November Update

Same same same, is boring boring boring

It seems that tears always have a tendency to fall in the same places over and over again, throughout humanity, especially in indie songwriting. Let’s go over these really quick:

1) Cheeks- Located right under the main source for tear ducts the eyes, who can blame anyone for getting tears on them?

2) Pillows- Do people often hold their frustrations in until the end of the day, only to have to sleep on a damp pillow for the rest of the night?

3) Rivers- Okay so they don’t end up in rivers as much as they make rivers, but who can cry a river anyway? Highly unlikely. 

4)Shoulders- Now I am assuming these are not your own shoulders, it would be really hard to get these on your own shoulders. Unless of course they were on your cheek first, and then, well that would just be double cliché. 

5) Letters- Who even writes these anymore anyway?

6) Eyes- This is the most logical of all places for tears to be, I mean, it is a good thing that our eyes already have saltwater in them because tears end up here a lot. (This is typically where mine do)

But in all seriousness, what does this say about our western society and crying? That it is a romantic whimsical notion that we all experience (for the most part). Does it represent the idea that we all know there is something bigger than ourselves out there, to show what happens on the inside on the outside? Our willingness to live in community, or without community of another human being? That we shove it into our deepest darkest moments with only ourselves?

Maybe there is nothing to it except for we. all. cry. 

Miss Mykell

I am an inspired thief.

I have noticed, in my study of languages abroad, that people have many different ways to say the same thing.

I know it’s pretty obvious, but there is one thing in particular that I find interesting within the English —->German/Dutch/French (and others) exchange. It is the difference between two ways you can look at creating forms of art.

In English we always say “I am going to go take photos” or “Will you take a picture for us?” But in Germany you would say “I make pictures” or “Will you make this picture of us?”

At first I thought this sounded utterly ridiculous, because of the way it sounded. But as this thought kept on popping up in my brain I started to see the genius of it. It is all in the way you think about what you are doing.

So I ask myself, as a photographer am I just taking things from the world around me so I can have them, or am I being inspired enough by the world around me to want to make something from it.

I prefer to think that I am doing the latter, but the different ways your language makes you think about things really dictates the way you think about the world.

Maybe we could take it as far as saying… are we trying to make the world a better place, or take the world to a better place? Just a parallelism to think about.

For now, as my life motto is “create lovliness” I shall venture into this European world where I make pictures instead of taking them and see how this changes my view.

Miss Mykell

God is in the rain

Our base leader, Jan, just returned from an outreach to the remote Kenyan tribes last week. He got to tell us one story while we were at the following staff meeting.

He told us that they got to go to a tribe that had never seen anyone outside their tribe before, no tourists, no foreigners, so definitely no missionaries. The area that they visited was in the middle of a overdrawn drought for the last several months, all of the people there didn’t have enough of anything because the rain had not come. 

So Jan and the team started to pray outwardly for the people, and for rain. 

Then some clouds started forming out of nowhere, clouds that the people had never seen the likes of before began to roll in over the village. 

Then downpour. 

Everywhere they went it would start to rain like this. In every tribe that had never seen a missionary, they saw rain for the first time in forever. People started asking the team who they prayed to and worshiped because obviously the team’s God was the mighty God. 

More mighty than any of the Gods that they knew.

So, for the people in those remote locations of Kenya, God was in the rain. 

What does it take for us “westerners” to see God? 

Do we see God in the beauty of nature, the wonder of technology, or the uniqueness of relationships? Do we see God in a child’s face, in the heartbeat, in a weeping moment? What makes us really realize who God is, and what He does? 

Is it as simple and natural as the rain?

Or do we need more in our technological world that seems to do magic every time we look at or touch a screen? Have we rationalized ourselves out of His wonder that he wants to show us? Or do we use this logic to understand how it all connects together?

You see, the people in Kenya needed God because he brought the rain, the life that they needed to survive in their own. Have we over-comforted ourselves out of needing anything from God? Or do we need Him in different ways as a society and culture? Is that okay? 

I personally see God in the quantum, existential and the rain. It never fails to connect the sky to the earth, me to my trampoline, or gravity to new life.

Miss Mykell

 

People shift, and change

When I first stepped onto the grounds of the castle a year ago and began my journey within the construct of what we call Youth with a Mission (YWAM) I was amazed at all the places people had been. Here in YWAM people travel– a ton– and it becomes oddly normal to just hop on a plane to half-way around the world.

Being one of the more traveled people in my homeland of the states, Idaho, I was giddy with excitement, as well as amazed, from hearing eveyone talk about how in just one year they had been to over four, five or six countires.

Needless to say in the last year, I have aquired this same view on travel that many of you had when I came here, that going to Kenya is almost the equivalent of going to the store. You see we have conversations so fluidly and easily here about travel and going to and from them.

I literally just had a conversation that went something like this;

“Hey, is so-and-so back?”

“Back from where? Kenya?”

“No, I was meaning back from the store.”

“Oh, close enough.”

There is always this disconnect when I am talking to people back home now, they don’t understand flying, driving, and taking the trains the way that we do here as the YWAM Herrnhut community. For us, it is simply part of our job, our way of life. For them it is a hassle, a financially taxing and time consuming commitment.

The surprising thing is, with as much as we travel, for me it never quite loses it’s exotic and exciting aura of adventure.

