and the seasons change

A week and a half ago, I had a significant change of season in my life.

I am taking a brief sabbatical from the arts team. While they are headed to Paris and Edinburgh on outreach, I have joined the first-ever counselling school that my base is offering.

The lecture phase of the school is three months long, and the slogan is "Receive to Give," which means that, while we are learning how to counsel others in a Christian way, we are receiving healing ourselves. I am receiving a lot of healing at the same time that I am being prepared to return to my ministry with the skills to help disciple the nations - and our future teammates - with Godly wisdom.

It's been an unexpected blessing to be here, to have peace and the chance to spend extended amounts of time with God. This is the busiest season for the arts team, and my leaders were gracious enough to allow me to leave the internship that we are running so that I can come be a part of this school.

As you pray for me in this time, please pray that God gives me the strength to say yes to the decisions that He places before me. It is a huge growing time for me, and I am only too aware of my own fragility. But I also know that He will not ask me to do anything that He is not preparing me to do.

One of the best parts of the school thus far has been how we focus on giving back. We do evangelism every week, as well as going to the Salvation Army to serve dinner to the homeless on Wednesdays. I have always loved going to the Salvation Army, and it has given me the chance to have weekly conversations with the people that are there, and to follow up with them about prayer, illnesses, and the evidence of God working in their lives.

God has also been using music a lot in this time. I began playing the ukulele this past winter, and I have been playing the piano again, as well. I am currently praying about purchasing a 3/4 size guitar (because it fits my size better than a full-size guitar). God has spoken to me a lot about the place that worship has in my life, and I am trying to take concrete steps to move in the way that He is leading me. Music has a way of bypassing the mind and touching the heart with truth that I find hard to accept when I filter it through rational thought.

when we stand and fight

Over the past two months, I have gotten to experience a different side to being a missional artist. In the month between internships, we fixed up the house, but we also partnered with an organisation that stands up for Christian opinions in the politics and media, and along with them, we worked to champion some of the causes that we feel passionate about. I went to the meetings that our leader had with the organisation, and I got to watch Christians fight for their beliefs in the political arena. I've never helped organise something of that magnitude before, and it was an honour to stand outside of British landmarks and declare the Lord's presence and ask for His grace and mercy to come down. There were hundreds of people there to sing God's praises and declare our love for God and the other people of the nation, and it was powerful to see so many people take a stand for God's heart.

The process also allowed me to use gifts that God has given me for which I never understood the purpose. I've never understood why God let me do one year of a broadcast journalism degree before having me change to theatre. I didn't know why I had taken so many public speaking classes, or why God led me to do an advertising minor with my degree. And yet, through our work with the Christian organisation, I found all of those aspects of my education useful. I attended planning meetings, helped with the publicity ideas, and did an on-camera promo for the events. God has a funny way of preparing me years in advance, and while I was complaining about the difficult exams and wasted classes, He could see how necessary it would be now.

That's something I'd like to remember now, as I prepare to do the first counseling school that our base is offering. While I may not understand how it will effect my life, I know that God is using what I am learning now to prepare me for His plans for my future. God's timing is perfect - even in the preparation stages. That is a truth that I am standing on.

river views and sweet buns

Our last location on our January Internship outreach was Linkoping, Sweden, a city about an hour and a half away from Stockholm. We were invited to visit by our friends, Anders and Sarah, and since they've blessed us by visiting us with a team this year, we traveled to their base for a week.

Linkoping is a university town, so our first project was to give a concert at the university. The concert was planned by the Christian group on campus, a group that has only 20 members. For a university with several thousand students, that is a bit discouraging. However, I was really impressed by the amount of work the students put into meeting new students. Their passion for Christ is evident, and not only did they host a concert that included a free lunch, but they also joined us for a talk on intercessory prayer later in the week. They are up against a lot at the University of Linkoping, which is the most humanistic university in Sweden. It takes a lot of energy and strength to fight in that kind of environment, and the students are fighting for souls as well as attempting to keep up with their degrees. Their dedication was quite impressive.

While in Sweden, we also had the opportunity to work with several youth groups. I gave my testimony a few times, and afterwards, I got to talk to Swedish teenagers about what it meant for me to surrender my gifts back to God. It's not something that I think about a lot, but really, surrendering theatre, music, and photography to God is one of the best things that I've ever done. God took back the gifts that He gave me, and He called me into this life. I could have held on tightly to my talents and used them for my own fame, but where would I be then? I'd be struggling alone in New York City, poor and desperate. But now I'm living in a family in London, working with other Christians to use our arts to speak to people's hearts about God. It's incredible.

