DayStar

Hey Everyone!

Summer has kicked into full speed, and has been extremely busy! We have girl’s small group (which is going through a series called “Make You Think”), hip hop classes (where we break down the lyrics to the song we are learning a routine too), camping and leadership skills, beach night (swimming and a BBQ along with a short testimony), Swat (Sunday night bible study, and getting the older native Christians to share their personal hope stories), AOK outreach events (another reservation on Manitou in Island), and serve projects around Wiky (get the youth involved in serving their community).

I should remind you I’m not working on a Christian community, this place is largely into native spirituality, most of the youth we work with at NOT Christians.

However, I was blessed to go to Missouri at the beginning of July to a Native Christian youth conference called Warrior leadership Summit (WLS) hosted by Ron Hutchcraft. I was one of the chaperones, seriously that conference was so life changing, and seeing the youth so into God was truly amazing. Growing up I had a hard time feeling alone because I didn’t have any real mentors or friends that were Christian Natives.

One girl that came to WLS has been a regular at DayStar, but she’s never established a relationship with God. And seeing her break down and surrender her life to God was defiantly a prayer answered! Seeing God work within the student’s lives has been the greatest thing ever, just being able to witness a year full of prayers being answered is the greatest feeling.

This summer has completely changed, it’s completely different students and building relationships with them, which has been hard because I’m only here for three more weeks, and I’m missing the friendships from last summer and trying to find times to reconnect with them, and somehow try and reach out to them still.

There’s so much I could share, but please continue to pray for the Aboriginal people in Native America, that God will continue to reveal himself to them, and his spirit will be poured out over this place.

God Bless
Melissa

Originally written June 12 08.

Hey Guys!
Just wanted to ask for prayers... things are really starting to be stirred up here....
Aboriginal people are very intune with the spiritual world around us, most of them are very animistic... and seeing spirits of some sort is not an uncommon thing...
with that being said...one of the girls that went to Pitch and Praise with us was recently telling us how her walk with God is amazing, i thought that was awesome, but she continued to share with us how shes able to communicate with her grandparents more,.. (her grandparents have passed away)... she's really confused and is starting to mix Native Spirituality and Christianity...

The same night, after our girls small group, we (jen my roommate, and Sydney, one of our girls) were driving home from the Native reserve heading back to our farm when i saw some people walking across the road i slowed down the car, when i realized that there was nothing ACTUALLY there there i picked up speed... trying to shrug it off and convince myself it was the fog i kept driving...

Jen spoke up and had asked if we had saw "that" and sure enough we all the same thing...
at first i was really startled since i've never seen anything like that, but than realized that was definatly spirits of fear and intimidation, and when it was just the two of us, we were talking about how Jen felt earlier in her quiet time that God really wants us to become fully secure in his authority...

This week is the traditional powwow weekend, which isnt the typical powwow you might have seen in the past, but its very into "connecting with the spirits"... please keep us in prayers here.... and that things will start to turn around and God's blood will be poured out over this community... pray that this will be the season of break through in wiky and other native communities...

God Bless
Melissa