-Miss Mykell

I’ve got a feeling….

… that tonight’s going to be a good night.

Okay, yes tonight is going to be a good night, but I mean, isn’t good all in your perception of it? I was thinking today about feelings, and how you can be in a place a specific time and you can have one feeling, and then return to that same place at a different time and it has a totally different feeling. 

Then there is the whole thing about places just feeling different. Also it is strange about time feeling different, or the same even when you change places. It is strange how depending on the time that you are in a place, you can be feeling something different than before.

I can be in Idaho at one point in my life, but then at another point I am all the way over here in Germany and having the same feeling. Like on my birthday it feels like this nostalgic looking back feeling, yet it felt like that two years ago and last year. Although, if you take seasons for instance, there is a feeling that comes around this time of year that seems to infect all people with sweaters, tea and running through the leaves on a blistery day and enjoying it. Now if it were this cold in the summer months everyone would hate it, but this time brings around a specific aura of feeling that humans all seem to notice.

 

Actually, what I find the strangest is when you get those feelings associated not with anything to do with time or space, but a random stimuli, like a song, or a smell, or the way the light splashes across someone’s face.

So what is it about feelings that make them real to us? What is it that ties them to the physicality of the world or ourselves that makes these different times or places have different meanings. How do each of us have our own feelings in the same place and at the same time that could be totally different and independent of each other?

So I guess what I am trying to say is this phenomenon of feeling is tied to both the places we fill and the moments we are living in… yet it is not at all. 

I guess I shall just stick with this feeling of fall with striped stockings,  loads of spiced tea, watch Tim and Helena movies, and get on with the candy corn! 

Miss Mykell 

October Update

Time will go on

Here is a quick update on some stuff that has been happening here.

Last week all of the MotA students did a “faith walk.” Basically, they were each given a euro and assigned to teams of five and then told they had to leave the castle and couldn’t come back for four days.

What we thought would be pandemonium turned to blessings. They all took the opportunity to just go out into the communities of Germany and the Czech Republic and bless people by working for them, playing music in the streets, and serving with odd jobs around the churches.

Some of the other staff and I did a mini faith walk for one night because we had to be back for work the next day and ended up discovering this old monastery about 20 km from here and attending a service there. Then we proceeded to venture into Poland, unable to find accommodations found a park for the night and headed back in the morning.

The staff had a harder time than all of the students did.

At the end of the week we all got together in the dining hall and just told stories about our time, and saw the way that God worked through, and in, all of us over a good meal and ice cream.

 

I get to have a couple of “one-on-ones” here at the base from the MotA student pool. Which basically means I will get to mentor a couple of the girls during their time in Germany for Lecture phase and also after they return from their outreach. I am super excited about that.

Yesterday all of the people that are into photography at the base had a meeting with the base leader, Jan, about a new project that he wants us all to participate in. It’s a worldwide photography campaign “shoot for what you stand for” or in my case, what I stand against. I plan to take photos maybe in Varnsdorf, Czech Republic, which is 20 km from here right on the border, and contribute them to the project. If you want more information on the project check out this video from Ted.com.

As for work against human trafficking, we started a prayer and intercession group here at the base for it. Right now, it is just a really heavy topic for everyone involved in it, and we are trying to see where God wants to lead us in this journey. One of the things that we were thinking about this week is how many abortions the women who end up in prostitution rings under a pimp have to have… at least 12 or so over their career, and it is not even about the mother’s own choice, but the ability for her to be able to work for her pimp.

It sickens me. That is thousands of lives every year.

Miss Mykell

I have found a revolutionary idea.

Humans are not perfect.

Miss Mykell

Update September

The fashions of time….. (and maybe space)

I just was rummaging through all my things a couple of weeks ago while packing for Germany and I came across an old photo of me taken when I was a child. Let me tell you I was a fashionista, I was wearing a paisley blue and pink top with bright blue shorts dotted with random Valentines day hearts. (It probably wasn’t Valentines Day… cough.)

I am sure we have all done that, looked back at a picture of ourselves, as a child or not, and questioned the fashions of the day, because they change so quickly and radically. It almost seems ridiculous to me now that people actually wore Goucho pants and they were what we would call “in.”

It has been like this all through history too. 

It has been a constant thing through history. In every time period people believed things that were ridiculous so strongly it would cause trouble to say anything otherwise.

What scares me is that is not just with clothing fashion, but with moral fashions. They’re just as arbitrary, and just as invisible to most people. But they’re much more dangerous. There were things that would get you killed if you went back in time and said them. It was even controversial for one person to state that the world was round and not flat, so you couldn’t fall off the edge. Now, most people think it is ridiculous that we actually thought the world was flat. (I think this is also still debated in some circles, so I won’t go into this further.) 

It’s tantalizing to think we believe things that people in the future will find ridiculous. What would someone coming back to visit us in a time machine have to be careful not to say?

Miss Mykell

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The castle…that I work in.

Inkstagram – Photo – The castle…that I work in..

On becoming a connoisseur of beaches

Sand is a wonderful thing.

I mean, besides the wet, sticky and itching that always comes with it its a pretty awesome substance. Actually… that’s gross so let’s eliminate the wet factor today and just talk about sandboxes.

