Back in Omaha after five great weeks at Missionary Training

We are now back in Omaha after our 5 week training with International Teams in Elgin, IL. How can I sum up our time at training? It was incredible! We learned soooo much and had many great experiences. The first week we focused mostly on cross-cultural communication, how to deal with culture shock, and team dynamics, along with the ins and outs of International Teams (which by the way is an amazing missions organization-if you want to check them out for yourselves go to http://www.iteams.org/). Week two and three focused on things like understanding how our personality type and spiritual gifts can be used, partnership development, supernatural realities, prejudice and reconciliation, ethic experiences at a Hindu Temple and a Muslim Mosque, learning about Islam and the Gospel and so much more! Weeks four and five were perhaps the most challenging, we spent around 8 hours a day learning about phonetics and Second Language Acquisition. While the last two weeks were particularly demanding we know that they are going to be incredibly helpful not only in learning German, but picking up some of the other languages that will be spoken by the refugees in Austria.

Overall, training was a great time of learning and friendship development. We got to know many of the other "Missionaries in Training" as well as the staff at IT USA very well. It was amazing to see how many connections we already had with people at IT in which we were completely unaware. For instance, the couple we roomed with in our apartment both went to North Park with Dan and had some mutual acquaintances. Another interesting connection was that the Head of Training at IT is related to a couple that we know from our church in Salina (who happen to be the parents of the Pastor's wife at First Covenant Church Omaha). Throughout the whole process we were continually brought back to the knowledge that this is God's perfect timing and direction for us to be serving with International Teams.