We have to apologize for the lack of consistent blogging. It's something we're working on and will hopefully correct soon!

This week our speaker is Herman Haan. The topic is homiletics and media...whatever that means. No seriously though, homiletics is the study of the composition and delivery of a sermon or other religious discourse. And as boring as that sounds, this week has been our personal favourite week up until now. And I'm pretty sure he didn't teach us anything about homiletics!

Herman has an amazing story. He is from the Netherlands and was a hippy and a junky back in the day, living on the streets and searching for God until one day, he heard a group singing and playing music. He wandered up and asked what they were all about and a woman lead him to Christ. Six months later they were married! He has since been a pastor, started a Bible school and now he works at a Dutch Christian television station, producing shows, starring in shows and going around the world to make award-winning Christian documentaries. He is also in a band that has several award-winning albums out (in the Netherlands).

What Herman has been teaching this week is on how to bring out our creativity in whatever form that comes out. He had us write five minute short stories (mine I'll share in a post very shortly) with a frame (intro, what, why, how and conclusion) and he had us write creative life stories (which I think we might share also in another post) which we will be reading in class tomorrow.

Every afternoon Herman showed us one of his documentaries. Now, these are extremely crazy, hard-edged documentaries but they were amazing! The first one was titled "Playmate Becomes Mother Theresa" - which was about a playboy playmate who turned her life to Christ and has since been working in Haiti opening orphanages, schools and health facilities for children who are abandoned by their parents. The love she showed these abandoned, sometimes handi-capped, left-to-die children was incredible. The second documentary was titled "The Pimp and the Prostitute" - about a pimp and a prostitute who fell in love, came to Christ and then were married and are now reaching out to other pimps and prostitutes. One line the former prostitute says is that she is so grateful to God for putting her through that so that she can now go and help others who were like her. She said it was the best job ever to help those who are caught in that life. Amazing!! The documentary we watched today was "Murdered on their Wedding Night" about a man and woman who were married for ten hours before robbers broke into their honeymoon suite and murdered him! The documentary was filmed only three months after this happened and already the widow and her husband's family were full of forgiveness. The man's father stated that he would never let a tragic situation like this ruin his relationship with his heavenly Father and that God is good. The widow also spoke only of forgiveness for the men who did that to her husband. INCREDIBLE!! These rough, tough, UGLY stories of faith were so inspiring and gut-wrenching but so full of God's love and so full of God's grace.

Only one more day with Herman and I'm sad this week is done! I feel so impacted by what he's taught us and he didn't even really "teach" - he was so relaxed and so open during classes - playing us songs that he's written, having fun fake interviews to teach us interviewing skills, sharing our stories. This is the reason we're here - to be impacted, to provoke change in our lives, to learn that it's good to be us the way God made us, and to rejoice in our good, good God.