Ah, the joy of our childhood, or at least most of ours… for brief moments. Okay I admit that a sandbox is not really the part of the defining moment of our childhoods normally, but always when you say the word you will think of children. Sandboxes full of children can only mean one thing, there is rarely only sand in a sandbox.

Yes, anything that a two year old could possibly posses could end up in a sandbox. It really should be dubbed the name “surprise box.” There can be anything from crayons, to little green army men, to… well I would rather now think about it… in there and you never know what you are going to get.

Life is like a box of sand… you never know what you are going to get.

Miss Mykell

Blue Lips Under Sunglasses

When you enter yourself into a community, the community starts to conform to one another. Not in a bad way really, they just all seem to jell into one big well-oiled machine all knowing what the other is doing at one given time. This I have learned over the last year. 

People will start to do the same things as one another, they become in sync and cycle through phases together. Right now for us at camp Firwood, as we are on the brink of our first staff break this weekend, are all craving peanut butter like a child wants candy, and just want to lay on the lawn in the sunshine and never m0ve. We all tend to start thinking about the same things, and in the same way, no matter how ridiculous those things might appear to outsiders. 

Like when a song is blasted over a speaker, it automatically means one giant dance party, and it is becoming automatic. And when we all start not to care what kind of crazy characters we end up being throughout the day we end up with turnaround tuesday, where you turnaround every time you start a conversation, or accent friday, you can guess what that is. But we also end up with parties where we all put on old people clothing and act like the elderly and just pretend to have heart attacks all night, want to play bingo and not be able to hear anyone. We make up mealtime activities such as putting your fork in the air, just to see how long it takes before it catches on. We name people official new, weird names, and forget we even have our other “real” names. This is what fun becomes. 

Because fun and entertainment and worth are all relative to the community you are surrounded in. Normal things become normal because either people stop caring, or everyone else is doing it, statisically it makes sense to do it yourself. 

Makes me wonder what earth looks like to outsiders. 

Miss S·hyamiläne

*Oh, and it also becomes normal to talk about poo. 

Little Children

Children make the world work.

I mean this in not a neogenerational cycle sort of way, but in a way of social life in the present ever changing moment of now.

How many times have you heard the phrase “… because the children….”

There are whole industries devoted to children. They are the largest revenue making social group in history, and we can’t help it but indulge in their desires or the contributions.

Children rule the world, they are the kings and queens of our time. They are doted upon and the cause of many non-profit organizations. They are the ones we invent bubbles and cotton candy for, and the ones we spend most of our time thinking about if they happen to be our offspring. Children bring purpose to our lives in a way that would not be possible if they were not the hope of our world. They are going to replace us, we know this, and we want to make them think the world can be a better place so we bend over backwards to show them this could be true if they just try.

Yet children also make some of the most perverted and horrible things in the world possible. We have a twofold dilemma, not only do they run the world with their promise of hope but also they bring in the heartbreaking idea of losing innocence. Children are also the ones we use to fulfill the roles of adults in pornography or labor. There are some of us in this world (shudder) that thrive off of bringing pain into the lives of children, or using them as objects to be used however they please. They bring their perverted minds to the table and create absolute hell for the little ones. And thus, the world will also bend over backward to get a hold of children.

So most people either try to do one of two things to children. They try to captivate them, or take them captive. Captivating them through wonder, curiosity and beauty. Taking them captive with their words, punches, or orders.

We need to be very intentional and careful with which of these options we choose.

For now, I choose to captivate the little ones at summer camp with creation.

Miss Mykell

Perspective pie anyone?

I have been thinking a lot about perspective recently, and how people either as individuals or a whole see the world around them. Just as we are the only ones who can witness the earth from our point of view, we can’t see the earth from another’s point of view as well.

I have been specifically thinking about perspective in the terms of how our universe came about or was created, and how it functions now. There are times in my life where I don’t see the order in the chaos I am witnessing around me, but then there are times in my life where I have seen order and could understand a foundation on which to make predictions. Still, this is something I cannot understand from another’s perspective. Where I may at some point see complete and utter chaos and disorder another may see it from a new angle, and understand something that transcends my narrow view.

To illustrate this idea, I have found this video. It is amazing trust me.

My point:
There must be someone out there that sees the order and knows exactly what is going on and has it all under control.

Miss Mykell

One giant inside joke

So the world, I concluded yesterday, is one huge inside joke inside of another, inside of another…

How did I arrive at this conclusion? Well it is a long string of thoughts that I beg you to embark on with me.

Back to yesterday, I was sitting in Nichole’s living room watching America’s Next Top Model and a Gieco commercial came on the screen (I know Nichole… you can fast forward through commercials on a DVR, but I always forget, for I am not used to such amenities). Now with this ad came of course everyone’s favorite British accented gecko telling everyone about the company’s newest venture of getting your money back in your pocket.

The funny thing is, logically, why would a freaking gecko be on a car insurance ad in the first place? We all know why, in this case, because we know the back story… the inside joke per sé. Because the two words Geico and gecko sound similar and they have made previous ads that have expressed this and built a story surrounding it, and a following of people who understands. And eventually this gecko ends up just becoming the accepted spokesperson of Geico and changed the whole way they did ads for the remaining years of the company.

This is how the world works also. We have built a knowledge base in all of our brains from the very beginning of our lives, and that has been built on all the things learned of previous generations. Our whole lives are one giant inside joke.

