Missionary Training International (MTI) Day 1 & 2

On our first day of training at MTI I can already tell it's going to be a great experience! They spent the day giving us an overview of what they will be covering the next 3 weeks. The name of the program is SPLICE, with each letter representing an area they cover. The areas are Spiritual, Personal, Lifestyle, Interpersonal, Cultural and Endurance/Enjoy. Their goal is to give us tools to deal with cross cultural conflict and stress so that we will be more aware of how to deal with it once in the field. Here are some thoughts that stuck out for me today...

* I have chosen to go into exile
* We usually think perfect means without flaw, but we learned it also means "functions as it was designed". So in our walk with Jesus we achieve levels of perfection as we follow Him and attempt to function as God has designed us.
* MTI staff sees us as "Perfect Pilgirms Parading by Faith to Paradise through the Land of Paradox".
* Need to learn to live in a larger story than our circumstance.

Day 2
We mostly talked about Personal Values today. We learned our values seem deeply right to us and when violated seem deeply wrong. We rated a list of values as to how important they are to us and then talked about the ones we rated the highest and whether we thought they would be met in the field. We also talked about how to decide what values we can and can not compromise on. They showed us a diagram of circles coming out from the center and the center circle is most important and represents "Biblical Absolutes" that we can not compromise, then the next circle out represents "Conscience Values", then "Cultural, Traditional, Organizational Values" and the last circle out is "Personal Values". The idea was that the further out the value falls, the more flexible we probably need to be about it. We ended the day doing skits that showed some conflicts that may come up in the field and talked about how we might deal with them. They explained that there are no hard and fast answers they can give the these issues but they are trying the get us more self aware of our values and beliefs and how they might be viewed by other cultures...interesting stuff!!