Hey it’s me, Claire! It’s been a while since I have updated my blog and that would be because I’ve been in Nepal for almost three months now! Here’s a list of things I haven’t done in 2.5 months:

1. I haven’t gone to the bathroom on an American toilet for two months

2. I haven’t brushed my teeth with sink water

3. I haven’t not slept in a sleeping bag

4. I haven’t gone a day without eating rice since I’ve been here

Now here’s a list a list of some things I have done since being in Nepal:

1. I have preached and taught in churches and fellowships

2. I trekked over 66 miles in the Himalaya mountains in three feet of snow

3. I have eaten many packages of coconut crunchies (my favorite Nepali snack)

4. I have worn the same two outfits for the past two months.

5. I have made new friends and family here whom I will never forget!

6. I have learned so much about my self, and who the God I follow is.

Nepal has changed my life in ways both big and small. As I’ve been here for a while now, things like seeing stray cows in a store or on the sidewalk have become very normal 😂 Here in Nepal everyone calls everyone brother or sister (bai/dai for brother, and didi/bahini for sister) and I LOVE that. God has used a foreign country to teach me things about America and speak to me about my future. I am incredibly blessed to have been able to spend almost three months here in Nepal.

Before coming on my DTS (discipleship training school) outreach, I expected that my outreach would be an amazing time of my life where I would witness God doing miracles, healing people, and bringing people to believe in Jesus Christ. My team and I have witnessed people be saved and come to believe in the Lord, and we have witnessed some people get healed of physical pain (PRAISE!!) but God has been showing me more than just his mighty power here in Nepal. Before coming to YWAM (Youth with a mission) I asked God to teach me things that would impact me and my relationship with Him for the rest of my life. OH MAN has He done exactly that!

If I were to summarize what God has been teaching me into one sentence I would say that He has been teaching me to believe that He is good no matter what I see or what I don’t see. One day, five of my teammates and I were riding a bus to Kolpur to meet back up with the rest of our team. When we got off the bus we were immediately swarmed by Nepali men asking us if we needed help and three small children begging us for money. I’ve seen poverty before but I’ve never witnessed children so poor they have to beg for money themselves. My heart was broken and I felt so helpless. In my moment of weakness God reminded me that the best thing I could do was love those kids through kindness and the way I treated them. I also felt the Lord ask me if I would still believe He is good no matter what Hardships I witnessed in Nepal. My answer has to be yes. Because I know that God works all things for good and for his glory. Even though God had been showing me that He is good all of the time, sometimes I can know God is good in my head but it doesn’t always feel like God is a good God.

God continued to teach me about his constant goodness as my team and I headed up to the mountains. Before we began to trek in the mountains, we arrived at a hotel in Jumla where we were only supposed to rest for one day and begin to trek the next day. Our day of rest turned into a day of sickness for three members of my team. They had to go to the Nepali hospital and our hopes of leaving the next day became a shot in the dark. As the three sick members of my team began to return to good health, more members of our team began to fall to sickness. At first, this time of waiting seemed disappointing and frustrating. I was confused why God would allow my team to get sick when we knew He had greater plans for us to go trekking and do ministry in the mountains. But again I felt the Lord ask me to trust that His plan for my team was better than anything I could ever come up with. Even though it didn’t appear like it, I had to choose to believe God had nothing but good in store for us.

Before I continue to talk about God’s goodness, I think it’s important to define the word good. Good does not mean delightful or fun. Good does not even mean pleasant or enjoyable. Saying God is good is not the same as saying a burrito from chipotle is good (I’m SO excited to have a burrito when I get back to America). Good means “fulfills its purpose”. God fulfills his purpose for everything he begins. God has been fulfilling His purpose for my team everyday of our outreach. His purpose for me did not feel pleasant all of the time. Some days were very hard but I had no other option but to trust that God is good. Kristine Dimarco once said “there’s something beautiful that happens when God becomes your only option”.

