So, we moved into a yurt.
Our neighbors are now roosters, turkeys, and coquí frogs.
Kona Living
Living in Kona is interesting.
We’re not on holiday, and our economy is very much supported by holidaymakers, so I can’t begrudge them having fun while they are here.
Where we were living tended to have a lot of young families visiting Grandparents, and I think quite a few of them live in houses, not condos.
When they come here, they bring their home noise levels with them. Sadly sleep had become a real issue. I was often away from midnight to 2 am, since moving, I am sleeping much better. The rain at night helps, to hear the pouring rain hitting the yurt puts me right back to sleep.
With our plans of going to the Philippines in September, we were both aware of our need to have been in a place of good living and good rest before we go.
And the yurt is doing this for us.
Coffee Farm
The yurt is on a small coffee farm with about 500 trees.
The trees are all blooming at the moment, and harvesting will begin once the berries are set.
Fun fact: You harvest each tree about eight times over eight months as the berries ripe in stages, a new set every month. People must hand-pick just the red berries, and pickers get paid by the pound.
Yurt living.
The yurt is off-grid and teaches us to be energy-efficient. We run stuff when the sun shines, and boy, does it shine. So far, everything is working well.
Living in a yurt sits well with another side project we have going: working with several groups of people, in the US and even in England, who want to do life differently, both financially and socially.
One area being talked about is creating celebration centers—places for people to get together and inspire training. For people to offer training in their field and receive training from others, be it budgeting, building websites (my thing), bible studies, or even for a church to have space.
This could work well in Hawaii as you don’t need walls to protect you from the elements. One church building we have been to has a wall behind the stage, but the other three sides have absolutely nothing—great airflow, beautiful views of the ocean, fresh and refreshing.
Then we could have other rooms, spaces for shops, small spaces for daily office rental, and even accommodation.
We’ll keep you posted if anything comes of this for us.
Websites for YWAMers
Over the last year, I have been working to create a website training course, to overcome the technical issues of having a website (I am my own hosting service), to make it dead simple, and make it so people can use their website for good communication with friends, family, and partners.
I am working with staff to help them create connections so that they lead from their vision, not their needs. I tell them that every person they communicate with already knows they have needs, maybe not the specifics, but they know. Better to give friends a vision they can hang their hat on. Pray for it. Then, from this position, create partners for prayer and partners for development.
Could a website pay for itself?
I am working on an idea to avoid being a financial drag on YWAM staff or base.
The cost of the website is small compared to the overall cost of living, but this cost is seen as a luxury or burden, and I want to overcome this stigma.
For me, my website is not a cost; it is a source of encouragement from people who email me and from people who support us.
So, I do not charge for the first six months of hosting. [Hosting Costs] I want people to get up to speed with their websites, for their site to tell their story, to provide a place for their vision, where they can showcase their work and their prayer needs.
With a website, Staff and Bases can develop their story and vision for prayer and financial partnership
In the seminar, [A proposed Seminar], I seek to move away from certain words and toward other actions.
- From Need to Vision
- From Donor to Partner.
- From Give to Join.
These are little things, but they stem from what we have learned from others recently: If people buy into your vision, then giving is not giving; giving is advancing the kingdom.
A lot of what we have been doing is providing training, which is in small groups and one-on-one. I have this page for the one-on-one training, and I don’t limit it to the Philippines or YWAM. I currently have a person in NZ using this link to build their website. [https://seed.backup.school.nz/]
Is there anything you would like to train in from a technology point of view?
If so, book a time with me.
Or if you might be interested to support an existing website.
Prayer.
Talking with staff, they feel very acutely their financial need.
If an army marches on its stomach, then we march not on money but on prayer.
It is a journey to move myself and others from merely nice words to the biblically correct idea of these words and to live from meaningful prayer.
So, if you are interested, I am interested in praying for you.
Not a “Jesus, please bless John, in Jesus name, amen.”
But a meaningful prayer.
