My Experiences in EPIC 2013

The first thing I did in this new year 2013 was go to the Epic Youth Conference in Siem Reap. 

For those of you that don't know what Epic is...it's a yearly-occuring youth conference for teenagers ages 12-18 in Southeast Asia to get together for a camp/conference type event, during which we can socialize, have fun, and learn a ton about God and each other. It's a lot of fun for everyone!

Well anyway, the trip there with us Phnom Penh youth lasted about 7 hours, during which my poor grade 10 class had to sit with the middle schoolers on their bus while the rest of the high school had their own minibuses. The middle schoolers were surprisingly quiet, and I had a few fellow classmates to hang out with, so I was okay. 

When we got up to Siem Reap at around 7:30pm, we stopped at the Hope Siem Reap campus for dinner and then the high school headed over to our dorms to settle in (the middle schoolers had their dorms at the Hope campus). The high school dorms were about 8km outside of Siem Reap at this green and nature-y place. There were only one set of toilets and one set of showers. Since the bathrooms were nearest to the girls' rooms and the showers closest to the boys', the guys got to shower at night and the girls were told to shower in the morning. However, when we ladies got up the first morning there, we were totally surprised at how freezing it was! We were totally unprepared for the less-than-20-degree weather (seriously cold for Cambodia) and went to the showers in sweaters, only to find out that they were without water heaters and were situated basically outside. What an adventure! It only made me think about the coldest shower I'd ever taken (which was in Norway, outside - but at least the water was hot). 

After breakfast, at around 9am, we high schoolers left the dorms for the church at which we would first meet the other Epic youth and have our first sessions together. I met some girls from Bejing that, over the Epic conference, I got really close to. Our first session was really laid back and we didn't really do anything other than play games and get to know each other.

After that, we went to the Hope campus for lunch, and then went right back to the church for our second session. In this session, we got to know our speaker, Jonathan. I knew him because he speaks at my church's youth classes almost every Sunday. He spoke to us about "home", which is a delicate but totally appropriate topic to talk to TCKs about. It turns out that, even though he himself wasn't a TCK, he totally understood out situation and got a lot of us thinking about our lives and all. It was really interesting.
After dinner at Hope at 4:30pm, we headed to Angkor Wat, where we took a group photo and hung out outside the temple just as the sun was starting to set. The only annoying thing was that I got a headache. 

The high schoolers headed back to our dorms just as it got dark, and we had a nice peaceful worship time for a couple of hours. I liked it because it was outside, in the dark, with the sound of chirping insects all around us. Totally...nature-y. However, I had a lot of trouble concentrating because my headache just kept getting worse and worse.

At around 9:00pm, the high schoolers left the dorms and went to this mini golf place. We got split up into teams of four and played until around 11:00pm. By the time my group was done with all our holes, my headache was so bad I felt like I was going to puke. I was glad that I had some time to relax before heading back to the dorms (we had to wait for the other teams to finish). On the bus, I sat by myself with a headache that I'd never had before. I felt totally disabled. I couldn't think, or talk, or laugh. So I leaned against the window and slept for a while. When I woke up, the headache was gone! I was, like, WOW! Thank you Jesus! You're amazing! For the rest of the ride, I talked to my friends. Man, I was so happy that the pain was gone.

When we got back to the dorms, it was almost midnight. But you know teenagers. The day's not over yet. Basically we got almost everyone hanging out near the girl's rooms with three giant bags of nailpolish that one of the leaders had brought with her. The girls did the guy's nails, and those that didn't want theirs painted just hung around, snacking and talking. It was some great bonding time.

That next morning I had to face the freezing shower again. But I got through it. Never in my life did I love my towel as much as I did that morning. Then, again, at around 9:00am, we headed back to the church for another session, and then had lunch at the Hope campus. The high schoolers hung around at Hope while the middle schoolers headed out for their activity. We high schoolers got to do a service project, in which we packed presents for drug rehab patients and then heard the testimony of one of their counselors named Heather. She spoke to us about her life and the things she learned. 

