My letter to friends and family, AKA, an explanation of what I'm doing.

Hello friends and family,

Some of you I talk to regularly, and some I haven't talked to in a long time, so as some of you may or may not already know, on September 1 I will be leaving and moving away to New Zealand for at least the next 9 months. I say at least the next 9 months, because I honestly don't know what the future holds for me. I've decided to attend a Discipleship Training School (DTS) with Youth with a Mission (YWAM) in Matamata, New Zealand. (For those of you who don't know what a DTS is or what YWAM is, take a look at their website http://www.ywam.org/About-YWAM) The DTS runs from September 4^th to February 4^th, and consists of 12 weeks of classroom teaching and 10 weeks of outreach. After it is over I plan to attend the School of Signs and Wonders which runs from February 21^st to May 14^th and has an optional outreach phase from May 15^th to July 9^th. I've set my return for May 16^th at this point because I'm not sure if I'm doing the outreach phase yet or not because I have a few different options available for the summer and I'm not sure where God is leading me yet.

The decision to go was not an easy one to make and I did not come upon it lightly. This really is something that started in me years ago. I always wanted to travel and felt that I wasn't supposed to live a normal life, but I fell into the typical North American life of going to school and starting a career, so the dream kinda died. It was actually during my relationship with Sally that the dream was awakened again. Sally has a passion to travel and see the world, and she helped wake up that passion in me and helped me realize that I don't have to live the career life. What a lot of you don't know is that Sally and I were actually planning on getting married in August, and we had planned to go travelling after my job at Woodstock General Hospital ended next year. So Although the main goal was to just travel and see the world, I started feel a call to see what kind of mission opportunities we could do along the way.

After Sally and I broke up, I realized that the call that I felt continued to grow stronger. I started looking at different mission opportunities and ended up looking into YWAM and found out about an outdoor pursuits DTS that was offered by the base in Matamata and was geared toward outdoor enthusiasts, like me. At first I was determined to go right away and leave in September, but after talking with my parents about it and the debt that I was in, they recommended that I wait a year so that I can pay off my debt and save money in order to pay for it all myself, and I agreed wholeheartedly.

A month or so later, in mid-June, I went to a week long Kingdom Passion School with the YWAM Alternatives Network in Toronto. At this school Jim Paul spoke about Prophetic Ministry. At the end of the day he prayed for everyone individually and when he prayed for me he spoke a prophecy over me of being called to the nations and to the mission field and that God would provide the finances, He also said that there will be resistance but God will provide and I will have a group supporting me back home. This blew me away, because it was like he had been listening to a conversation that I had with my buddy Gerry the day before. I prayed a lot about it that night and throughout the next day. I kept feeling that it seemed more like the time was now rather than in a year. I talked to Gerry and he felt the exact same way. Throughout the week, the words “step out” kept running through my head, and I felt that this could be the reason why.

I knew that part of the resistance that Jim spoke about was my parents, so I spoke to them, and they basically reiterated what they had said before about waiting, so I prayed that God would change their hearts. Over the next few days, something amazing happened, He did it. After I spoke to my church on the Sunday after the school, my mom told me that she could support me in going in September. The next few days were filled with confirmations from God. I wanted to be sure that this was Him calling me and not my own desires because I knew that this was not a “one and done” sort of thing. I knew that this was a long term calling so I wanted to know that I had His anointing in going and that I was going in His timing.

The last month has been a bit of a whirlwind. I was accepted to the school, so I told my job that I am leaving at the end of August and have been starting to plan. My parents have blessed me more than I could imagine by paying for my plane ticket and by forgiving some of my debt. I am now into full blown “save mode” to get the money to start this new part of my life. The DTS is going to cost $7600 NZD (Approx. $5700 CAD) and the School of Signs and Wonders will cost $3600 NZD (~$2000 CAD) for the lecture phase and another $2000 NZD (~$1500 CAD) plus travel expenses for the outreach. The tuition covers room and board, but all other personal expenses are my responsibility. I know that I do not have enough money to cover all my costs yet, but I am trusting God that He will provide for me.

As I go to follow God's call I will need your prayers and support more than anything else, so please, do not feel obligated to support me financially. I did not send this email as a solicitation for your money but as a way to tell the people that I know and love where God is leading me to and to ask you to please pledge to support me prayerfully, but if you do feel led to support me financially in this, I will gratefully accept your help. Also, I will be having a barbeque on August 28, 2010 starting at 5:00 as a going away party as well as a fundraiser. I'm not sure exactly what it will entail, but please come and see me before I leave. Please RSVP to my mom Alice at jastelpstra@hotmail.com so that we can have an idea of the numbers for the bbq.

I am starting a blog to chronicle my travels and what God is doing in my life at http://stelps.blogspot.com/. Right now it is very empty, but I will be trying to update it as much as possible with pictures and stories of what I'm doing and where I am.

Please feel free to forward this to anybody I have missed, or anybody that you feel led to send it to.

God bless,

Matt Stelpstra