Follow the click below: I would appreciate prayer on some things, not just you praying, but when you pray, if God says anything to you, such as a verse, an idea, or a comment, let me know what that was.
[Prayer Wall]
And I would like to do the same for you.
We all need the tools God gives us to navigate our ship through the storms and doldrums of life. God is a community God, so it’s obvious that He may not be speaking to you because He wants to speak through me. It can be equally obvious that He is not speaking to me about something because He wants to speak through you.
I suggest that this is why we don’t know where and what we will be doing in April 2025.
I don’t think it is a lack of planning on our part.
When we planned to come and live in Kona from 2014 to 2016, we did a lot of successful planning and landed in an apartment with the ability to establish ourselves.
Right now, however, we keep trying to plan, asking God what we are meant to do, but we are only getting a skeleton outline of the future.
We did not know what this year would hold when we returned home to Kona from New Zealand in January. Then, this conference in Manila in September came up, and both of us immediately saw that we were to go, not so much for the conference but for purposes beyond the conference.
I have been running the YWAM Digital Library for a few years, and it is gaining traction. Talking to people and schools face-to-face about how we can better serve them will be very useful.
We are also slowly building out the websites we host. Again, I feel strongly about helping people and bases become aware of how to use technology well and create internet content that helps grow disciples.
So we don’t know what the future could hold, for it could hold anything.
After the conference, we made ourselves available to hold seminars in the Philippines, but that could also be any country between the Philippines and New Zealand, where we would like to be by Christmas.
Feel free to connect with us at any time. We would love to hear from you and share a call.
I am going through a re-learning of prayer.
Christine is better at this than me.
Here are things we are praying towards.
places to hold seminars
We have a number of places that have voiced an interest in having a seminar, we now need to line it up so it can happen.
places to stay during the seminars
how long a seminars
Should the seminars be intense one-week seminars or low-key two weeks?
I think that a two-week seminar might be better since the staff will also have other duties, so a one-week blitz might be too much.
seminar finances
We don’t charge for the seminars, and even if we did, that would only cover some of the costs.
Interested in partnering?
storage in Kona
We have had excess stuff in storage. And the cost of storage is getting close to the value of the stuff.
Apartment things.
My work supplies.
Christine quilting supplies.
We are now getting out of that storage location, moving everything to the yurt, and downsizing (again) as much as possible. But there will still be things like our beds, kitchen items, my computer, and Christine’s quilting gear that we will need to put somewhere when we travel.
But God, where?
Bye bye little Kia
We plan to get rid of our car when we leave at the end of August.
Then, when we return, we will have to look at getting another vehicle.
The joy of cars, aye.
Collaborate
When we first moved to Kona, it was not out of a calling but more from having a lot of places we could go to and God giving us the freedom to choose.
So we choose Kona.
We chose Kona because of the opportunity to collaborate with interesting people who are doing interesting things.
Since being here, we have seen the next thing come to the fore for us: to help people thrive.
Thrive
We all have commitments and even pressures on us.
However, have we said yes to things God never said yes to?
We can be involved in random acts of kindness so long as we are also involved in random acts of rest for ourselves.
We can often be in a potion of being the provider or the carer of others, forgetting that these roles can be reversed.
Just because we have had a “provider/providee” role with someone, God may indeed cause them to be a provider for us in a time of need.
So wise thriving is learning how to say “yes” and “no.”
How to start a thing but not have to do the whole thing.
How to drop a thing when it becomes unhealthy.
How to start things with time limits and goals for finishing your involvement.
New Life
We have young families from all over the world here in Kona, both in YWAM and out. We have people that meet here in Kona, get married, and have a child.
Christine gifts a homemade quilt to them to celebrate this new life when their families are far away.
Better Living
This is both a vision and a prayer.
It is connected to all the other things here.
How much does our modern inclose living reduce us as people?
Berean Standard Bible
Woe to you who add house to house and join field to field until no place is left and you live alone in the land.
We have people around us, above us, below us, and next to us. Maybe we know them, or maybe we don’t.
How do we create better living, better communities, thriving families?