Half way through Phase 1

Hello to all. I pray the most abundant blessings over each one of your lives. May God continue to work in your lives each and every day.

God is completely consuming our students from the inside out. He is doing heart surgery on each student in their own time. I love being a witness to the Spirit and seeing the physical change of the radical change within their hearts. Their faces no longer show the emptiness and pain and shame of their past. Instead their faces show redemption and life and freedom. This is why I know that I am meant to be here. God wants me to be a part of it. He wants me to see His loving power and His heart for every one of His children. God has called me to disciple in this season, he is continually preparing my heart to reach its full capacity of giving and receiving.

I have found out what world route I am leading a team on for outreach. I am going to Africa and South East Asia (aka Africasia). I am leading with one other girl on our staff team and we have 3 girl students and 2 guy student on our team. So that's 7 of us in total. We are going to Thailand, India (yay 4th time is a charm), Kenya and Uganda. We end in Israel for debrief and graduation. So we are going to be leaving to being outreach on May 14th. (If you have any further questions about outreach feel free to email me).

These past three weeks we have been going over the Father Heart of God, a life of serving in the field and Intimacy and the life of Christ. The Father heart week is always one of the most emotional weeks by far of our lecture phase. A lot of restoration comes out of this week and also a lot of praise for those who have wonderful parents that reflect the Fathers love. For me this week was built off of praise and further understanding of how exactly I fit in as a daughter of the Most High.

In going through Intimacy and the life of Christ I came to realize through the first lecture of the week that I don't know Jesus. I know in my mind of all that He is, all the miracles He has done, the solid fact that His soul purpose in life was to die for our sins and to give us eternal life, defeating death and doing so much more. I know this because it has been taught to me and I have taken in the views of others. The Church is constantly teaching us about Jesus and all that He is. I said and thought that I knew Him. I preached in His name, I was used by Him to do miracles in His name, and I did all sorts of other things in His name. But in my heart I truly don't know Jesus. I have been blinded by my own arrogance. I have no idea who He really is. I haven't had a full heart revelation from God of who He is. It makes me feel like the most horrible person alive to say that, especially after seeing my track record of ministry. I have reduced parts of Him because I can't manage picturing Him in certain ways. I have reduced Jesus to what I wanted Him to be. It's because I can't put two and two together when the Bible describes Jesus as diversely excellent. An example of Him being both the Lamb and the Lion, the two most opposite things operating together. I have been embracing Jesus for His one side and not the other because I comprehend it, I can't manage it. I am basically starting from sqare one again. Starting my 'knowing Him' from the beginning. My prayers are that my knowledge of Jesus will only be from revelations to my heart by Him. Nothing else, no one elses opinion but His.

As you may or may not have known, every weekend we go and help out in Christchurch as part of our local outreach. As the weeks have progressed there is less and less relief work to be done. Recently we have just worked within one of the churches in whatever ways needed. We have helped quite a bit of people move out of the city. Along with that we are still shoveling the silt from the liquifacation. Just yesterday we were able to go into the city for the first time. We were able to walk the streets up to the fence line of the central buisness district (which is still shut down). Our purpose in walking in the city was to pray for it. None of our students had seen the city before, but for those who have (like me) it hit hard. My words can't really justify how it felt in my heart to walk the streets. To see the abandonment and destruction and lifelessness of a city that I have only known to be the most beautiful and alive city feels like something crushed my heart. But I feel that God intentionally put that pain in my heart to reveal His pain for the city. I can't tell you why the earthqakes happened or why God even let something like this happen, but I know that He is still good. I know that God loves each and every person, including everyone in the city and around it.

We are now half way through lecture phase. Time goes by so fast, it's crazy. We had an awesome masquerade feast on Thursday night to celebrate a week of secretly blessing one another. It was so fun! I have always wanted to be a part of a masquerade, yay a dream come true.

Thank you all again for your continual support. It truly means so much to me.
I pray that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened in order that you may know the hope to which he has called you, the riches of his glorious inheritance in his holy people, and his incomparably great power for us who believe (Eph 1: 18-19)

Sincerely, Kari