Because when you and a group of friends stand around talking of old times and somebody throws out an inside joke and you all are laughing so hard you can’t breathe no one on the outside of that circle would understand why it was so funny to you. Just like anyone outside of this planet would not understand all the things we have here.

I mean really how would you explain a blog to someone that was from a distant planet (and happened to speak your language), but had never been to earth before? How well would that translate?

You would have to go back and explain what the internet is, and a computer, and maybe even prose and sentence structure and everything that you yourself have learned up to this point in time to be able to explain what a blog is. Maybe you would even have to go back and explain the history of humanity and how we got to a point in time of where we could actually log on to the internet on our i-phone and push buttons to make  thoughts and ideas come out of our heads in weird markings.

There is so much to know when you are a human, and even more as the days go on.

Just take today to think about all the actions you are doing and the thoughts you are thinking and analyze where you learned, and how much you had to learn to even make it through that one small thing that you are doing.

And the thing is there are hundreds of these actions that make up a day. Even up to the googooplextillions ( I made that up) that make up a lifetime. It is a good thing that you don’t have to have an individual log of things that comprise each of these items though. It is good that the world is connected in ways that we don’t even expect.

It is when the gecko is about Gieco. It is when this is about that. Because all of our lives this is almost always about that. Whatever you want to fill in those two words with, it is all connected and it is all one big human inside joke.

Miss Mykell

And a transcript

That is one of the many videos shot in my home in Germany to come out of my time at discipleship training school with an organization called Youth with a Mission, or YWAM. Not only was it a very fun thing to do, as you can see we had our fun, but it was, to say the least, one of the most amazing experiences of my life.

Fist off I would like to thank you guys for all your support of this time that I have been given to do these things. You guys have been so giving and loving towards me and I appreciate that so much. 

Okay, let me explain a little bit of the school. In YWAM there is this program called DTS, and it is a seven month course about God and the Bible. Sometimes a DTS will have a focus like sports, media, or a certain ministry etc. Mine was called Marriage of the Arts, it is located in a small village (and when I use the term village I mean it to every sense of the word) called Herrnhut, Germany. It is focused in using your art to glorify God and fight injustice in the world. 

The first half of the program we go to school, we have classes on various biblical topics like God’s voice, injustice, evangelism, the holy spirit, among other things. We also had classes in our particular art, for me that was video and writing. 

In the second half of the program we are placed with a team of other students and go on a mission trip to places around the world. 

I learned, in a big way very quickly right from the start of this adventure that God is going to provide for me. Nothing I can do will change the way he will do it, and that His timing is everything. 

At first I didn’t even know that I was going to get to go. I found out about this opportunity a bit later than the other students and fundraising had not gone as well as I had hoped. To make a long story short, on the first day of class I was still working my summer job, with no money to be able to buy a plane ticket to Germany let alone pay tuition. 

Seven days later I got a call from the YWAM base there and they said I miraculously had the money to be able to purchase a plane ticket. Two days later I was on the plane, and three days later I was there. Haha. 

What a whirlwind start to a whirlwind God adventure. 

During the lecture phase of my studies I was reconnected with an injustice that had been on my heart since high school, and it lit a passion in my life for fighting against it. This injustice was human trafficking. 

Human trafficking is the illegal trade in human beings for the purposes of commercial sexual exploitation or forced labor, a modern-day form of slavery.Human trafficking is the third largest criminal industry in the world, and it has over 27 million victims. I became on fire to change this statistic. 

We were given a choice of what outreach we felt like God was telling us to go on. There were teams going to Ethiopia, India, China, Jordan, and one special team that was focused on human trafficking. Naturally, I chose the human trafficking team, otherwise known as the Not For Sale team. 

Not For Sale is a non-profit organization that fights against modern-day slavery and human trafficking. We would be doing our mission trip through this organization.

Before working with them, the organization wanted us to go through some formal training about human trafficking so we got the opportunity to attend an abolitionist investigator course with them over our Christmas break. During that time we learned many things about trafficking and slavery including how to spot it and talk with authorities as well as many hard facts and statistics and misconceptions that people have about trafficking, and prostitution.

Once we were formally certified investigators we headed off to our mission location: Peru.

Here is a video me and my team made about the house we worked at for ex prostitutes and street children while we were there.

We spend a total of seven weeks there helping out with the children, working around the house and teaching them art and english as well as just being there to show them God’s love. We also got to have some intense times of learning about the culture, why peru was filled with street kids and prostitutes. We also got to spend a couple days at the beach with some of the teenage girls that sold themselves for a living. What I never thought would be was how young these girls were. They were all starting to prostitute at ages as young as twelve, maybe even ten. It hit our whole team on a deep chord, and just made us even more passionate about getting to the roots of these problems occurring in the world.

So, we get back from Peru, but our team still has two more weeks of outreach that we need to complete before graduation. Peru ended up costing us more than we originally budgeted so our finances were shot and then some. We had planned to be in Eastern Europe somewhere, but we had yet to solidify those, and with absolutely no budget we didn’t know what was next. So we met, and prayed. Somehow, through Gods voice, our leaders came up with this crazy idea to just start walking along the road that goes through our town. Incidentally, that road also happens to be a major road for traffickers to bring in girls from eastern to western Europe.

