Beauty Arise

Where do I start?

I think January 6th, 2018 is a good place to start.

On that day, a terrified, nervous, excited and tired young woman boarded a plane headed to a destination where she didn't know anybody to start the journey of a lifetime.

That was the day I left for LA to attend the Beauty Arise Discipleship Training School. I wasn't really sure what to expect going into it. All I know was that it was an all girls school that had a 12 week lecture phase and a 10 week international outreach.

For those of you who don’t know what a DTS (Discipleship Training School) is, it’s a school where you spend 3 months living in community, learning about God through lectures, spending time in worship and intercession, and going out into the city to put into practice what it is that you are learning; followed by 2.5 months overseas showing God’s love to others.

What started as 18 strangers living in a trailer together quickly became a group of sisters living in a home together.

Trailer 6 - my home for the last 6 months

The staff and students of my school, whom I all love so much!

Six months is a long time to be away from home, but during this time I learned more about myself, God and living in community. Honestly, there was so much I took in that I'm still trying to remember it all.

During the lecture phase we had weekly topics including the character and nature of God, recognizing God’s voice, the Father Heart of God, and spiritual warfare, to name a few. One of the biggest things that I learnt from this time, and am still learning, is that it doesn’t matter what you do, good or bad, because it’s not about what you do. It’s about relationship! The only thing that God wants from you and me is to spend time with him! Because when you spend time with Him, He fills you up with His love and that love begins to overflow into every aspect of your life!

The vision of Beauty Arise is to bring the truth of identity, beauty and value to women and girls of all cultures. As a school we had the unique opportunity to work backstage at LA Fashion Week. Our jobs backstage were nothing glamorous. We steamed clothes and helped dress models to go out on the runway, but while we were doing that, we were bringing the presence of God into that world and allowing Him to work. We also had the opportunity to work with a school called Cloud and Fire, which is a non-profit school that offers youth aged 15-25 to get their high school diploma for free and learn about God. We had a chance to go there a few afternoons and share with a group of girls what we were learning and just connecting with them and building relationships.

For the outreach portion of my DTS my team and I went to the Philippines and Thailand.

My wonderful outreach team!

We spent 3 weeks in the Philippines working with an organization called Project Life Subic. Project Life is an organization that is geared towards helping girls to get out of the bars and equipping them to make better lives for themselves. Project Life plugged us into ministries that were already established. While there we led women’s bible studies in 2 different slums, shared a devotional and testimonies at a sewing class, taught English, shared at a youth group, and helped put on a beauty parlor for the bar girls. One evening we went out with the staff to the bars to invite the girls to the parlor and the next afternoon they had 15 new girls come that had never come before! That had never happened before. Most of these ministries were geared towards discipleship and sharing more of who God is to the people there.

Olongapo City, Philippines

The next 6 weeks we spent in Chiang Mai, Thailand doing lots of creative and bar ministry and some monk ministry. A large part of each of these ministries was approaching strangers and making conversation. A lot of the time it didn’t feel like we were doing much because we didn’t see results. We didn’t see anybody get saved, we didn’t see any healings, but we still saw God at work! One of my favourite creative ministries that we did was buying flowers and attaching encouragement notes to them and handing them out to women that we saw as we were walking down the street, whether they were a tourist walking by or a girl working in a bar. Handing out the flowers was a way that we could show the women that they are loved and that someone cares and just seeing the smiles on their faces was rewarding!

Some of the flowers we handed out.

Bar ministry looked different than you might expect. For us, we didn’t really connect with the women working in the bars, but instead we ministered a lot to the men (mostly tourists). We would go into a bar and hang out there and try to make conversation with people.

The first night I went out to the bar, I knew that I would have a hard time going up to a stranger and starting a conversation, so before I left, I was like “Okay God, if there is someone I’m supposed to talk to, make it obvious and make it easy”. So, near the end of the night I ended up talking with this 50 year old man named Garreth from Australia. When it was time to leave, I asked Garreth if I could pray for him, and he asked “Why would you want to pray for me?” I can’t remember exactly what my response was, but it was something like “Because I like to bless people”. So I prayed for him and once I finished, he told me that he thought I was the first person to have ever prayed for him! He’s 50! Through that experience I learnt that no matter how old you get, God will continue to pursue you because he loves you that much and he wants a relationship with you! Although we didn’t see much for physical or numerical results, we did experience a lot of spiritual warfare. While in Thailand we discovered that the most important thing we were doing there was bringing the presence of God into some of the dark places of the city.

The bar where I talked to Garreth.

One of the first weeks there we went to a temple to do monk chat. It’s a time where there are monks sitting in a designated area for people to chat with them so that they can learn English. Before going to talk with the monks we went into the temple. The moment we stepped in, we could feel heaviness. We started walking and looking around in there and praying over the place. As I was walking around, a worship song popped into my head. I immediately felt the heaviness dissipate. It was really cool to see that even in a place designed to worship other gods that our God is so powerful that He can enter that place and Satan has to take a step back.

The temple we visited for monk chat.

I’ve learnt so much, but there’s still so much more to learn. So, what’s next? Back in March I heard about another school at YWAM LA called the School of Leadership Development or SOLD. It is a school geared towards training leaders by teaching their students how to lead themselves so that they can lead others and developing character, skills and experience. About a week after hearing about the school and being completely unsure if that was what I was supposed to do, I felt God tell me that I needed to apply. So on July 5th I will be heading back to LA for 3 months to attend SOLD, to continue to grow in my relationship with God and as a leader.