfect way to end lecture phase and such a significant teaching to have fresh in our minds as we head into outreach phase. I am looking forward to what God has in store for our team! We will be taking the train to Frankfurt, then flying directly from there to Addis Ababa, the capital city of Ethiopia. We will stay in Addis for a week or so and then head down to a city in the south of Ethiopia called Jinka, where we will work for about a month. From there, some of us, depending on God’s leading, will most likely be heading into northern Kenya and Uganda, and possibly South Sudan. The rest will probably stay in Ethiopia. It is all up to God and what he is calling us to in those weeks. This is all so exciting for me, because Africa is my dream and it is actually happening. The actuality of this reality has not quite struck me yet, but I know that once I am on the plane and definitely once I have stepped foot onto African land my heart will begin to beat so fast. My prayer is that my heart will beat alongside the people of Ethiopia and eastern Africa. I desire to have such a heart for these people so that I can show them the love that God has for them. Something huge that I learned from Dan this week is that the Christian life isn’t about being exactly right and making the best decisions all the time, it is about leaning more into the character of God and just falling more in love with him. Hearing from God and making decisions is difficult and frustrating sometimes, but that does not mean we give up and stop communicating with God. We should always be asking God for guidance, and yet we cannot just be stagnant and do nothing when we are unsure of where God is guiding us. We still must do something. The main will of God for our lives is to love God and love people; therefore we always have something that we are able to do. If we desire to follow God’s will, we will obey that major commandment and love. Love is an action; it is something that we choose to do. Love responds.  

My prayer is that you are continually able to be in awe of Jesus and the love that he has for you, and from that loving God and loving others will come so simply to you, that all you can do is respond. I ask you for prayers for my team and myself, for safety and health and protection from all kinds of danger, both physical and spiritual. Prayers for focus and unity within our team as well as just always going to God first and having him as the center of everything on this outreach and in our lives. Prayers for encouragement and just a joy and peace that can come only from Him so that we will be able to constantly be able to share the love of God with all that meet.

Thank you so much for your support; it does not go unappreciated nor without significance. I will be back in Germany in twelve weeks, at the beginning of July. I will do my best to update you as much as I can while in Africa, but internet will be rare so do not expect too much. Thank you again for sharing in my journey with me. May God bless you in whatever you are doing; my love goes out to you.

Take care. And remember, God loves you. :)

Love always,

Fina

Hey!

So it’s been a week since I have been back and Germany, and what a good week too! The sun has been shining every day, the grass is becoming a gorgeous green, the trees are budding and the flowers are growing; it is so beautiful. The Castle has been so full of life as well this past week with three different schools living and studying here at the moment. The September MOTA just graduated this past Thursday, so a lot of them are actually leaving and on their way home. There is also a MOBILE DTS school that travelled all over Europe and is now spending their last two weeks here in Herrnhut; they will be graduating this coming Thursday. Then our school, the January MOTA, recently returned from mini-outreach and will be on our way to Ethiopia in two weeks! Everything here is so busy and exciting and happy and alive. It is so good to experience God’s goodness on so many levels, including learning lessons from mini-outreach, all throughout worship and lecture this week, the people that I have met and have gotten to know, and even through the weather.

I learned some major things through mini-outreach, and encountered many challenges, but overall I found it to be a really good two weeks. The last weekend our team spent in a town called Česky Tešin, which is on the very Eastern side, right on the border to Poland. We helped out with a missons conference there and spent some quality time with the youth and young people of the local church there. it was a really blessed ending to our two weeks spend in the Czech Republic. On our drive home on Sunday we stopped in a Polish city called Wroclaw, which was an incredibly beautiful place. It is not too well known of a city, and that is a shame, because it’s architecture, culture and leisure is comparable to a lot of popular cities.
Something that really struck me during those two weeks was that the way I react to situations is different than the way other people react. I need to learn to be more flexible, not in the sense of dealing with a schedule or lack thereof, but instead being more flexible with people around me and how they are reacting and going through things.

