28 Months Later

I’m now a Basic Leadership School Graduate! By my reckoning, February 13th 2008 (the start of the first SDF in Australia) is when I consider myself to have started the BLS. Officially it wasn’t until the second half of that year when I actually started BLS. But I was given credit for the “prior learning” I received from the lectures and by staffing the first SDF. And now that I think about it, the first BLS lectures I went to were a few weeks before the start of the school, so it’s closer to 29 months (but I didn’t want to miss out on the movie reference).

BLS is a 18 month (normally) school that is run on the campus here. It teaches leadership skills (hence the name, although it is far from basic) as well as some of the logistics to staffing the various schools that run. I was supposed to graduate last October, but I still had a few assignments to finish (See here for that amazing story, and if you haven’t read it yet, this story is one of the most incredible events in my recent life, which is why I have now linked to it twice. So read it). Now all those assignments are finished all the various elements are completed and I have my certificate! YAY!

Back to Work

For Easter we (the 10 or so staff on the campus who aren’t involved with the currently running schools), had four days off. It was great, I got to do all the things I love, read, watch movies, install car audio systems, sleep late and fellowship. The campus was pretty much deserted so I got time to reconnect with some of the other staff and just hang. It was time well spent.

The campus was deserted because all of the schools (70 some odd people) were in a city two hours inland call Toowoomba (tu-’womb-ba). Toowoomba is the host of “Easterfest” The largest Christian music festival in Australia. Every year now for about 10 years YWAM has helped out, we even have a venue that hosts some of the 140 musicians.

While I wasn’t there for the full weekend I did go up for one day on Wednesday to help set up lights. It was hard to leave. I’m not a music-fest person, and camping amongst thousands of people in the rain (which is normal for Easterfest, although this year was beautiful) is not my idea of a fun weekend, which I why I declined to go volunteer for the full weekend. But I wanted to get to spend time with the schools. A few weeks back I went back to Stradbroke Island with one of the Discipleship Training Schools.  This time for the full week. I got a chance to get to know the students, even leading small-group discussions. They travel a lot and it had been two weeks since I had seen them and I found myself missing them. This was a huge thing for me, since I don’t find myself missing large groups of people. Half of me said just stay, it will be amazing (and it would have been) the other half was screaming “No you fool, mud, loud noise, LOTS of people, no time off, stay away!” So in the end I didn’t stay more than the day, and it was the right decision. I didn’t realize how much I needed the rest during those 4 days.

And I just found out as I’m writing this that my visa was granted (yea!) and its good until May 2012 so I don’t need to worry about visas for over two years, and that’s when my commitment is finished (well, to YWAM, I still have a commitment to God so he might want me here longer)