My favourite part of our trip to Sweden was the Jesus Bus. It's an actual bus that has been converted into a cafe, and every Friday and Saturday night, a group of senior citizens drive it to a central square in Linkoping and hand out cinnamon buns and coffee to the people coming out of pubs and clubs. They stay out there for hours, even in the cold, and talk to the young people. I was amazed at their dedication to the youth in their city; even when younger people went home, they stayed. We joined them with our music, stilts, and painting, and it gave all of us the chance to talk to people. I accompanied one of the girls on stilts, and when people stopped to ask her why she was on stilts, we got to tell them that we were in Sweden to show them God's love for them. Swedish people are surprisingly open to talking about their faith, and several times people let us pray for them or asked us how salvation worked.

The most encouraging thing about Linkoping was how it is able to be grasped. Taboo is faced with a daunting task here in London: to influence a city of millions. But Linkoping is much smaller, and with a few more people on their team, the YWAM Linkoping team has a fighting chance for taking that city for God. While we were there, Christian, our team leader, met with the vice mayor. They have connections at the University, as well, and with prayer and resources, the city of Linkoping could be won for God's Kingdom. We should pray for the team there, that God provides them more workers and connections. They were so hospitable to us, and I would love to see them blessed with resources to make their fight a bit more manageable.

 The concert at the university

 Talking to university students

The Jesus Bus

Daniela on stilts by the Jesus Bus

Lion-hearted

For the second phase of Taboo Arts' outreach, we traveled to Lyon, France. The trip to Lyon was terribly stressful, with a delayed train leading to a missed train and an unexpected night in Brussels, Belgium. But when we arrived in Lyon, we were greeted with blessings. It was sunny, and the team at YWAM Lyon took us to the park for the afternoon. We got to leave our jackets behind for the first time this spring. They also prepared amazing French food for us every day.

For the week that we were in Lyon, we taught our arts to the DTS teams that are leaving on outreach. Patricio, Micah, and I taught theatre to six of the students who are going to Asia. We spent the first few days doing workshops in which we taught them some warm ups and acting techniques, and we also taught them several dramas that they can do on the streets in Asia. It was a blessing for me to be able to teach dramas that I have actually performed on outreach, and I am always surprised at the new ways that God speaks to me through the dramas.

At the end of the week, we went into the center of Lyon to do evangelism. As the director of the dramas, I got to stand in the audience during the performances instead of performing. Several times, I got to talk to people about the meanings behind the dramas - about how God can save them from the lives that they are living now, and about how His death on the cross is relevant to our lives right now. One of the men that stopped next to me asked me if God could really save him the way that the man playing Jesus was saving the girl in the drama from the demons of her life. His friends kept calling him away, but he stayed for the whole drama, and at the end I explained what a life with God means - being healed of the things that are killing us and walking with the Creator that loves us.

I think the coolest part of the day was when I actually spoke to people about God in French. It was clear that the Holy Spirit was with me, because I took two years of French in high school, and I did not remember very much of it before we set foot in France.

My birthday also took place while we were in France. I share my birthday with my roommate, Marta, and in the evening, our team threw us a surprise party that included a delicious cake and ended with Marta teaching me how to break dance. I was also sung to in five languages: English, Spanish, French, German, and Portuguese.

What surprised me most about Lyon was the openness of people to discuss God and their lives with a random American girl. People opened up to me about their lives and struggles, and they gave me glimpses into their hearts. Sometimes I'm amazed by the privilege that I am given to see into people's hearts and to get to tell them about the God who saved my life. I often forget the urgency of what I'm doing, but in the streets of Lyon, as the team performed the dramas that we'd taught them, I remembered.

Teaching dramas in the beautiful weather.

The DTS team performing the drama "Everything" in the center of Lyon's old town.

With some of my family here (from L to R): Heather (England), Juliette (Holland), Marta (Portugal), Sebastian (Argentina), Melody (Puerto Rico, but she's growing up here in London), and me in front of them all.

 

Marta and me with our birthday cake.

 

below sea level

It has been a long time coming, but I have once again returned from traveling with the Taboo Arts team. We spent the past month in outreach around Europe, and we went to Amsterdam, Lyon (France), and Linkoping (Sweden). We also managed to go several places in between.