So our mini-outreach is over, and the entire week after that is gone already as well. The time to go to Africa is approaching quickly, and my excitement is growing! I am of course scared of some things that I will face there, and the twelve weeks spent there will not be without its challenges, but I know that God is willing and able to take care of me and my whole team. These last few weeks of lecture are really crucial in our preparation for what God has in store for us in Ethiopia, and I think that we are finally really getting to know each other on deeper levels within the team and are really doing our best to dedicate our hearts to God so that we are able to serve him to the best of our ability.

Our speaker for this past week was very intense and very thought-provoking. His name is David Guava and he is a really spirited man. He has encouraged me a lot with his teachings on the Holy Spirit and he is speaking again next week so I am looking forward to what he has to say about evangelism.

I will be sure to post again what is going on within the next few weeks. Prayers for preparation of my heart as well as the hearts in my whole team would be really appreciated. And also, prayers for financial needs as well would be great; I want to thank those who have supported me again for helping me pay for this amazing trip. I would not be able to be here with such freedom if I was not supported so much by the people back home (aka: you!), so thank you so much. I say that from the bottom of my heart.

I pray you are all well and that the weather where you are has been a beautiful blessing for you too! May God continue to bless you and may you be open to what he has for you each and every day.

Love always,

Fina

Hey all! This is just a quick update to let you know how I am doing! Being in the Czech Republic for the past week and a half has been great! I have seen a lot, heard a lot, learned a lot, and grown a lot. I am tired, but that is only because I am  up way too late. But tomorrow we are driving for about six hours, so maybe I will catch a nap in the van. 


Last Sunday, my minioutreach team and I left Herrnhut and drove a few hours to the Western side of Czech Republic, where we spent five days in a town called Chomotov. While we were there, we stayed at a church and just hung out with a bunch of youth from that church community as well as youth who didn't go to church. We went to a zoopark, learned how to make beads out of glass, did a lot of sightseeeing, played some games, and just hung out with each other. In the evenings we had group discussion times where our team prepared something to share, such as testimonies, stories from the Bible, songs, etc. and then we spent time in discussion with people that came from the community. We were all challenged in different ways, and God was always there with us. Many people were touched by him in that week and it was amazing to see the impact that God can have through people who are striving to serve him. 
The time came for us to leave and head on to Prague, so we said our goodbyes to our new friends, then drove to Prague, the capital of Czech Republic, on Friday morning. We spent an entire week there, helping out with a missions conference, going to church and spending time enjoying the city, doing prayer walks, encouraging the believers here in Prague, going to English clubs and hanging out with Czech students and speaking English and sharing God with them. It has been a really good week! 
The week in Prague is already over, and tomorrow, on Friday, we head to a town on the Eastern end of Czech Republic, our final destination. We will be hopefully be spending time with the youth group from the church there and then on Saturday we will be helping out with another missions conference. Then Sunday will be here so soon and we will make our way back to Germany by going through Poland. 

This outreach has been really good for me. It taught me things only hands-on experience could, and it prepared me for big outreach coming up in ways I did not even realize I needed preparation for. But God is constantly working in my heart to make me more like him, and as I work alongside of him, I pray that I can be the best influence as I can to all those around me. 

So this has been brief, but I am tired. I need to get some sleep; rest assured that I will probably write more about this minioutreach soon enough! 
I hope all is well back home. I miss it deeply, but I am truly enjoying being in Europe. 

Thank you for your prayers and thoughts and support; they are very much appreciated. Take care. :)
Love always,
Fina

P.S. This is a shout-out to my father (I sincerely hope he does read this): Happy 50-something birthday on March 17! :) Haha I miss ya Pa; hope you have a great day and are enjoying your time off work! 

Hello family and friends!