When we were done, we headed out to the silk farm. I could tell that a lot of the teenagers though it was boring, but I found it rather interesting. It's pretty fascinating how one worm cucoon makes the most beautiful silk...and a ton of it! After that we each got an ice cream at the Blue Pumpkin outiside the farm.

After dinner at Hope again, everyone met up at the church again for our session. Now, this was the session that I'd been waiting for. Jonathan told us his life story. And it was really, really, really powerful. I could tell everyone was touched, and the time afterwards was spent just worshipping God and responding to the message. It was one of those awesome moments when there were people crying and praying and worshipping Got everywhere. Wow, I love those moments.

After that we went back to our dorms and hung around until around midnight, when we went to bed. It was our last night, and I could tell that everyone was realizing that and wanted to make the most out of the time that we still had with each other.

That next morning I had my last freezing-cold shower. I will not miss it.
At 9:00am we left the dorms with all of our stuff and went to the church for one last "session". It wasn't actually that official, since it was mainly just for responses and goodbyes. The one highlight of this particular session was the moment when Jonathan played "Gangnam Style" for everyone to dance to...and then stopped it at the perfect moment! Some people took videos, and I have one right here so you can see the funny moment for yourself:
 




Ahaha. Yeah. It was pretty hilarious.

And then, after lunch and all the painful goodbyes, the Phnom Penh bus left. 

Epic this year was definitely an experience I'll never forget. I made new commitments and new friends; the kind that I know I'll never want to let go of. Not only has this youth conference given me a fresh perspective on my life as a TCK, but it's also given me the opportunity to relate to other teenagers and give them advice based on the things that I've learned in my life. I especially appreciated Heather and Jonathan's powerful testimonies, and they will forever be kept in my heart as a reminder that I am not alone in the world - because God has placed the wonderful people in my life that He needs to get my attention and help me realize that His plan for me is beyond anything I can do for myself.

An Update on My Caterpillar Rash

If you guys read one of my previous posts, you would know I had a caterpillar attack and now have a rash all over my body except for my legs.

Not fun, I tell you. Not fun.

Well, it hasn't really gotten better, so I went to the doctor yesterday (my daddy took me) and she gave me a cream and some pills and a tips as to how to get rid of most of the itchiness. Well, guess what it is!

BAKING POWDER! 

...so baking powder is my new best friend now! Yay! I mean, I also have a cream that works even better, but that's only for the most irritated areas where I sweat the most (neck, stomach).

So yeah. I hope that my rash will have died down by Monday so I don't have to go to school looking like some crazy teenager that scratches herself for no reason (that's seriously almost what it looks like). And I don't want my teachers thinking I'm crazy or something.

Which I'm not.

Seriously.

An Update on My Thursday Devotion

If you read my post from a few days ago, you'll know that I was planning a devotion for my class. However, yesterday I was thinking about how my classmates would be totally bored out if I just talked the whole time, so I went on Youtube, asking God to help me find something to make my devotion more interesting. About three minutes later, I found this!

I was so amazed! After watching the video, I was like, God, you really ARE amazing!. He literally gave me this video to show to my class - that's how amazing He is! So, I shortened my devotional speech and downloaded this video to show to my class. This is my shortened devotion (the red parts are the things I added to make it relate to the video):

(after showing the video)

This girl Emily Griffin started off her life thinking that it didn’t matter what she did, God would still forgive her in the end and she’d still end up in heaven if she repented. A lot of our secret philosophies on life are “live a party now, ask God for forgiveness later, and then go to heaven”. But that’s not what God has planned for our lives.

The book Chasing Daylight says:

You were born to live a great adventure; You were created with a divine destiny; You are called to fulfill a great mission. You were designed for unique purpose. Now you are called to live it out.

This is kinda like what our speaker last week told us: life is an epic journey, right? What this book talks about is that God is so often misunderstood when people know Him for judgment and rules. Actually, Jesus calls us to a life of unimaginable adventure. And it begins the moment we choose to follow Him. Because when we do, we pass from a mere existence to real, true life (walking in the truth). His promise is that in Him we will find the life that our hearts have always longed for.

There is no principle that says everyone who does God’s will lives and easy life – at least not on this earth. Even when we live, it doesn’t mean the victory comes without suffering.

