COAT recap!

WOWEE!! It's been well over a month since our last post! That just goes to show just how busy we really were! COAT (Community, Orientation, Assessment and Training) was a lot like being back in school again. Only much more intense. It was 40 hours a week of class plus lots of reading homework! We studied many subjects such as missiology (the study of missions), living in transparency, and being good stewards of God's resources.

We had a total of eight people who went through the whole eight week process. This time was both amazing and trying. It was trying because we had many curve balls thrown our way. There were three major ones that we mark our COAT experience with. One was that our budget got bumped up to much higher than we had originally estimated. The second is some personal awareness type questions that were brought up. Finally, the third was finding out that the last class I needed to officially graduate is not offered at Northwest this fall. While these have all been large bumps in the road, they by no means have completely thrown us off our course. God has been, and is continuing to, work through them. I will comment more on one aspect of this in another post.

Some awesome times we have had almost always included our other COAT teammates. We had several weekend evenings of just hanging out and being silly. One of these evenings resulted in a sort of 'Stomp' like routine that is shown in the video below. All from a simple Cranium game night! Another instance was going to a local coffee shop and watching as some of our new friends performed at a couple of open mic nights. Our last weekend together in Ft. Myers found our COAT team on Sannibel Island enjoying the beautiful beach and spending two whole hours out in the water about 75-100 yards out from the beach! This was amazing to me since this was my first time actually swimming in any kind of salt water or any body of water bigger than a small lake! On our last official day, the COAT directors took all of us out to lunch at the Elephant Bar Restaurant which was a cultural experience in itself.

COAT was a very memorable experience! There is absolutely no way we could describe to you here the entire impact it had on us. We learned a lot more about NMSI as a whole and got to know several of the staff members that work in the office. Our COAT teammates got to be very close and we plan on staying in contact with each other to see how support raising goes. We are all very excited to see what God will work in the lives of everyone involved.

Our COAT team with directors Jordan and Matt at the Elephant Bar Restaurant