Week 2: Miscellaneous Events and Details

But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you. (Matthew 6:33 ESV)

For the record, it’s really hard to sum up a week of DTS in a blog post without taking half a day to write it. So much goes on here and we learn so much that it’s just hard to narrow it down. But I keep trying.

The main focus of this week in lectures was worship, but before I get into that, here are of few of the other cool things that happened this week:

• Starting off every Monday morning, we have what’s called whanau (Maori for “family”) time at the base. Everyone from the Marine Reach Ministries office up the hill comes down to the base, and we spend some time together and hear about anything important that’s happening in the ministry. This Monday, we took up an offering for Nesi, our wonderful DTS registrar, and her family, who are Fijian but are applying for permanent residency in New Zealand. They needed around $2300 to cover the application expenses, so we wanted to bless them with at least that much. After the offering was counted up, there was about $3100, which was more than enough! But that wasn’t all. As Nesi took it to the bank to deposit the 2842 New Zealand dollars (some of the $3100 in US dollars and IOUs), the teller told her that there was actually more than Nesi had thought. In fact, the teller now counted around NZ$3400! To her knowledge, no one had added to the money since the offering, so the only explanation was that God multiplied the money! Now, including the IOUs, the collection totals near $5000, more than twice the visa application expenses!!
• The second exciting side story from this week starts with a broken electric piano/keyboard. Not so exciting to start, but it gets better. Anyway, the keyboard which the base here has been using for worship and general student playing (a very nice but old one) recently decided to completely stop turning on. So I, along with our worship DTS leader Cheyne, was tasked with figuring out what to do about this. We looked into fixing it or buying another used keyboard, but finally we decided that this time it would be best to do it right and buy a new keyboard that would hopefully last longer than our other options. So we drove all around Tauranga looking at our options, did some online research, and finally drove all the way to neighboring city of Hamilton to pick up an 88-key, hammer-action Casio Privia PX-150. This was pretty exciting for me and quite a few other piano-playing students, who now have about as close as we can come to a real piano with our budget.
• I am now officially the staff member in charge of basically anything technology-related in the base – internet, sound, projector, etc. I’m really not as knowledgeable as some at these kinds of things, but I guess they figured that out of the rest of the staff I was most suited to that position, and I’m not complaining.
• We had our first justice stream class from 1:30 to 3:00 on Wednesday afternoon! We now have 10 justice students from 8 different countries, and it’s really great group! We started off our justice-focused time by talking about what justice and mercy are, how they are different, and how God is both just and merciful. You might not expect it, but these can be tough concepts to define. I think we’re going to have some pretty intense discussions as we move forward led by our stream leader, Patty.
• On Tuesday and Thursday, we had our first two BSS (Body, Soul, Spirit) sessions. BSS is the physical/exercise part of the DTS. A couple schools ago someone pointed out that DTS does so much to promote spiritual and mental growth but largely neglects physical development, so they began an exercise component. The leaders (the lovely Cadi Trask and Danny Aviles on this school) try to make it as fun as possible, and it functions as a community building activity as well. On Tuesday, we started off with fun relays and ended with a game of blob tag (some people felt like they had regressed back to elementary school). Then on Thursday we did a circuit through 20 different stations, which were designated for activities from pushups to sprints to dancing to drinking water. Then after we were done someone brought out a long piece of black plastic which was promptly laid out down the hill and turned into a slip ‘n slide. As you can see, we had an epically good time with that.

Camille, an awesome student from French Switzerland

No need for explanation here

Edgar, a justice student from Brazil who came to DTS with his Chilean wife, Nicole. He gets credit for the other two photos (and I used his camera to take this one)!

• Later Thursday night, we had our first small group time. Our small groups consist of everyone in our particular stream, so Danny (my fellow justice staffer) and I have small group with our 10 justice students. For our first week, we had a campfire down in Gideon’s Valley, which is just a few minutes’ walk down from the base. We roasted marshmallows, hung out, discussed the week’s lectures, and worshipped a little bit. I think we all had a pretty good time.
• The fun didn’t let up on Friday night, when we split up into genders for guys’ and girls’ night. Us guys went down to David Cowie’s (the ministry leader’s) house and ate pizza and ice cream sandwiches, shot really cool guns (a 50-caliber flintlock rifle, a 70-caliber cap and ball rifle, and an antique .22 rifle), and watched a movie.
• On Saturday it seems like I caught up on sleep most of the time J, but in the evening we went to the movie theater to see our justice movie for the week, which was the recently-released Les Miserables musical. Fortunately I like singing, because there was 2 and half hours of it, along with good acting and a whole slew of justice and mercy themes.

I thought I’d also put a bit on this post about what it’s like to be DTS staff. There’s no doubt it’s quite different from being a student. For one, there’s more responsibility (duh), which makes time management a much bigger deal (and it was a big deal as a student). As someone who’s quite task-oriented, it can be hard strike the right balance of spending time with God, building relationships with the students, fulfilling my staff duties, doing everything else that needs to be done (like writing blog posts), getting enough sleep, and that kind of thing. Spending time one-on-one with God and finding intimacy with Him is especially easy to overlook, even though it is the foundation of everything and maybe the most important thing to be sure to do. God has really convicted me that He has to come first, then everything else will follow. If I have a foundation of intimacy with God, I will be effective in my staffing and in getting all my other duties done, but it probably won’t work if my primary focus is on being effective in staffing and getting things done. Seek first the kingdom, and everything else will work out.

Another part of staffing is that I’ve begun to feel a bit of what you might call a pastoral burden for the students, especially the ones I’m more responsible for in the justice stream. This burden isn’t a bad weight; I just really desire for them to know Jesus like I do – better than I do. That burns in my heart, and really makes me want to pray for them and intercede for them. When they have a victory, I want to rejoice with them; whey they fail, I feel some of the grief. Certainly, I understand that the real weight is ultimately on Jesus, but we as staff have the amazing privilege of partnering with him to transform lives. Do you have anyone in your live that you are investing in, hoping and longing that he or she will come to know God better? Are you making disciples? I understand that I’ve got it easy here because the structure is all laid out for me to disciple people, but all of us in the body of Christ should be making disciples in some way – it was the last thing (and one of the clearest things) He told us to do!

Check out the next post to find out a little of what our week of lectures on worship was about.

Love ya,

Dan