If we are going to seize divine moments, we much accept the reality that we have no control over many so many things. We have no control over when we die or how we die. We must take responsibility now over what we do have control over – how we choose to live.

Emily told us that she had troubles and that it was difficult to get over her obsession with drinking even as she was trying to fill her life with Jesus. To follow Jesus is to enter the unknown, to relinquish security, and to exchange certainty for complete confidence in Him.

Are you willing to live a life that honors God and reflects His character and leave the outcome to Him? Are you willing to live by faith and trust him to be faithful? There will be days on this journey of faith when the crystal clear outcome will be something you don’t like. On those days you must, like Jesus, declare, “Father, if you are willing, take this cup from me; yet not my will, but your will be done”.

I know that sometimes the current outcome may seem sucky, but God promises that with Him, lives that are lived built on full pursuit of Him and His plan won’t every be regretted no matter how difficult it was to live that life. This is because these sort of lives are at their best – and there’s nothing more that we could possibly ask for.

Even though a lot of you guys right now are trying to block out what I just said, I really encourage you today to make a choice. Everyone (even the people who pretend to not care) has some sort of desire or want to live a full life with purpose. Everyone. So what I encourage you to do today is to ignore your impulse to impress others by pretending you have it all together. You don’t. The truth is, you don’t. God is the only person who can control whether you go to heaven or not. What you can control is how your life ends up, and what you leave behind. What you can control is whether or not you want to die a content, happy person that leaves behind a mark that says ‘I lived life to its fullest’. And I know you all want that.

Here’s a verse that God suddenly brought to my attention yesterday: Romans 14:7-8

For none of us lives to himself alone and none of us dies to himself alone. If we live, we live to the Lord; and if we die, we die to the Lord. So, whether we live or die, we belong to the Lord.

This verse you see at the end is another great "God showed me story". I was looking at my favorite verse in the Bible in Romans (which I will probably talk about in some other post sometime soon) when I suddenly looked at this verse and went, Wow!!! God, again?! And this was after the video experience. Cheesy as this "story" may sound about God showing me what to use for my devotion, I really believe it was Him, because I couldn't have done this without Him! God is GOOD!

Caterpillars and Rashes

Today in History class I unexpectedly got super itchy all over my body except for my legs. It was horrible! I asked my teacher if I could go to the school nurse and he said that I should wait a few minutes (he thought it may be allergies and that if I didn’t have trouble breathing I was going to be okay). The trouble is, I’m not allergic to anything, and I doubt I ever will be! After about five minutes, the itchiness all over my body was gradually getting worse and I thought I would literally scratch all of my skin off my body, I was so itchy. So I desperately asked my teacher again if I could PLEASE go to the nurse (I was near tears), and he still didn’t think it was worth missing the class. I quote, “What would the nurse do to help you? Do you honestly think this is worth missing the lesson for?” Of course, I didn’t really know how to respond to this, so I just tried to keep quiet. Five minutes AFTER THAT, I was practically crying as I asked my teacher if I could at least go get a wet towel to dab on the rapidly spreading rash that covered my arms, neck, and parts of my face. I could feel the rash spreading over my stomach and back, but I knew it would look weird if I scratched there.

Well anyway, my teacher said yes, and so I go up to go the bathroom. All of a sudden, my friend that was sitting near to me called out, “Oh my gosh, Sarah! I know why you’ve been so itchy! You have a bug on your back.” Of course, an image entered my mind of a huge, gruesome, ugly thing crawling all over me, and I started squealing, begging another friend sitting nearby to “get it off me!”. Well, she flicked it off, and I saw this tiny black caterpillar on the floor with a white streak through it. All my friends nearby were totally creeped out and I was also practically in tears. I rushed out of the room and to the bathroom, where I stripped off my shirt, shook it out, and started dabbing at my rashes with wet tissues. I was so horrified!