And… then… we walked. We didn’t have any plans, or money and we just started to follow God’s lead. It was the beginning of a thing we ended up calling “the Justice Walk” because the whole point was to carry around signs and raise awareness of human trafficking along these roads that are used for them most often. 

It was the thing that most of us had only read about people doing, and we had never thought of actually doing. It was a crazy thing that we all had to push ourselves leaps and bounds to actually walk out of the castle the next morning to do. We were all excited, but all nervous as well. 

And of course God came through, like He always does. I don’t even know if I should stress that word more… He ALWAYS comes through for us. 

Our fears were eased that first night when we stumbled upon a church who’s pastor had just gotten in from a blistery cold dusk outside and dropped our stuff in a heated room to enjoy a meal of free loaves of bread and meats from a few local shops. 

Let me pause at this point and just point out that GOD IS CRAZY ….and I love that….

The next fourteen days consisted of things like chance coffee with mayors and their sons, street art on warming days, walking, getting blessed with food, train tickets, bus tickets, hostel stays, faith lessons, beautiful creativity, lovely songs, and heck, I even witnessed God multiplying oatmeal for us to eat.

Each place we went it seemed like we were blessed more and more with physical and spiritual provision, as well as opportunities wherever we placed out feet. 

We ended up being able to do work and raise awareness in Germany, the Czech Republic, Prague, Austria, and Salzburg. 

My favorite part of the European leg of this outreach was when God set me and a couple teammates up to talk to this guy on a bus in Austria about trafficking. He apparently was dating a girl who was trafficked. It was a good conversation and I was really excited about some of the things I got to share with him on this pressing issue of our time.

The last thing he said before getting off the bus was “okay, I am going to go save a girl’s future.”

That blew me away.

Our team made a difference.

Not only in this way, but in many other ways too. It seemed wherever we went everyone was telling us that we brought God with us. Not only were we blessed by people, but people were blessed by us.

All in all, we had traveled 1220 km, and returned home with 700 euro to pay towards our debt. But we also learned that a lot of people still don’t know about human trafficking. 

Although now I know that God is always going to go before us to prepare the way and all you have to do is be available to him and listen to what he is telling you to do.

So… now where am I going with this?

You see, I make things. I like to make videos, I like to make screenplays, I like to make up gymnastics routines, I like to make salads, I like to make…. wishes…. And apparently I like to make blog posts. What I would really like to make though, is to make a difference in this world through God and the things I make. What I wanted to know before this DTS was how I could change the world… I was just a maker of things… let’s put a name to it and call it an artist.  

You see, at DTS I learned how to use my art to fight for the change I wanted to see in the world, through God. I learned that God is so gentle with us, and he will always provide for us if we let him. God will give us the gifts to serve his kingdom. An artist, just as anyone else, has a chance to use their profession to change the world. And that is what I am choosing to do.

I have decided to follow God’s leading in my life completely, and go back to the YWAM base in Germany to serve there as a full time staff member. Which means I will be dedicating at least the next two years in the mission field, with a focus in fighting human trafficking. I will most likely be helping frontier the human trafficking movement through the YWAM branch of Not For Sale in Eastern Europe, a much needed development to add on to their United States, South American and Central Asian organizations.

So I am currently home for about a month raising support to be able to go back in time to help with the next marriage of the arts, August 9th. I am in need of much prayer support from this community, this is my greatest source of support that I could ever have. I also, in total, need 11,000 USD, which is 450 USD a month. This will cover all expenses including housing, food and other various expenditures. I am trusting in God to move people’s hearts and generosity to come alongside me in my ministry and support the work of his Kingdom by being partners with me.  Either through monthly support, or one time donations I know this can happen through God’s provision and voice alone.

Thank you. 

Miss Mykell

A revival

Actually…

Here is something to look at! Right now! I am so excited to have been able to help make such a publication!

MotA Magazine!

Yay!

Miss Mykell

 

Insert ‘Canon in D’ Here

Yes, that day was here.

So I graduated yesterday from Discipleship Training School in the University of the Nations. I had a focus in writing, as well as participating in the video and dance tracks. It has been an eventful, and insightful seven months, and I am surely ready to move on to the next thing in life.

I couldn’t help but think about all our individual lives together as our names got called out to walk across the “stage.” How they all intertwined, perpetuated, and just existed. We all, in these seven months, had built a story together. But still, in between the lines of that story there were all the stories that we ourselves experienced alone. And still then, we have all imagined, and created stories with our art that we are sharing with the world.

I couldn’t help but think of all the things every person had gone through in the last seven months as they walked across that stage. Some heartbreak, death, and depression. Some joy, peace, and elation. But all of us have come out better in the end to my knowledge, and we can only continue these individual stories.

I couldn’t help but think of what we have been through together, lectures, improv, and boxes. Flights, foods, and cultures. We have discovered these things together, and had a group reaction, but within that reaction were the individual thoughts that made it.

Such a complicated web we weave of existence in a community like ours. I was trying to think of a metaphor, using a tapestry and how all the colors and threads come together to make a completed piece, but I found my mind coming to either loose, frayed, or incomplete ends. I realized that that is how we all connect to the outside world.

Because our stories are not complete  yet. They cannot finish this tapestry. There are too many things that are still happening, and things that could have been that are not, and things that need filled in by outside people existing now.