A few days later, we were finally able to leave Jumla and begin our trek to Mugu, a tiny mountain village in the Himalayas. With some members of our team still in a weak state we were nervous to begin trekking. I prayed often before, during, and after our first day of trekking, that God would give us supernatural ability to get up the mountains and give us strength that comes only from him. Our second day of trekking was a day I will never forget for many reasons. Our team was hiking at a pretty slow pace given the physical state of some of our members. There was about a 30 minute period of hiking up a big hill where I began to feel defeated. My whole team was exhausted, one of my friends who has asthma had an asthma attack, another one of my friends was dehydrated, sick, and passed out. Meanwhile one of our leaders had super bad diarrhea, and another of my friends was suffering from her chronic calf pain. I was so confused why God wasn’t answering my prayers. I felt like I was trying to follow God, blind. In my moment of weakness God spoke to me. He reminded me that “The joy of the lord is my strength”. God didn’t just want to sustain us physically up the mountains. He wanted to give us immense joy that comes only from him. Again, God spoke to me about his character. He said “I am always good but will you choose to believe that is true even right now?”. Again, my answer had to be yes. I had no other option but to trust that God is good and rely on his strength alone. My own strength was nowhere near sufficient.

Trekking in the mountains was only one of the many struggles my team and I faced in Nepal, but through it all the Lord has been teaching me to praise him no matter what. He has made it all worth it because He is worthy. There has been so much to be thankful for here in Nepal even on the hard days. I’ve learned that God is always worthy of praise, I have to make the choice whether I am going to praise him or not. I am so thankful for everything I have learned here in Nepal that I know will affect my life as long as I’m alive. If I wrote a blog about every amazing thing that has happened here in Nepal, it would turn into a book… So for now I’ll keep it (kind of) short. But hangout and grab some coffee with me when I get home! I would love to tell you all of the things 😉 I can’t believe this season of my life is almost coming to an end but I am so so thankful that God has allowed me to have this life changing experience!

Thanks for reading ☺️💛

-Claire

Well… it’s been three months (which actually has felt like three seconds) since I have been here in Oakhurst California doing my YWAM (Youth with a mission) DTS (Discipleship training school)… and now I leave for Nepal in eight days. Yes. CRAZY. Time flies.

Exactly what do my days here at YWAM look like? Well, every day looks a little different but the day starts with breakfast at 7 am, after that we have quiet time from 7:30-8:30, where we focus on spending time with God. Then after quiet time, we either have bible study, worship, or intercession, which is a time to pray together as a group for other nations and other people. On weekdays we have lecture from 9:30am-12:30pm, where each week we are taught on a different subject. So far we’ve had the Character and Nature of God, Father Heart of God, Holy Spirit week, Fear of the Lord, Relationships, and so many other awesome topics! I think our week on The Biblical Journey has been my favorite so far. After lecture we have lunch, then free time. Each day we get to serve on base in a specific work duty; I get to work in the kitchen and help cook dinner for all of our students and staff everyday and I absolutely love it!!! I have learned so much about cooking and it has actually become relaxing for me! On most weekends I have ventured into one of the most beautiful places on earth… AKA Yosemite National Park!!! The park is just 15 minutes from our base! I love Yosemite with my whole heart and I can’t help but walk through the park and fall more in love with God’s creation and the Creator every time.

Besides school and trips to Yosemite, I spend a lot of my time hanging out with my amazing friends in DTS. I get to live in a house with 25 girls and to my surprise I absolutely LOVE IT. You wouldn’t think that 10 girls could share one bathroom but here at YWAM Yosemite we are proving the impossible to be possible 😂. But for real I am so incredibly blessed by all of my roommates and God definitely knew what he was doing bringing all of us together.

I leave for outreach to East Asia with a team of 18 amazing people in eight days… yes I did say eight days you didn’t read that wrong. I really can’t believe it! But I am so so excited for this amazing opportunity and I can’t wait to see how God continues to grow and stretch me!

