The time has arrived for our Fall DTS and SBFM schools to begin at YWAM Maui. This is what we have been gearing up for for months now. There is a charge of excitement in the air- and yet with all the bustle of my SBFM students arriving (the house is throbbing with footsteps, chatter and laughter) I have to take a minute and reflect upon when I first arrived in Maui to begin my work with YWAM.
In YWAM, step one for everyone is DTS: Discipleship Training School. In September of 1998, as a seventeen year old blonde girl from South Dakota, I stepped off a plane into the balmy hawaiian air...and the rest is history.
It was twelve years ago I first saw the YWAM Maui sign as I walked up to the little chapel we met in back then.
And twelve years ago I first walked walked up Baldwin Avenue and saw Haleakala crater looming like a watercolor backdrop to Paia town.
And twelve years ago I first hitchhiked the dusty roads of Maui.
And it was twelve years ago that I (front row standing) embarked on DTS with a couple dozen other young people that wanted to "Know God and Make Him Known," as YWAM puts it.
As we go into opening night tomorrow, and into the other events of orientation week, I am busy with my own SBFM students- who have already completed the DTS program. Still, as our events run side by side with the DTS where everything begins, all of the base's staff fondly look over at the DTS students and remember when that was us.
No matter what role on base we presently fill, we all still love to see new young people every quarter come to pursue God. We remember being in their shoes. We remember what God can do in a life.
And our hearts beat a little faster.
