My First Thoughts

Hey hey thanks for coming and checking out my blog. And this is the first entry of many, hopefully.

For those of you who do not know my story of where I am and how I got here, I will give you a brief recap.

My name is Brendan McCaskell; I am 17 years old, turning 18 next month. I recently graduated high school from MacGregor Collegiate Institute and just finished cabin leading at Valley View Bible Camp over the summer. After camp I embarked on an adventure which took me half-way across the world to the beautiful country of New Zealand where I am in a Discipleship Training School (DTS) with Youth with a Missions (YWAM).

The process of how I came to the decision of doing a DTS with YWAM was an interesting one- sorta. Early in my grade 12 year I had decided that I wanted to go to UofM and study either business or go into engineering. Now, there is absolutely nothing wrong with either of these options, but this is not where God wanted me. One night when I was thinking about university God used some situations in my life where I experienced a brokenness and he spoke through this and told me (yes I do believe I heard God’s voice) that I needed to do something that had Him as the focus. And no, God did not say, “Brendan, GO TO YWAM IN NEW ZEALAND”. No, sadly it wasn’t that clear. Months went by where people would ask, “Brendan, what are you doing after school”. And I would say was, “Well..... umm... hmm... I don’t really know, maybe a bible school or something”. Ha. Eventually, God placed many different people in my life that had done a DTS with YWAM and spoke good things about it. After a lot of procrastination I started to search out different YWAM bases and decided on the New Zealand base for two reasons: 1) They were offering a Music & Worship DTS, which are two of my passions. And 2) Its New Zealand, Comon! Lord of The Rings?!?!.

Now after lots of prayer and fundraising I find myself sitting on a creaky bunk bed where below is a Dutch guy and across the room are two Americans and a fellow Canadian brother. It’s amazing how you can see God’s hand work in getting me to this place and how he brought all of us together from so many different backgrounds. Even though I have only been in this country for almost three weeks God has started a process inside of me. He has broken me down, shown me my weakness, brought the filth in my life to the light, and now, out of his abundant grace, has started the process of remoulding me into the man of God he wants me to be. This process is going to be a long one, and probably will never fully come to an end, but throughout this DTS I believe God is going to do some incredible things in my life.

I do plan on updating this Blog as frequently as possible and I might be able to do that a few times a week. I still want to share some the experiences I had during the first two weeks and my goal is to share with you (Hopefully there is a “you” :P ) what God has been showing to me about Himself.

God Bless,

Brendan