The last week has been spent organizing stuff around the house, planning meals, discussing kids schedules with Jon, and preparing our wonderful house helper Loita for the trauma that will be starting this week. I am going “back to school.”

I hope Jon survives.

You see, he gets to be “Mr.Mom” over the next 12 weeks while I participate in the daily lecture phase of the Discipleship Training School (DTS) at the YWAM base. DTS is a class that consists of a lecture phase followed by a field assignment around Central America and the Caribbean.

I have never completed this course, and it is a requirement to be a staff member in Youth With A Mission. I have been a “volunteer” up to this point so I need to complete this training. It also is an excellent time to learn from different speakers and to learn some new Spanish vocabulary. It’s a bi-lingual course so I will hear everything translated.

Students are arriving today from around El Salvador, the States, and Nicaragua. This is designed to be a training that takes a “time-out” from life to focus on growing personally with God and preparing for cross-cultural ministry. I’m not sure how much of a “time-out” I will be getting, but I am looking forward to the change of pace. I will be blogging about my experiences throughout this whole course so you will get a sense of how we train people for leadership with Youth With A Mission.

The week is not off to a good start as Jon and Tori are both sick with yet another strange virus. We seem to get them a lot around here!

I’m not sure how the next few months will work out, but I am trusting that God knows the details. It’s so hard for me to relinquish control of the daily schedule with the kids but sometimes I just need to learn to let go! Please keep us in prayer in the following areas: Health for the whole family, a chance to rest when needed, and for us to keep family time a priority. Please also pray for our ongoing language learning. Up to this point we have been pretty focused on Spanish for our first 8 months with classes in the mornings. We are now shifting to just two days a week working with our tutor in the evenings. We have come so far with our language learning, but we still have a way to go until we are fluent.

Well, I guess I better go get ready for class…