March! What a month, starting off with coming back from a mini outreach in Bosnia & Herzegovina, then ending with graduating the students successfully and sending them back to their family and friends. I will do a separate update for Bosnia next weekend because there is just so much to say about that. This update I'd like to focus on bringing you all up to speed on the school, how March was and how we wrapped it up early due to the circumstances.
Going into this month, coming back from Bosnia was already a stretch. Nervous about borders closing and having to reroute so we don't go through Italy. Covid-19 was already trying to cause us to worry. But we had trust in God knowing that His ways are higher, and that if he wanted us back in Switzerland that he would get us there. We were able to return safely and without a problem! Arriving back home after being away for two weeks it was nice to have a full day off to recover from driving through the night. We started up the next day with lectures.
Lectures
Relationships
This week was focused on our relationship with God, family, friends and in the future relationships with your spouse. It was taught by a wise elderly couple from Lausanne, Switzerland. Although I had learned a lot about how to have a solid relationship with a woman, God brought me a revelation this week on my relationship with Him. It came from a very odd and random quote by Paul, I can't exactly remember what he was talking about at the moment. But I remember him just saying “did Moses read his bible?” then kind of chuckling and moving on. That phrase “did Moses read his bible?” really stuck out to me. I have been struggling lately because I have a Bible reading plan that I had fallen behind on quite a bit and felt like I was having a hard time connecting to God. In that moment when Paul said that it opened a new way of thinking for me. I felt like I couldn't connect with God because I haven't been reading my bible too much. Moses didn't read the Bible, yet his relationship with God was great! They were so close, he did life with God. We have a gift of being able to connect with God through the Bible, one of the many tools we have to connect with God and know Him more.
Biblical Worldview
“If it's true in the light, it's true in the dark”
Like all lecture weeks, another week jam packed with wisdom from a speaker brought in from Burtigny, Switzerland. This is a huge topic because like it says in the title, this is about learning how to look at the world Biblically. A revelation I had thought from this week is when he was defining what a kingdom is like - in the medieval days and how they look compared to the Kingdom of God.
In a Kingdom
Lordship of kings make them sovereign
Submission to the lordship of kings guarantees your protection
You don't own things, the King owns everything in the kingdom but you are given things to steward and take care of
The kingdom fights for you
In God's kingdom it's way different than the medieval ones, but definitely have some similarities like the ones I listed. We can rest in the things of God's kingdom. Hebrews 16- “Let us then approach God’s throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need.”
Covid-19 & the Effect on Ywam Davos
During school, covid-19 became a very big deal in a very short amount of time. From just washing your hands and coughing into your elbow to, don't leave the house except for essentials, and if you're not from Switzerland please return to your home country. We prayed and felt to continue on as much as possible. Plan for outreach to South Africa until the door is closed was our mindset. Shortly after the door was closed and it seemed more wise anyways to not go and potentially bring a virus to South Africa.
So the next step we felt to do was get student visas for all the students so they could stay here for the next three months and do missions in Switzerland. In this process things looked good, all the students wanted to stay and do that. So we started working on visas. On Monday, March 23rd 6 out of 8 students committed to getting visas and staying to do missions in Switzerland, continuing the school at Ywam Davos and making the best of it. Tuesday, March 24th was a weird day, people who committed to the visas were all in doubt and started to actually feel called home now. The same Tuesday night at 19:45 the staff got the news that because of visa issues all the students must leave as soon as possible. God was speaking to all the students that did commit to staying that they're actually going home. The rest of that Tuesday night was spent in worshiping God, crying and sharing some last moments together. It was so powerful that everyone in the school in response to the crazy news was to worship God for who he is, a loving and good Father. He doesn't change!
On Thursday, March 26th we were able to graduate the students successfully from the DTS without them completing a 3 month outreach which was a blessing! YWAM made a way to graduate students just by them completing the lecture phase, but what was special about our DTS is that we met the lecture week requirements to graduate the school and they still got 2 weeks of outreach in Bosnia which no other school could get. God is good. In all the chaos of covid-19 we still got to complete our school successfully, it didn't look how we all thought it would. But God still made a way.
Everyone was also able to leave back to their families healthy, and all staff on base are healthy too.
Thank you all for your prayers at this time.
Blessings, Lucas
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