Here are some photos from the past three months🎉

My outreach team

Me hanging out with half dome

Taft point

time in Yosemite

San Francisco

If you’ve ever been a senior in high school, you would know that most people will begin to ask you “where are you going to school next year?” starting in September. If you’ve ever been a high school graduate or a college student you would also know that the questions of “what are you doing?”, “what are you doing with your life?”, or “what are your plans for the future?” pretty much never stop being asked.

I just graduated high school and have endured a whole year of being asked all of those questions. At this time last year, I had absolutely no idea what I wanted to do or where I wanted to go, however I did know where I “should” go and what I “should” do. I felt like I should go to clark college (a local Community college here in the Couve) in order to save money. I felt like I should go to Western Washington University where a billion of my friends from church go, in order to have an amazing community. Both of these options are good ones but I just wasn’t sure if they were for me right now at this time in my life.

Most of my senior year was spent answering all of these questions with “I don’t know yet”, which honestly made me quite uncomfortable. Like many other people in the world, I like to appear like I have myself together (Which if you’ve seen my bedroom you would know is NOT the case). I like to have a plan. I also like to be unique, creative, and not stick to the norm , which is exactly what the Lord gave me the opportunity to do at YWAM Yosemite.

Throughout the course of my junior year I started to hear more and more about this thing called YWAM. I had met many people over the course of that year that had done YWAM in Hawaii, New Zealand, and Australia. I got curious quickly and began to learn that YWAM (Youth with A Mission), is a Christian founded organization that focuses on equipping young people to be able to reach the unreached and love on others the way that God loved them first. All of that sounded pretty great to me. But I still felt a push from society to go to school right away. Not that it is a bad thing, but as you may know, most people graduate from high school and go straight to a four year university, or even a junior college for a couple of years. As I thought more about going to college, I realized I felt very burnt out and not quite ready to endure another four years of receiving an education. The Lord kept putting traveling and serving in other countries on my heart, as well as putting people in my life who had done YWAM or were planning to do YWAM  and I began to realize that this opportunity to explore the world with the Lord by my side was more realistic than I thought. After I had decided to take the jump and apply to YWAM the next question I had to answer was where I would do my discipleship training school (DTS).

YWAM has DTS’s all over the world. Basically think of a country and there is most likely a YWAM Base there… or like 10 bases there. One of my friends Nate sent me an Instagram ad for YWAM Yosemite back in November. The ad had a cool skier on the front which (obviously) intrigued me. I had no idea that a YWAM base in Yosemite California even existed! I have never been to Yosemite but I have been to California many times, so my brain was trying to figure out why on earth I would give up the opportunity to live in Australia for three months (It’s important to know I love Australians and their accents a lot) to live in California instead. But I felt a call there for some reason. I got accepted to YWAM Yosemite in February and I’ll be leaving for California in less than a month.

I still don’t know exactly what I will be doing in Yosemite for three months, and I have yet to find out which country I’ll be sent to and what exactly I will be doing there, or even what I will do when I come home from YWAM, but all of those unknown things don’t really bother me anymore. The Lord has graciously revealed to me his plan and given me confidence that this is what I am supposed to be doing this year. I no longer feel like I need specific details because the Lord has shown me that he has the big pictured covered. My generation seems to fear the unknown. We need everything to be planned out and perfect or we consider ourselves failures. I am learning to sit in the unknown and (almost) enjoy it. For one of the first times in my relationship with the Lord, I am beginning to truly understand what it means to trust that God has a good plan for me. I am not very good at being surprised. I normally find out about the surprise before it even happens… But the thing about not knowing all the details is that it gives God a chance to surprise us without us finding out before it happens. In this season of my life that seems to be full of unknowns, my prayer is that I can give God control and let him surprise me because life will be more fun that way 🙂

Thanks for joining me!

Good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter. — Izaak Walton