I realize now that this is going to be a giant tapestry. . . probably of the whole world and human history. But that is just the thing.

The world is not complete without every action. Everything that we think, or choose, or stumble upon in life is part of that.

In the grand scheme of things, then, does it matter if one thread is off, or missing, or frayed? Yes because then the whole thing is thrown-off and likely to fall apart in places. It is not perfect.

But then, is it even possible for a thread to go wrong? You decide.

Miss Mykell

The Justice Walk: a brief overview

So, we get back from Peru, and we have two more weeks of outreach that are required. But we have absolutely no money.

What were we supposed to do then?

So we asked God and he responded.

Now what he responded with was something that none of us had ever done, or had thought about as an option to do with this time we had before. We happen to live right on a major road that human traffickers bring people into Germany from Poland and the Czech Republic on, so God told us to start walking this road.

Just to go. We had fourteen people, fifteen days and we started with no money and no plans. The goal to raise awareness of human trafficking and follow where God leads us. It was a big leap of faith for most of us.

So we packed our outreach bags that night, making them as light as possible, some of us brining only one set of clothes and the next morning we set out wrapped up in scarves from the cold.

We had no idea that perfect timing for housing and free food waited for us at the end of the day. I felt like it was the coldest day of them all. But it was all worth it to be able to sit and enjoy hot tomato soup with teammates in a church and know that we were going to be okay for at least the night.

We trudged on the next day and made it to the Czech Republic, where we had a chance meeting with the major’s son, got invited to coffee, and granted a place to stay for the next three days. We were so blessed by this church that we were staying at in Varnsdorf, they let us join them in their ministries, and made sure that we always had plenty of warmth in our room and tea in our mugs.  We even got to teach the youth of the schools about trafficking and do a couple prayer walks in the red light districts.

But we had to move on soon enough. We had asked God where to go next, and he had told us Prague. So we rounded up all the finances that people had blessed us with during our stay in Varnsdorf and we were able to afford a bus ticket to Prague for all of us.

Prague was an amazing testimony of God’s provision in our lives. Jan told us before we left that we were going to stay in Hostels and churches, and were like “yeah, okay, churches but probably not hostels.” Well we got to stay in a hostel for the first two nights. One of the nicest in Prague. Thank you Jesus.

In our time in prague we had the chance to slit up and be with different people in the city, play music, and make art. I personally saw God give us envelops of money from the ground, find us people to talk about trafficking with, and even multiply oatmeal. Our faith and trust in God was growing in ways it never had the chance to before.

But again, soon enough, we had to move on.

God told us to go to Austria, and Joe a red train and the number three. Sure enough, as soon as we had crossed the border into Austria we were getting on a red train at platform three to Linz.

Each place we went, we were blessed more and more with physical and spiritual provision, as well as opportunities wherever we placed our feet.

Salzburg was our last destination in these two weeks, we stayed there for the last three days, and were blessed even more than we had been before.

My favorite part of the European leg of this outreach was when God set me and a couple teammates up to talk to this guy on a bus about trafficking. He apparently was dating a girl who was trafficked. It was a good conversation and I was really excited about some of the things I got to share with him on this pressing issue of our time.

The last thing he said before getting off the bus was “okay, I am going to go save a girl’s future.”

That blew me away.

Our team made a difference.

Not only in this way, but in many other ways too. It seemed wherever we went everyone was telling us that we brought God with us. Not only were we blessed by people, but people were blessed by us.

All in all, we had traveled 1220 km, and returned home with 700 euro to pay towards our debt. But we also learned that a lot of people still don’t know about human trafficking, God is always going to go before us to prepare the way and all you have to do is be available to him and listen to what he is telling you to do.

Thank you.

 

100

Today is my 100th blog post.

I also, unknowingly, made up a challenge yesterday to force myself to think of words as more valuable than I previously had. I also wanted to learn about the power of words. So I told myself I could only use 100 spoken words today. They say the average sentence length is 17 words long. That means I only spoke five sentences today.

I found out many things during the course of my day. For one, this challenge makes you rude. Somehow you don’t think of all the times during the day you say thank you and sorry. I found myself early in the day constructing my sentences carefully and made every word intentional.

I have also discovered that not speaking with people around you who can speak is anti-relational. It made me wonder if you were to tell our whole school to do it together one day if it would make it either extremely anti-relational, or let us bond more. Something to ponder.

I was also considering the goal of this exercise. Was it to find the importance of verbal communication and words? Was it to  intentionally make my words have more meaning because they were rare? Or was it to have an excuse to not talk, but making sure you had emergency leeway in case of an important topic?

I was also keeping a list of all the words that I did say. It would be interesting to have our whole school group do it, then have them outline what they used the few word resource they had, and figured out what was most important to them that day from what they actually talked about or participated in a social conversation. What would be the most used words?

Maybe you could tell a lot about a person this way. I personally found myself asking people things a lot. Asking for their help, and also saying thank you a lot. Danke (Thank you in German) is the word I used the most today with a tally of four.

I also only used two people’s names. Which, now that I look back on it, were quite unecessarily used. So why did I impulsively say them? They felt really special that I used a whole word to say their name though. Actually everything I said was nit picked and awed at, and people were begging me to use my words on them.

That or trying to trick me into it.

