The Whitsetts

Each Sunday our team gets together for training with our mentor, Gary Green. This past Sunday we were blessed to listen to the wise words of our guest Brenda Whitsett. Brenda and Dwight were, and still are, missionaries to Australia. I met Dwight in 2002, and while he didn't know it at the time God used him to share with me the need for Australians and Kiwis to know the love of God. While I knew God wanted me to share His Gospel overseas, I did not know it was in the South Pacific until I heard Dwight speak about the area.
Dwight and Brenda are sweet, fun loving people who love to encourage others. On Sunday Brenda shared with us what it was like to be a North American woman living in Australia...with a job that was not like your typical baker or school teacher. Jenica and I really learned a lot from what she had to say. After our mentoring time, they stayed with our home gathering and spent the evening worshiping God with us. We all had a blast telling stories, sharing communion, and talking about the crazy ways that God works around us. I really enjoy their company, and I like to think that they don't mind us too much either!Brenda, Matt, me, Frances, Jenica, Gregory, Gary, and Dwight (with their sweet little grandkids in the mix)

On a totally unrelated note, my husband Matt helped me reach an epiphany tonight. I do martial arts, and lately I've been helping one of the instructors teach the beginner class. I have my own class of intermediate students that I teach on a regular basis, but teaching beginners is a whole new ballgame! Intermediates know the drills, so for the most part they just need to be polished. Beginners on the other hand have to be taught everything from scratch. If you don't show them how to do it correctly from the get go, they'll develop bad habits that stick with them for a very long time. Tonight I told Matt how I don't really know what to say to them, so I wish they'd just watch me and pick up on what I do. Then Matt said that's kind of what Jesus did with us, we weren't really getting the whole holiness thing just by words, so He had to come down and show us how it was done. That made me think about how Christians should live, enough shoving the how-to manual down people's throats when they want to know Jesus (which seems to be our method of choice). I'd like to make it clear that by "how-to manual" I don't mean the Bible, I mean the human created rules that we throw at people instead of putting our time and energy into getting to know and impact the lives of others. We have to show through every step of our lives what it is to follow Jesus. That means our actions have to be something worth learning from....
On yet another totally unrelated note, since I'm talking about martial arts I'll go ahead and post the video Matt put together of some of the demos I've done. Enjoy, and disregard the weird phantom girl that shows up sometimes. I get kind of fuzzy during short parts of the video, and we couldn't figure out how to take it away!