Welcome to Townsville!


Hey all! I finally made it to Townsville! It’s so different than Sydney! Although I have been living here for a week now, I could tell it was different right from the start. When the plane was landing, all you could see out the window was grassland and mountains. Way different than the city! Although our group did look a little like idiots trying to figure out which baggage claim was ours, we eventually found our stuff and set out on our way towards the YWAM base!


It was a great first couple of days of exploring the new city. We learned some of the “lingo” such as Woolworths, a grocery store similar to an Albertsons back in the states, The Strand, which is the local beach, and of course you can’t forget Macca’s! See if you can figure out what that stands for, and I’ll have the answer written at the end of the blog so you can see if you were right. We also discovered the best gelato I have ever tasted from a place on The Strand called Juliette’s, and we got to explore the Castletown Mall.
And I also was introduced to the best cookie you have ever tasted in your entire life, called a TimTam. I have nearly bought out the entire store because I can’t stop eating them. (That was a joke, but I have spent waaayyy to much money on them!) They’re basically a chocolate coated cookie with filling in the inside. My personal favorite is the chocolate mint because they taste like thin mint girl scout cookies.

Finally our week started! Although it was a tad boring becasue it was only orientation, we got an amazing welcome consisting of indigenous and island breeze dancing. After 3 days, our orientation was finally over and we began on our lecture topics. Our first one was hearing God’s voice. This was a bit of a struggle for me.
What’s really interesting is how much I seem to doubt myself. I’ve been raised a Christian my entire life, yet sometimes I feel like I have more unbelief than a non believer. Although, after wrestling with some of the material that was being taught, and after spending a couple of hours on the phone with my parents, I realized that I hear God’s voice constantly. When people hear the phrase, “hearing God’s voice,” they automatically asume it’s an audible voice. I’m guilty of that too. I’ve tried my entire life to “hear God’s voice.” And sometimes I can imagine him speaking to me, such as when other people pray for me, or have a word for me. However, what I didn’t realize is that God’s voice is in everything. It’s in the quiet times of sitting on the beach and staring out into the ocean. It’s late at night when you lay out and look at the stars. It’s in that stomach ache you get from laughing too hard with a friend. It’s in the times of long boarding down the street listening to msuic. It’s in the little coincidences that happen throughout life. It’s in everything. God is constantly with us, yet the question we have to ask ourselves is where are we? I always find myself saying I’m close to God, now I’m questioning if God is real. I’m close to God now, and yet again I’m questioning if God is real. I feel like some of you might relate to that. However, the question I had to ask myself, and you should ask yourself too, is who’s moving? If God is constant, and always here, could it be that you’re the one moving away from God, and then coming back to him?
Even further than that, why do you keep straying from God only to come back to him eventually. Obviuously you believe he’s real and he’s going to be there if you keep coming back to him right? So now, instead of asking yourself who’s moving, you need to ask yourself why don’t you trust yourself enough? And I’m no expert on this at all, please don’t take this as I know everything, and I’m just telling you what to do. Because trust me, I’m learning this right now and encountering God in fresh ways every single day.
I could go on and on with more of what I’ve been learning and stories of how God has been “speaking” to me in my own way, but I don’t want to make this a 30 minute read! If for some reason though, something stood out to you, or you do want to talk to me more about anything, you can email me at kamicrume@gmail.com and I’ll respond as quickly as possible!
How our time here works is that each week we have a new topic that we have lectures on. So as I just explained, last week was hearing God’s voice. This week is Lordship, and we just finished our first day today! I don’t want to spoil too much, but let me tell you, God’s been speaking in some crazy ways! My goal is to post a blog at the end of each week to recap the topic and to share some of the main points that stood out to me!
Also, just a heads up, I still am short on my funds by about $4,200. Which, to most that sounds like a lot of money, and for a while it did for me too. But after some different things that have been happening this week, and some hard moments of thinking that the money isn’t going to come in, and doubting if this is even where I should be, God’s just constantly reassured me in these past 2 days that this is exactly where he wants me. So, without a doubt I know that God is going to provide every last penny! If you would like to be apart of that provision, email me at kamicrume@gmail.com, or check out my GoFundMe page at https://www.gofundme.com/ywam-australia-dts.
If you’ve made it this far, congratualtions and thank you for being a part of my journey! It means a lot to me.
Goodbye for now!
— Kami Crume
P.S. If you said that Macca’s stood for McDonald’s, you were right!