I know now that I will have to reformat the experiment in order for it to be more oriented towards the actual goal; to learn the power of a word.

Night lovelies,

Miss Mykell

A second of loathing

Have you ever noticed when you end a Skype call that there is that moment of akwardness while each person fumbles with the mouse for the “end call” button?

This is something that always happens to me.

But what is it in that moment that happens to a relationship and conversations? Each person is no longer interacting with the other; both minds have moved on to what they are each going to do next. But they are still not completely separated from each other.

It’s like when you say goodbye to someone thinking this is the last moment before you part to different ways and then you realize you are headed in the same direction for at least a little bit. It’s also like when you are driving somewhere, like from work to home, or even from somewhere far away to home. You have contacts in both places. There are entities that tie you to both, but you are neither where you came from or where you are going to yet.

What do we do during these transitional times, be it one second or fourteen hours? Where are our thoughts and desires? Is this the purest form of ourselves that we can be because we have no one around us that we are trying to please, conform to, or have plastic pleasantries with? Are we making our rawest form of decision making because we have no concrete relationships around us?

I think about this all because the faces that people make when they are looking for the “end call” button are the most fun.

 

S·hyamiläne

An album of human heartbeats

Tonight I watched a livestream of a deep, bubbly, accented singer/songwriter (Imogen Heap) and found some curious thoughts out of my ether (yes, I have my own personal ether).

She has this idea to have her fans help her write these songs, but she does it using wordclouds. She has listeners put in words they want in the song into a little box and click submit. The most common words end up the biggest in this visual show of words.

It was a beautiful thing to take part in the creation of something so melodic, so delicate, so full of sugar (well, teaspoons full of sugar).  But there she was, creating for people, from people, in one place in the world with no one else but her, and everyone else peeping in.

Why, before the creation of the internet, did we ever find satisfaction with just consuming the creativity of others without response or contribution? Or perhaps what I should be asking is why is it so satisfying to collaborate when we create? Why do we want to help and aid in such endeavors?

We are a generation of purple letters, of EEE’s and living up to enveloping expectations of those letters put together to make ethereal and eviscerating emotion. Sometimes life is really like the flips of a teaspoon.

Her last request: A listener generated call for a cello section recorded and sent to her to use for the song.

I hope that happens a lot.

Perhaps I will learn to play the cello tonight just for the occasion.

Miss Mykell

Obituaries

Oh yeah, and here ended up being our final route for the two weeks. We left with 150 Euro (for a team of fourteen) and ended up making it through the two weeks somehow.

There is a map, growing in my head: Day 13

I’m just going to put it out there that I have met a lot of people lately* and it has been an eye-opening experience, obviously. So I was thinking about in what way I used to think about the world, and how my view on it worked with all the connections in my brain and comparing it to how I view the world now.

There is a drastic difference between the two. Not necessarily from changed beliefs or morals, or whatever else you want to say that could affect this area of my mind, but from what places and, specifically, whom I know.

People can make such a difference in the way you perceive things. Usually when I think about things, I have this map going on in my head and to find the location, or remember the picture of an idea or place that I am thinking about, I go through the map in my head. It is more or less a map of people, and how those people connect to ideas and other things through my experiences. (I know this doesn’t explain it all the way, but for spaces’ sake, let’s not get into it further, you can ask me personally if you are interested.)

So now, since the beginning of DTS, I not only have all the people from home, and random meetings from the US, and certain parts of England, I have maps in different languages, maps in different belief types, and even maps in different foot sizes (believe me, knowing your foot size in every culture is key if you didn’t bring a pair of heels with you to DTS). So I go through these maps by category, like mazes or spider webs and find exactly what I am looking for. Eventually your journey from one place to the next becomes more laborious (not hard, but fun) and eventful, and you stumble upon many things instead of few in this time.

Its interesting now, that one song, say the song we sung at an Austrian church this morning in Salzburg (where we have been doing ministry, meeting random people on the bus, and attending faith seminars for the past two days since we left Linz) called “Everlasting God” is now connected to DTS outreach, the German language (which connects it automatically to the German and English map) a worship leader sticking a pick to his head, the fellow Superchic[k] fan I met at a youth conference last year in my state capitol, and maybe even learning to play the guitar.

Things just keep building on this plane of people. And it really is people that keep it afloat. That is just the way that our brains as humans are programmed. People see, and notice, people.

Now that we have all that covered, we can get back to the original point; my view of the world has expanded sevenfold. May yours too.

I hope it continues.

Inevitably it will.

 

Miss Mykell

 

* in the English language when did it become “lately” instead of “as of late”?

Justice Walk: Day 9

Sitting on a train,

Instead of in the rain….

 

Actually, no, it’s not raining outside. . .  but I am on a train. A train to a new country that I have never been to even! We are on our way to Austria and already we have accommodation for the night. What a relief.

The last two days have been amazing, even more amazing than the first six.  One thing that keeps coming up in my mind, though, is a the time that I spend in Denver, Colorado on an inner city mission trip with my youth group in high school. That was an experience that opened up my eyes to the ways of homelessness and how they functioned without a big box to return to at night and store all of their stuff at.

I remember one story in particular that has been on my mind a lot in this trip. During that mission trip we talked to a bunch of homeless people that were attending the church that we were working with one Sunday.  There was one woman that we talked to that was headed somewhere east, but it really hit us all that she told us, “I don’t really know where I am going to sleep tonight, or exactly where I will be.”

