These past few days I’ve come to realize, I am a YWAMer. Everything about this missions organization excites me, makes me smile, my heart pump, tears well up and I can just throw my hands in the air and say “God, you are SO good.”

The YWAM University of the Nations campus is absolutely amazing. It’s the largest YWAM base in the world, over 800 people training, living, teaching here. I sat at lunch with four different nationalities, the Canadian and I having a conversation but she’s periodically laughing at the Korean jokes next to her: she’s bilingual. I had a hard time understanding the Native Hawaiian accent, just smiled and nodded my head. I’ve met a young lady from Kosovo—she doesn’t use Facebook because at home there would be serious consequences if her community knew what she was doing.

If you walk around campus there are so many buildings for training. There’s even a fish farm, pig farm and garden where people learn how to cultivate, grow and farm these things so when they go to Cambodia, Africa, China, etc, they’re able to teach the locals how to survive. “Give a man a fish he eats for a day. Teach a man to fish he will never go hungry.” At worship, the entire campus attends—over 800 people—singing and worshiping our Father. Does it make the rest of the Big Island tremble in awe? Can they hear our lovesick voices challenging the waves?

At the heart of it all, there is one purpose. The Koreans learning English, the skaters wearing too many clothes in the heat, they guy with the tattoos leading an intense prayer session, the Russian girl spooning out stew in the lunch line, the 4 year old boy raising his hands in worship to the beat of a drum, the middle-age couple who sold everything to come and re-find God….there is only one reason to be here. We are fortunate to be in Hawaii, but really, it’s only a lava rock with a grocery store, a Ross clothing store and Taco Bell is the only reasonable tourist restaurant. No real beaches nearby for the majority who walk as their transportation, just cliff faces. You have to go to the tourist island to do all that.

We are God followers. We are God breathers, God lovers. We want the rest of the world to understand the abounding love that God IS. We love Him. We desire Him. We want others to be ruined for the ordinary. We are often un-polished, mis-understood, sometimes just weird, followers of our one true love. We are lovesick.

We are YWAMers.

And we like it.