Our first stop was Amsterdam. We stayed at the YWAM base in the middle of Amsterdam, and on the building it said "Jesus Loves You" in English and in Dutch. The proclamation on the building reflected our attitude the whole time we were there - we were bold. Amsterdam is a tough city, and it requires a lot of fighting to do God's work there.

Our main purpose in being in Amsterdam was to work with teenagers and children in the Biljmer, which we were told is the "ghetto." While it's true that the Biljmer is a bit underprivileged, we were amazingly blessed in our time there. We taught stilts, dance, music, and graffiti to the children and teenagers that we met in the neighborhood. It was interesting to talk to them in a mixture of English, Dutch, and Spanish, and still find ways to communicate, but by the end of the week, we had made several friends and promised to try to come back at a later date and host a festival for their neighborhood.

What struck me most about the Biljmer was the sense of community that we found there. In London, people are isolated from one another. We live in a row of houses, but we only meet our neighbors when the kids kick a ball into their back garden or when we bake cookies for them. In the Biljmer, the families share a common garden area and spend a lot of their lives with one another. You can tell that, although they don't have a lot of material wealth, they don't lack for friends or love. The children were polite and enthusiastic, not at all like the children that we work with in London. I loved working with them.

When we weren't in the Biljmer, we got a chance to use a prayer room in the Red Light District. All around us were windows lit up red and full of women selling sex, but in our window, we knelt and prayed for what was going on around us. We also led a night of music and testimonies at a youth hostel in the red light district. It was a really bizarre dichotomy - all around us filth, but we were able to be a little bit of light.

On our final day in Holland, one of our team member's parents treated us to a boat ride and dinner at a pancake house. They took us all around their country, to Utrecht (the city in which they live), a tiny town with windmills, and to Rotterdam. At the very end of the day, while everyone finished up their dinner, I managed to catch a beautiful sunset in the fields nearby. It reminded me a lot of the wanders I used to take in the States, and for a few seconds, I was really amazed by how full and blessed my life is. A year ago, I was a university student, but now I'm privileged to serve God around Europe.

I serve an amazing God.

Relentless

Taboo did our first production this past week! We did a show called Relentless, a combination of physical theatre, stilt dancing, harness dancing, and live music. Our leader, Christian, even did a painting on stage before the show began.

It was an important time for our team, not only because it was our first production, but also because of the location. We performed in the Tabernacle Theatre in Notting Hill. The theatre has been used by many famous artists throughout the years, but most importantly, it started as a church. We took our production as an opportunity to invite God back into the building.

I narrated in the production, which we wrote (including the music) and rehearsed in the seven weeks leading up to the production. It was a massive undertaking, not only from the production standpoint, but also spiritually. It was also amazing to see the ways that God's strength shown through in the rehearsal process and in the show. It was my first time performing in a Christian context, and I think that what I learned the most was that God's presence takes away a lot of the pressure on the performer. I  knew that God would be present in the performance, because He was present in the rehearsal, and because I didn't try to do the show in my own strength. When you go into a show knowing that you are doing it for God's glory and that He will be glorified, it takes all of the responsibility for the performance out of your hands. God will be glorified, because it has been surrendered to Him and is His.

What an amazing thought.

a glimpse of a global family

One of the best parts of being a missionary in such an international city is getting to join with people from around the world to spread God's love. This week, our team joined an Indian church in an evangelism event that took us to three different parts of London. Our team provided the spectacle that drew people in, and then we got to tell them about God. I spent a large part of the week playing my ukulele and singing God's praises in the middle of busy London streets. I also had a few conversations that I will never forget, including one with a man named Tony who, when I was done telling him about how much God loved him, sat and silently wept for several minutes.

On Saturday, the members of the church congregation took us back to their church, and I got to experience an Indian worship service. How crazy is it that I am a part of a family that extends around the world, and that, if you follow Christ, you are as well? In what other setting would I be invited to eat and worship with people from India, in the middle of London, with my Argentinian, Puerto Rican, Portuguese, Swiss, Dutch, and English family members? God is so global and unifying. Sometimes I forget that, and yet, this year alone, I have been invited into churches of at least seven nationalities, including Afro Caribbean, Ethiopian, traditional Anglican, Catholic, and Irish.

God is moving in this place, and I am so privileged to be a part of the movement.