Orientation!

Hey everyone!

So I've spent the past week in Colorado Springs at orientation for EMI. It's been an amazing experience. This place is beautiful. As I write this, I'm actually looking at Pike's Peak out the window. Crazy. Colorado is a great place, and there's so much beauty here that it's almost impossible not to glorify God in your mind when you see this place. It's crazy to think that the same God that created these mountains is the one that desires a relationship with us and has called me to Uganda.

This week has been long, but a great preparation for Uganda. We've spent a lot of time this week discovering how God has equipped us in different ways. We've done personality tests, spiritual gift tests, formulated mission statements, and plotted out our life story. Lots of deep thought. But it's been good. Just so you know, I'm a practitioner (a perfectionist that's task-oriented but can be outgoing at certain times), one of my dominant spiritual gifts is service and giving, and I have the natural strengths of seeing things in life connected together, strong belief, and responsibility. I also was surprised at how some of the tests pointed to how I value relationships. I knew that was sort of true, but the more I think about, I really do enjoy being intentional in relationships. That's something I'm definitely going to be focusing on while in Uganda.

We've had lots of sessions on many different things, and I won't go through all of them here. Some of the highlights include culture training, where we learned how North America tends to differ from other places in the world. It was really eye opening, and it will really help as I adapt to Uganda's relationship-oriented (not-task and time oriented) culture.

One of the best parts of the week for me was hearing every interns testimony. God has done some awesome things in out lives. It's really col to me how God draws people to himself in different ways. It's not this simple formula, it's really complex, but awesome. It also brought us all closer together, since we know where we're coming from and what God has done and is doing in us. We also got to be really honest with each other, so that's great. I love honesty.

Hearing all these testimonies really got me thinking. I honestly don't know the testimonies of a lot of my Christian friends. Thinking about how much closer we became because of that really put in me a desire to be a lot more intentional about things like that back home. I guess that's lesson one.

God has also been revealing some inner issues to me lately. There's definitely some sin in me that God is wanting to get rid of, and so it's a tough process. I love it's happening, because I hate sin in my life, and so God sanctifying me like this is great. But it's discipline, and that's never easy. If you could, really just pray for humility for me.

But we've also done some fun activities like hiking and rock climbing this week, which has been great. I've got to see more of COS, so that's great. Great times.

So I leave for Uganda TOMORROW! Our flight leaves tomorrow night at 8:30 PM. We fly through the night to London, have a 8 hour layover there, then another 9 hour flight to Entebbe airport in Uganda. Crazy. Please pray that God protects us according to His will, and even gives us opportunities to share what we're doing while traveling.

Well, that's it for now. The next update will be from Uganda! I hope everyone is doing great back home. The adventure is about to really start, and I'm excited to let you all know what happens and how God works.

Much love in Christ,

Kyle Bryant