12/06/09

Since my last update, I’ve been to a ball where I was nearly murdered, 3 new states, had several different speakers, my nephew was born (YAY!!!) , and I got to experience a bit of India.
We had a “Get a Clue Ball” where it was a mix of a live version of Clue and Mafia. We all got dressed up and had a good time. A lot of people were ‘murdered’ and the Mafia won because we didn’t ‘kill’ all of them soon enough and didn’t know that Joshua Miller was Mafia. Anyway, I believe they are going to put one on again next year and make improvements. That was on November 14th and we left for North Carolina early on the 15th. We took a school bus, two 15-passenger vans and a 12-passenger van. It was about a 10 hour drive. It seemed like it took forever!!! I think I slept all the way through Georgia on the way there. It was really pretty in South Carolina! It actually looked like Fall!! North Carolina was great too!! We went to a conference called The Gathering, which means about 8 different east coast YWAM bases came together, there were about 200 people there. I was very blessed along with 6 other girls to stay in a house on the YWAM Charlotte base, which meant there were 7 of us to one shower. Some of the other girls stayed at a church where there were 3 showers (one of them only cold water) to 22 girls. Our speaker that week was Winkie Pratney. He’s been in YWAM for a looong time! He’s from New Zealand so he’s a little bit hard to understand at times. You also have to pay attention because he makes some funny noises and if you’re not listening, you don’t know what he’s talking about. He taught about some really cool things. One thing that’s been reiterated to me this whole DTS is how big God is, yet he still wants a personal relationship with each of us!!! It blows me away every time I think about it!!! Mr. Pratney showed us a fractal and how it’s the same pattern over and over and you could go deeper and deeper and the pattern will always stay the same. This is a picture of God to me because he’ll always be the same. He played a clip of crickets chirping then slowed it down to be the same lifespan of a human and all of these crickets chirping sounds like a choir singing. It was amazing!! I got chills and it brought tears to my eyes. He also showed us an animation of what goes on inside one white and one red blood cell. Each one is busier than New York City at any given moment. It was a good week!!
Adam Lucas Duncan was born Tuesday, November 24th, at 4:12 am, CST. It was hard to not be able to be there, but I knew that was going to happen when I came here and it was a sacrifice I decided to make. That knowledge didn’t make it much easier though. I got a picture of him and have been able to see pictures on Facebook and I’ve been able to use Skype to see Chris, Christin and Adam.
Yesterday we had some India team building time. We went to Bass Pro Shop to look at/buy hiking backpacks to take to India. Only one girl, Jamie, bought one yesterday. I’m going to look online and try to find a cheaper one. Then we went to an Indian restaurant called Punjab to experience some Indian food. We then watched Slumdog Millionaire at the house next to mine. It’s such a good movie!!!
I’ve tried to keep this short, so that it’s not a book. More things happened that I’ll try to remember and write about later! Now it's been a week since I wrote this so I'm already a week behind. I'll try to update on Christmas break next week!