Visit from YWAM Leadership

This morning, Danny Lehman, a member of YWAM's Global Leadership Team and the Director of all of YWAM Hawaii visited our base.  Danny comes here about once a quarter to update us on what's going on with YWAM as a whole and any new big projects that are in the works.  

Danny and I outside of our staff meeting room.  That's right, I run with the big dogs (or at least take pictures with them)!

It's always encouraging to hear from Danny.  He's very engaging and is always excited to share with us what's new in our world wide ministries.  Today he talked about the continuing need for us as YWAM to love each other as brothers and sisters and remain humble in any leadership positions that we might hold.  We also discussed some opportunities to go to some international missions conferences in Thailand and New Zealand.  I think a lot of people are excited about the thought of meeting up with other missionaries at a large scale event, and even though I'd love to make it to one of these conferences, I think I have enough traveling ahead of me in the next couple of months!  

Finally, Danny told us a little bit about the YWAM base that is being started in Kauai.  One of the original thoughts of placing YWAM bases in Hawaii was to have them be a cultural epicenter in the Pacific and to be an easy jump off point to Asia and the South Pacific.  The plan was to have a YWAM base on every Hawaiian island.  Currently, there are bases on Oahu, Maui and the Big Island, but this newest base will mean that we have a YWAM ministry on all four of the major islands in Hawaii.  I found out a lot of this from my friend Raquel, who works for YWAM Honolulu, who is in charge of starting the base in Kauai, and it's really exciting to see YWAM branching out to the outer islands that are sometimes overlooked.

Kauai is known as the Garden Isle and is supposedly the most beautiful island in Hawaii.

In some personal news, I'm running an off road 5K race tomorrow morning called XTerra.  The race is a warm up for the XTerra World Championship triathlon (which I definitely won't be doing anytime soon).  The course is over crumbly volcanic rock and about half a mile of it is on really deep, soft sand.  I'm afraid I haven't trained enough, but it should be fun anyway.  Wish me luck!

Part of the XTerra course is along this rocky coastline.  Hopefully I won't break an ankle or run embarrassingly slow.