That was us this morning, two days ago, four days ago, and seven days ago. It’s funny how everyone’s circumstances can change so drastically. I’m thrilled every time we don’t really know what we are doing. It leaves so much room to just go with it and see where God leads.  Of course, this feeling might be the opposite if I really was homeless, if this wasn’t a mission trip about raising awareness of human trafficking, and if I didn’t have the support of my team and YWAM base behind me.

What is it really that’s creating this feeling of ease in me about this, though? I mean, of course the above things help, but I don’t think they’re the only thing causing me to feel peace about waking up in the morning not knowing if we will have enough money for food, or be able to find lodging that night. Is it my adventurous spirit? Was I born to do this sort of traveling? Is it that I know we have to go back to the base in about a week, so we can’t really stray too far? Maybe a combination of these things, or is it that this trip is not about my life, but the betterment of the lives of others?

Who knows? I love this though. I hope it never stops.

It will stop, eventually. And I will go back to the United States at the end of March. Then, it can’t stop, the adventure continues in other ways. Well, maybe the adventure will continue with YWAM though…

As well, who knows?

 

Miss Mykell

Justice Walk: Day 6

I think about the most random things in my spare time. I also spend way too much time thinking about things I can’t really change.

But maybe I won’t talk about that right now.

Maybe I will just say that it is really weird to be sitting in a pub (Oh, don’t worry it is the basement of the hostel that just happens to double as a pub. It’s also rustic, eclectic, and brick-y)  and find people across the room speaking in clear English with an American accent. What brought them here? I know, I know, it is Prague, but really, how did they get here?

It is part of my space and time conundrum. It absolutely blows my mind to think how a bunch of molecules that have formed together can stay together and pass through and between the same types of structures as themselves to be presentable to human perception in a totally different point of space and time. How does that work?

Then, also, can I layer in the abstract of human observation in the first place? How does it all get from out there, into here?

Yes, of course I understand scientifically how it works and all the synapses and connections and things that have to happen for us to sense the world around us. But what does it mean to “sense” the world around us? To use our “senses”?

Isn’t that kind of a loose word to be using in science? It’s almost as if the physical and our minds shouldn’t be connected at all. But they are somehow.

So I’m observing this American on the other side of the room, and she talks with other people she just met about the same things that everyone talks about when they just meet people. These ideas form a reality for us to observe and comprehend when we put them together. Which then translates through our brain into our own utterances of these perceptions and observations.

In other words we can communicate with people to get to know each other. But knowing someone is another one of those abstract concepts that has to connect the two worlds.

The more I think about it, the more I think the two worlds boil down to this: the physical and the spiritual. Because everything that is not physical has to belong to some other soup of entity right? The spiritual seems like the place that all these things should happen. Or is it something else? Should it be something else?

Can we confuse the realms of attention to a degree that everything is just mixed up and you can’t tell which part of the egg is the yolk and which is the white?

I think my brain just did that tonight. I met a crystal, legit clear crystal, person. But I am not even sure which category to put these people in. My heart will fasten itself to them, but also will my mind and time.

None of this really made sense did it?

No matter, I guess it is just normal update time then. Yes, let’s get down to business.

Today was a day of rest, and we went to a lovely international church service and met hard working Christians who had little reward. Maybe we blessed their day. I sure hope we did. Once more night in the hostel and then we are back to our “any bets on where we are going to sleep tonight?” game.  Maybe we should start playing the “any bets on where the relationships within the team went?” game.

…

Justice Walk: Day 5

The day I realize that my titles are going to get very monotonus quickly.

Also, the day that I got to take a long bus ride, enjoy the warm seats, and think to myself for a long time. While I was in my thinking wonderland, stumbling around, I found myself drifting off into the many worlds I was creating while looking at the scenery outside for screenplays.

Screenplays of all things… danget my mind is already years ahead of my pockets.

But, I did realize exactly what inspired me to come up with so many stories today: setting.

More precisely the setting in which I am writing. I realized that my writing and thought processes change dramatically depending on what kind of atmosphere or place I am writing in. Like right now, I am writing from a cozy, brick, basement lounge and I feel like I have about a bazillion things I could write about Sherlock Holmes, but maybe not so many dark fairytales that I was coming up with on the way here. (Oh yeah, we made it to Prague, and we are staying the night in a epic little hostel… bonus… we get to have a lie in in the morning.)

And this information has made me so excited about my future when I study film, and make films someday. Because I can always expose myself to different scenes and settings in this profession, and know I will always be able to produce mew stories because of this. Ahhh… the freedom of no boundaries.

No boundaries by the way, is kind of the way of a missionary. Especially us on this trip. We have nothing that we can’t do because we don’t have any prior commitments to fulfill. We can go anywhere, and do anything that God puts before us. Which is also a cool thing about being a missionary. It seriously just means we have committed to being available for God to use us and put us where we can be used. We are just normal people who have no prior commitments, no stay-in-one-spot job to weigh us to one place. That is exciting. They can literally be able to go anywhere and do anything in the shortest amount of time. Ever.

The question I have right now is… Is there a way I can put film (the kind of feature length narrative I would like to make) and missions together in one job description?

Miss Mykell