Sorry its been so long :( (continued)

So continuing from DT week, after getting back, getting dry, sleeping in an actual bed and having the best breakfast cooked by our UK director, Mike, we were starting to recover slightly.

After this week we continued into our second part of Cultural Studies learning more about just how different people from different cultures really are and how much it can be a problem if you don't try to understand the culture of people you're working with, a culture you're going to or the culture you're in. I realised this is  highly important, not just in mission work where clearly there would be a culture change but just in church in general as the cultural diversity is growing all the time, if this isn't understood or attempted to be understood at least then this can have massive knock on effect on relationships due to misinterpretation usually.

The week after this we hit the week of spiritual warfare. This topic I hadn't learnt much about previously, so I was very eager to learn. I learnt so many things during this week and mentally it was one of the weeks that will a lot more full on but as a Christian was definitely one of the teaching topics I value most.

We looked worked through looking at who the enemy is and then, more importantly, how we can protect and attack the enemy and how important it is to literally apply the armour of God. I'd gone through what it was before but never thought of the use of it or how it was important to me at all but over these past few weeks I've learned such things as truthfulness. righteousness, peacefulness, faith and the word of God (Bible) are among the most important things that I need in my day to day life and will keep me strong and firm in my faith. Making sure I use the armour will enable me to do more, be more and fully step into what God plans are for me.
Finally we talked about prayer and how important that is in day to day life. Before coming on this gap year prayer had strangely enough never really been a massive part of my life and I hadn't truly valued its power to change situations. I never understood why we had to pray and why didn't God just change our situations anyways. I've never realised so much how prayer can change seemingly unchangeable situations until these last few months and how essential it is as part of daily life.

I loved this week of teaching and I could go into a mass amount of detail about every area we got taught on... if you really would like me to go more in detail on this topic you can ask me personally and I'll be very happy to pass on everything I've been taught...however for now I will just say I've learnt that the specific armour of God was taught to us so we would know what we would need and how to use it, not so we could completely disregard it as just words that have no life or meaning.

Every part of God's word was written for a reason and we should remember this at all times.

Sorry its been so long :(

As I remember saying in my last blog post "speak soon"...soon has turned into weeks and I still haven't wrote another one. I'm sorry to all of you who I'd promised to keep you up-to-date but all I can say is that you would have to actually do this gap year to know how busy and packed our time table is.

To make this much better to read and so I can include picture and it won't be a mile long I'll split it up and only include the most key moments of my last few months here in Llanelli.

Since I last wrote I've been on development training or DT week as its known at work horizons. It was a highly challenging, injury causing, teaming building, and productive week  that I will never forget. I faced my fears on this week and was stretched but in that it produced results I wouldn't have imagined. Firstly if you haven't been on any form of development training before this week involved various tasks such as planning a meal, hiking, abseiling, sleeping in a cave yet more hiking and sleeping in a concrete hut..supposedly...if there wasn't torrential rain an it floods. Along the way also doing various other tasks, going 3 days with a maximum of 5hrs sleep and my anaemia coming back.
Although that all sounds like great fun in itself, trust me (looking back) it really was worth it and showed me a lot about how much I am capable of if I push that little further and keep focused. That even the things and places that seems unreachable aren't if your remain positive and don't give up.
God taught me he can answer your prayers and we can be so wrapped up in the problem and the situation that we're in that we look over the solution that God has provided for us. I learned this when I was on the literal edge of a slippery cliff at night. Being scared of heights this wasn't at all my favourite place to be and I was terrified, asking God to help me, or give me something to help me through this. After about 5 minutes my friend Aurora came and held my hand and kept telling me everything was going to be okay and she wasn't going to leave me. During this I was still stupidly asking God for something, anything to help me in this situation. He kindly opened my eyes to the fact he'd already placed someone in my path to help me and as she said I was going to be okay.

Left Photo - The team in the bothy after a veryyyy long and wet day.
From left to right: Aurora, Me, Nate, Godgive, David, Hollie, Isaac, Joy, Sarah, Joce
Right Photo - Me and my roomies in the flooded bothy

You're probably thinking we're all looking far too happy to be anywhere near as exhausted as we were. Trust me we were all bordering on hysteria due to tiredness by this point. 

So this doesn't become ridiculously boring and too long to read I'll spilt it up into a few more posts, so please read on if you can be bothered :)

Byeee for now
Helen xoxo