About a minute later I went back to class and made it through the rest of the lesson pretty calmly, although I was still itching like CRAZY. The wet cloths were helping a little bit, but I still had huge urges to just rip my skin off my body. After history class, we had one more period of the day, but I didn’t think I would be able to handle it without taking a shower first. So I ran to the bathrooms again and took a nice, amazing shower (thank goodness I had extra clothes from PE!). After the shower, I was still itching, but I felt somewhat clean and a little bit more calm about the current circumstances. Nevertheless, I went to the school nurse (who was glad that I came because it could have gotten really serious), and she put this cream all over me that made me just go, ‘Aaaaah’. It was heaven. After that, I went back to math class smelling like medicine but feeling a WHOLE lot better! Thank GOD for school nurses! :)

Now I’m back home and I’m still itching in some places and I have tons of dots and rashes all over my body. But I feel so much better and I’m glad that this experience is all over and done with! I’ve lived here in Cambodia my whole life and I’ve never gone through this before – it was a nightmare!

"Walking in the Truth" - Living Life with a Purpose

This Thursday I am leading devotions in my homeroom class, and I decided to share with you what I've decided to speak about. These are my exact notes for this Thursday morning:

In my Sunday school class we’ve been doing these really cool sessions called “Chasing Daylight”. Basically what they are about is “seizing the power of every moment” and “choosing to live by making the right choices with impact”. Cheesy and out-of-this-world as this may sound, I think what I’ve learned so far has really helped me. It also sort of matches what we spoke about in FLAG week last week. We spoke about “walking in the truth” with God, right? Well, today I decided to share what walking in the truth means to me.

To me, walking in the truth is a basic translation of living life with a real purpose. The only problem with our society today is that we try to avoid the pain of fear and doubt by “just getting by”. A lot of our secret philosophies on life are “live a party now, ask God for forgiveness later, and then go to heaven”. But that’s not what God has planned for our lives.

The book Chasing Daylight says:

You were born to live a great adventure; You were created with a divine destiny; You are called to fulfill a great mission. You were designed for unique purpose. Now you are called to live it out.

This is kinda like what our speaker last week told us: life is an epic journey, right? What this book talks about is that God is so often misunderstood when people know Him for judgment and rules. Actually, Jesus calls us to a life of unimaginable adventure. And it begins the moment we choose to follow Him. Because when we do, we pass from a mere existence to real, true life of walking in the truth. His promise is that in Him we will find the life that our hearts have always longed for.

The most spiritual activity you engage in everyday is making choices. When you think about the story of Adam and Eve, they had a Garden full of endless opportunities for pleasure. And yet, they chose another path, one that severed their relationship with God forever. Like with them, the choices we make either bring us closer to God or move us away from Him.   

One encouraging thing I noticed about this story was that, when Adam was hiding after his sin, God set out in search of him. Even when we get lost, God and His mercy still pursue us and invite us to once again join His divine adventure.

Now I ask you: Have you confused the blessing of God with wealth, comfort and security? There are things that God does for you and then there are things that He’s waiting for you to do. The journey begins when you choose to “stop wasting daylight” and start to live in the epicenter of God’s activity.

There is no principle that says everyone who does God’s will lives – at least not on this earth. Even when we live, it doesn’t mean the victory comes without suffering.

Here's something else from Chasing Daylight:

If we are going to seize divine moments, we must accept the reality that we have no control over many things. We have no control over when we die or how we die. We must take responsibility over what we do have control over – how we choose to live.

Jesus said, “If you have the faith of a mustard seed, you can move mountains.” He didn’t say that we should all have a tiny bit of faith. He’s saying that it takes very little faith to accomplish great things.

To follow Jesus is to enter the unknown, and to push away security and certainty for full confidence in Him.

Are you willing to live a life that honors God and reflects His character and leave the outcome to Him? There will be days on this journey of faith when the crystal clear outcome will be something you don’t like. On those days you must, like Jesus, declare, “Father, if you are willing, take this cup from me; and may not my will, but yours be done. Amen”.

Okaaaay. So that's my devotion. I realize that I have a few random, non related thoughts thrown in here and there, but that's what was on my mind at the time, and I think it's important for my classmates to know this stuff. 

Please pray for me as I give this devotional - I'm really praying that God will use me to speak some change into my friends' lives. Also, I pray that God will help me not to be nervous and that I can take on this "challenge" with full certainty of what He has planned and how He wants the devotional to go.

Amen!