Before I share about this past week, I want to fast forward to Friday and what happened on that day. We, as a school, were in our lecture room, anxiously waiting for our leaders to share with us the location of our outreach. We had been anticipating this information all week long; it was a suspenseful time. The leaders of our school did not tell us straight up where we would be going; instead they sent us on a journey so that we could find our destination. We were put into pairs and given instructions to walk to different spots on the base and pray about different things, such as the nation we were going to and the people we would meet and the people who would be on our team. As my partner and friend, Pia, and I were walking through the forest we prayed earnestly to God about all these things. Eventually we came to the rest of the group, where they were already waiting and had the knowledge I desperately wanted to know in their minds. I heard the words “Welcome to Team Ethiopia” and I literally jumped for joy. I was so excited to learn that we would be going to Ethiopia for our outreach, and that we would be going together as one group! God has been so faithful to me in this and I feel honoured that he is giving us the opportunity to travel to Africa do be able to share his love. I am seriously so excited! But first, before I run away with my excitement, I need to remember to focus on the now and to not let myself be distracted by anything; I must keep my eyes fixed upon God. So tomorrow I leave for the Czech Republic for two weeks for mini-outreach and am excited for this trip. I find myself being more anxious about this two week outreach in the neighbouring country rather than our twelve week outreach in the heat of Eastern Africa. Once the three different outreach teams get back from our separate locations, we have three more weeks of lecture phase in Germany and then will be on our way to outreach phase already! We leave April 7^th and will return June 30^th. Then we have a few more weeks in Germany and the graduation date for our DTS is on July 20^th. Wow! SO much happening! So much excitement and experience and expansion of myself. It is all wonderful and I am so thankful to God for placing me here and for all he has done and will do; he is so good to his children.

Anyways, on that good note and with much more excitement in my heart than last time I wrote, I will tell you about my week. I am less exhausted, which is nice; I was able to sleep in today and that was definitely nice! We had Rogerio, a man from Brazil who is completely dedicated to God and to this base here in Germany, as our speaker this week. He spoke on spiritual warfare, and I am again astounded by how much I can learn from one person. Rogerio taught me a lot about more than just spiritual warfare, and he is an incredible encouragement and inspiration to me. I wish I could tell you all that I have learned but then you would have to read for days. I will try to just give you a few main points that really stuck out to me:

The biggest defense to the attacks of the devil is to be fully obedient to God in all that we do. We must not be ignorant of how the devil works, or else he will be able to fool us with less effort. We have to know that spiritual warfare is real and that it is on-going, but we have the victor of this war on our side, so as long as we stay connected to him, we will be alright.

God is always for us and has what is best for us. God values us not because of what we do, but because of who we are. When our identity is in him, we are connected to him. When we are connected to him, we can have a relationship with him. When we have a relationship with God, we are able to know what he is saying and be obedient to him and therefore stand strong against the ploys of the devil. I am learning more and more about who I am in God, and it is so exciting and lovely to learn of how he knows me. God is also challenging me to learn more of who he is. For how can I have an identity in someone I don’t even know? I need and want to learn to trust that God is who he says he is, just like Moses did. With that, comes spending more time with him in prayer and silence. Reading his Word is crucial as well, for the Bible is his words to us. The well of Scripture within me is very dry, so I have been trying to fill it by reading the Bible more and more. This past week, I along with my Bible reading group, memorized all of James 1. It was a good challenge, yet memorization comes easily to me, so I was able to conquer it with enough work. For a bigger challenge, I may push myself to memorize the whole book of James. I will let you know how that goes. There is so much within James that we can learn from, and I know this applies to whole Bible. There is so much to know, and I feel a thirst within me to know it all. As I continue to push myself to spend more time with God and his Word, I pray the for the same hunger within each of you.

There is so much more that I have learned (and more I want to share with you!). At this point, while I know I have learned so much, I realize that I still have so far to go and so much more to learn. But this is not scary nor discouraging, instead I am looking forward to all that God will teach me on this DTS and throughout the rest of my days that he blesses me with.

Prayers to keep myself from being distracted so that I do not miss out on what God has for me and prayers for focus and discipline are needed. I need to also just take one outreach at a time; I need to concentrate on what God has planned for me in Czech Republic, and then once I am back I can set my mind to Ethiopia. Please also pray for the people that my team as well as the rest of my school will meet in the Czech Republic, the Ukraine, and Germany. Prayers also for preparation of our hearts for mini-outreach and big outreach are appreciated!

If there is anything I can pray for any of you, please do not hesitate to let me know.

I miss home dearly, but I am loving being here. I am unsure of any consistent internet that I might have for the next two weeks, so I do not know if I will be able to update you while I am in the Czech Republic, but I will be sure to let you know of all my adventures with my team and with God when I get back to the Castle in Germany!

Take care, and may God bless.

Love always,

Fina