Jessamyn Leigh

Wow, feels like a long time since my last update. Sunday and Monday there was a lot of cleaning to get ready for our room inspections. We missed a few things though, so we had to get a second inspection the next day. Only one room on our whole floor passed the first day. And they fixed the light in our bathroom! I have never been so grateful to have a bathroom light! Now if we could just get the fridge replaced. I also decorated my journal for small group. I cut up a bunch of magazine and postcard pictures and decoupaged them onto the cover. It came out so good. It was fun to do a craft. I’m also almost done with the one knitting project I’ve done while I’ve been here. I’ll have pictures up soon. And I got to cook this week! But more on that later. the front the back, which I kind of like better Our lecture this week was really good. It was about worldview and transforming societies. When I was in high school, we did The Tr

This week I had a much lighter rehearsal schedule. I only had a few dances and one singing class the whole week. It was good to have a break, because my lower back/hips started really bothering me this week. After a lot of prayer, icing, gentle stretching, walking, making myself sit up straight for lecture, and Advil, it’s feeling quite a bit better. I’ve also always slept on my stomach, which I know is bad for it, and I’ve tried for years to sleep on my side. For the last four or five nights I’ve slept on my side. I’m pretty sure it’s a miracle. On a side note, I’m really enjoying the Hansam. On Monday morning we got to do Bible reading for three hours instead of lecture. I love when we do it. We get in groups of three and take turns reading chapters out loud. It’s just so much more interesting that way. Maria did our lectures this week, on Spiritual Warfare and discipleship. They were good, but just kind of general overviews that I didn’t get a ton out of.  One of her lectures s

This week we had three different speakers: David Hamilton, Maria, (our school leader) and Joseph Avakian. Since we are a Performing Arts DTS, the talks were kind of focused on how Arts can spread the gospel and how to use Arts. I especially enjoyed the last three days, when Joseph spoke. He’s a really engaging speaker. I felt like this was the first week where I felt like I was learning new stuff from lecture, like a lot of it has felt sort of like review before this. Joseph's crazy notes  My favorite talk was on Thursday, when he talked about the “boxes” we naturally put ourselves in, based on mainly 6 things: Fear, Comparison, Criticism, Egoism, Arrogance, and Control, and how to break those things by coming in the opposite spirits. (that’s kind of a YWAM-y term, which means pretty much what it says, doing the opposite thing)  So Love, Identity, Exhortation, Generosity, Humility and Freedom. His talks were very visual oriented, with a lot of pictures on the whiteboard, s

Hey guys, I just wanted to thank you all again for all the support (financially and otherwise) for my mission trip. (You can read more about it on this here blog) I actually ended up with a little bit of extra money, and I’ll be donating some of it to my classmates. Within my school there are still about 17 people that don’t have enough money to go on the trip, totaling about $88,000.  We’re going to do be doing some (well, a lot) fundraising and we all believe that God will provide. I just want to specifically highlight one of the girls in my school. Her name is Sarah and she’s one of the sweetest and most beautiful girls I’ve ever met. I’m enjoying getting to know her. She’s from Roseburg, Oregon, so we’re practically neighbors! Sarah’s a gifted and graceful dancer and so far we’re in the same dances and the same small group, so we’re spending lots of time together! She arrived without her complete school fees, but through donations she has paid all of them and part of her outre

I won’t say that I had the best Easter weekend of my life. I missed my family and unfortunately I had to do kitchen duty for the Easter brunch, which meant I couldn’t go to church. At least the brunch was really yummy. And my grandma baked and sent me a loaf of her Easter bread! It got here on like Tuesday, along with some other treats from my Mom. They played The Passion of the Christ on Saturday night and I watched it for the first time. I’ve never cried that much during a movie. My small group did “secret angels” over the weekend, and I forgot about it until Sunday afternoon, so speed-knitted a white plumeria headband for Ashley, my small group leader. I’ve realized that I really have a sense of entitlement about having good food. Our fridge broke this week, (right after they finally got our toilet fixed) so I had to throw a bunch of my brunch leftovers and my cheese and Farmer’s Market veggies out. I was really grumpy about that, especially when I didn’t like any of the fo

On Friday night I walked to Wal-Mart with two of my roommates. On our way back this creepy drunk guy started following us, but one of the other girls turned around pointed and yelled for him to leave, and he did. She said she felt the power of God like she never had. We called some guys to meet us at McDonald’s and walk us home after that. Saturday was our big beach day. It was really nice, though I ended up with some pretty nasty sunburn on my thighs. As my mom said, they’ve never seen much sun! Sunday was a nice lazy sort of day: I did my laundry and cleaned up the room, read my Bible, went through my notes from lectures, watched some America’s Best Dance Crew, chilled, and watched High School Musical with some of the girls down the hall.   On Monday mornings we have worship with everyone and it’s great. After that we dove into a couple of intense days. We had four lectures (meant to be spread out over a whole week, but we had to cram because of scheduling) on sex and rela

So once we actually started, I got really busy and obviously haven't sent as many updates. Monday morning we had worship with everyone on campus. The worship is one of my favorite things here. Most of the rest of the day was spent with the rest of my DTS (38 people and 12 staff) working on doing introductions. My school is bilingual in English and Korean, so everything takes twice as long because it has to be translated. It's kind of cool though. I wish Korean was easier to learn. I love when we worship in both languages though. So anyway, we didn't get through many introductions. After each person went, we all prayed for them. We have a really interesting mix of people from all kinds of backgrounds, some of them quite sad. There's a guy who didn't really know God, but decided to come because he saw how his older sister was a Christian, and now he's so excited and just reading the Bible and praying and asking questions all the time. It makes me excited!

spent most of the day in the kitchen cooking oatmeal, hot dogs and doing dishes. It was pretty fun though. They have all the dancers doing every other weekend kitchen duty. Spent the afternoon at Walmart and Target and getting my stuff more organized. There's a family on staff here who know my parents from when they were in YWAM, and she offered to drive me. They're so nice! Then I Skyped my family for a while and rested. It was so nice to see them! After dinner, a bunch of girls went to this really cool frozen yogurt place. Right next door they have one of those Zorb things. I think we're going to go do it tomorrow. There were a bunch of people hanging out at the campus cafe when we got back, have a "Brazilian Night" and dancing and we all joined in. Different people showed taught some of their moves: Brazilian, Nigerian, Bollywood, and B-girl! Heading to bed now because I have kitchen duty at 6 tomorrow!

Just to let everyone know what I've been up to... Had to get up at about 3:45am to get to the airport. From there I flew to Portland, and then Seattle, and finally Kona! The flight was pretty much fine. It was pretty bumpy, but otherwise.  I got some really gross food, watched Black Swan (which was edited and really good!) and part of Voyage of the Dawn Treader.  I got in to Kona at about 11:30, Hawaii time (three hours earlier than Oregon.) It's a little more dry and rocky here than I expected, but still so beautiful. Yesterday it was pretty cloudy and rainy, which they said is unusal. Oh well, it was nice to not have a super hot first day. I spent a couple hours doing registration and getting my ID and stuff. Then I hung out and wandered the base with various people. I've already made a lot of friends, mostly in my DTS, but some from other schools too. There's one other girl from my DTS in my room, as well as six other girls. (2 from Canada and the rest from