Outreaches announced!

I'm going to Southeast Europe with a team of over 30 people! We want to get some hippie vans and drive them down toward Moldova, Turkey, and Greece to share with gypsies, women in prostitution, and the like. I'm so excited, but we still don't really have any destinations or plans yet. We just need a lot of prayer in general, for direction, open doors, etc, but also for visas because none of us have our visas yet. Germany changed their visa regulations the day our school started, so it's a new system not only for the people here who process the visas, but also for the German government, which means that everything is just going much slower than anyone anticipated.

So in the visa process, everyone has to take a trip to one of the nearby towns to get fingerprinted, and then after that it takes about 6 weeks to process the visa. As of now, about 10 people have been fingerprinted, and they only do the fingerprinting twice a week in small groups. So there is a possibility that most of us will not have our visas by the time outreach begins. In Germany, foreigners can stay in the country for 90 days before they get their visas. We are allowed to stay in Germany if we are getting our visas processed, but past that 90 day point we will not be able to leave the country until we have the visa. So we basically have two options if God doesn't give us our visas by outreach. One is to stay in Germany until we get our visas, which could take until January, and do outreach in Germany until then. The second is to leave Germany before the 90 day period is up, and then we'd have to stay out of Germany for 90 days before we could return. So we're basically just living on faith that God will give us our visas somehow, the whole base is praying for it. Any other prayers would be very much appreciated as well!

I am so excited about this next part of DTS, with roughly 5 weeks of lecture phase left things are starting to get really real. And it’s going to be really cold for outreach, something I was definitely not expecting. I won’t need the long skirts or the mosquito net which I made sure to pack, and the need for really good snow boots has grown more urgent. But God is good, he will provide everything I need. And probably more. :)

Happenings

There have been a lot of things going on at the castle lately, a lot of good things. Let’s see if I can sum this up without taking up too much of your time.

One thing that happened this past week was our very first critique night. I’ll explain what it is first. Critique Night is a time when we all get to share our art with the rest of the school and really just fill the castle from the basement to the attic with a lot of great stuff.  Everyone had comment cards or paper next too each of their pieces and it was just a time when we got to tell everyone what we thought about their work. There was a dance by the dance track, performances by the music track all over the castle, photos by the photo track all around the student floor and in the stairwells, a lot of painting and drawings and sculptures made by the fine art track, some really nicely designed stuff by the graphic design track, and finally two full tables bursting with handmade things by our track.

The day leading up to the evening was a little stressful, because we had just one day to prepare everything. That meant finishing off our nearly complete pieces, pricing anything that was meant to be sold, making comment cards, collaborating with the other girls in the track about setting things up, making our display look nice, making a description card about my collection, and more. So the six of us who could worked from after lunch right up to 7pm in our crowded little studio, made a huge mess, but ultimately, set up a great display. If you want to see what it is I am making, I will be posting photos on http://thethingwithfeatherscollection.wordpress.com, which is the blog that I am setting up as a requirement for the track. I just made the account though, so there’s nothing there as of yet. But hopefully soon!

Another thing that happened here was the announcement of the MOTA plans for after outreach ends! So how our school is set up, we have a 12 week lecture phase, a 10-11 week outreach phase, and then we come back to the base around mid-February. I don't graduate from the school until the end of March though, so what is it we're doing for the last month and a half? We will come back to the castle and do some intense art-ing for 3 weeks, and then we split up into small teams and we will take our art and our stories and go on tour around Europe! It'll be a 10 day tour to just tell people about what is happening at YWAM Herrnhut. We don't have any locations nailed down yet, we'll probably do a lot in Germany, but we're definitely not restricted to this country! We also need God to provide us with some money, places to stay, open doors, and about 20 vans to truck us all around.

I guess that's all for now. A few prayer requests beyond those mentioned above would just be for finances, a lot of us still do not have all our money in yet, even though we know it will come, and just for more of Jesus everyday. We've seen a lot of breakthrough, but there's always more space for God to fill in us. Thank you for your prayers! Auf Wiedersehen!!