8th Week in New Zealand: A Week of Honor

This was a very interesting week at base and not because of St. Patrick's Day, which went almost unoticed. We had Relationship Week, which consisted of not just being taught about our relationship with God but also discussing our relationship with people.

The first day of lectures on Relationships set the tone for the whole week. The topics at hand were Honor and Love, two things the Bible commands us to do, for all people... even our enemies.

Now obviously there are no enemies here on our DTS... at least I don't think there are. In all honesty, we as students, who have almost been woven together by God himself, have naturally been going out of our way to be honoring to eachother,  especially the guys toward the girls. However, we (Ship and Base students due to a second week of combined lectures) were still given an assignment to take things to a new level.

Our assignment was to specifically honor the person sitting to our rights and lefts at the time the assignment was fiven. On top of this were were given a paper test to take so that we could better understand our, and thus eachother's, top "Love Languages."

There are five Love Languages:
Words of Affermation (Complements)
Physical Touch (Hugs, Backrubs, Bromance, etc.)
Receiving Gifts (Fairly obvious)
Quality Time (Spending time with eachother)
Acts of Service (Helping someone with chores or other jobs)

My top two were Quality Time and Physical Touch, with Words of Affermation being my lowest (but, God is changing that slowly). My two "Honorees" also had Quality time is their top twos, which made things really easy for me. However, this did not mean that gifts were out of the question. Actually, the whole thing became more of an "Obvious Santa." The Main objective was to challenge us all to get to know eachother better.

We all had a lot of fun just being with eachother and going the extra mile to honor a fellow member of the "Whanau." I enjoyed just spending time with my Honorees and of course seeing their smiles from recieving a meaningful gift.

With all the excitement of Honoring it is almost easy to for one the other main highlights of the week, the "Burn."

Now we first learned about "Burns" during Spiritual Warfare Week. These are really just elongated praise and worship sessions, 12 hours in our case, though some have lasted for 2 days or more.

We went from 7pm on Friday night to 7am on Saturday morning, with both staff and students signing-up to lead 1 hours slots. I was one of a handful that stayed the while night long. As much as I would like to say that I was awake and worshipping the whole night, that would not be truthful. I did fall asleep a couple times but, got back into the flow of things after 30 or so minutes of shut eye. Actually I don't think anyone was fully concious for the whole event, but that was okay, there was always someone still worshipping.

Starting tomorrow we start Week 9, Destiny and Calling Week. So excited!