CARSON HILLMER

“The most important one,” answered Jesus, “is this: ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these.” Mark 12:29-31 NIV Love God, Love Others, one of the biggest things I am taking away from my experience serving in Mexico this year is a whole new perspective on love, I am not talking about love in the sense of loving your pet or loving your friends, I am talking about the sense of loving everyone unconditionally. Before going down we were told about how the locals down there were always ready for a conversation, how if we asked them for help, or how they were doing, they would stop whatever they were working on or doing to have a conversation with you because they genuinely just loved everyone. We would be stopped in the street on the way to the worksite just for th...

4 days... Four, Quatre, Cuatro. In just four days our team is heading down to El Papalote, Baja California, Mexico. That idea is crazy, but the real big deal is that we really don't know anything about the trip, we have a basic idea of what ministry we are serving in, but even then we don't know much. We don't know what time we are leaving at, we don't know when the ministry's we are leading are, we don't even know what devo we are each leading in the mornings, we are four days out and we still don't have a packing list, we don't know who we are meant to pack with or who we are rooming with, we really don't know anything about our trip. In some ways not knowing anything is in part preparing us for this trip, and for others, it is just stressing them all out. We have talked about Mexico being dubbed "Flexico" and that's a big part of the trip, the idea that our plan for the day can change at any moment, or that there will be lots of las...

One God, One Voice, One Night, was the tag line for a youth night us as students planned, prepped for, and ran last Friday night. CVYN (Cowichan Valley Youth Night) was about bringing together different youth groups in the area for a night of worship, games and a message. To be able to show the youth that there are more people in their schools and communities that are Christians and to just be able just all gather as one. My specific role for the night was  Greeting and Moving people through,  which consisted of hopping on the two minibusses that arrived and welcoming them, that's all. I was also assigned to sound but that quickly changed to A/V as there was none else assigned to any of that, and I started working on some graphic design for the evening which turned into a whole list of different aspects of media for the night. From a countdown/intro to backgrounds, speaker slides, and various other media projects it gave me something to actually prepare for. My orig...

This past week we got to spend 3 days serving the community of Crofton, from helping out in people's yard, to cleaning windows inside we got to spend time doing various service projects in the town that we are spending the year living in. During each of the jobs I did I took the time to ask whoever we were working with about why they chose Crofton to live I as a town, I was really intrigued by the different answers that came from each person or couple, everyone had their own reasons for choosing the town, some were there because it was cheap, others because they had grown up and spent their lives in the same area. It was also really interesting to hear about their lives and to be able to listen to their stories. One day we met a world-famous model boat maker, the next an Australian who used to work for the ministry of health now retired in Crofton. Each person we got to work with had their own unique and exciting story There was a couple that a few of us were cleaning their g...

Both my full retreat weekends landed right in the middle of what is probably the hardest, or at least the busiest month and a half of the program, with Jr High being right as we were starting to plan out the Old Testament film for our next class and writing a major research paper for our previous class, and Sr High happening right at the end of busy week of filming, editing and planning, the retreat weekends definitely provided tons of different challenges in and of them selves. For Jr High I counseled a group of 7 boys with one of my room mates Zack. I have counseled before, never at Qwanoes but at Imadene, we had a pretty rowdy group of guys, not really wanting to sleep at bed time the first night made for a pretty late night, once they were finally settled in I tried to sleep. The worst night of sleep I've probably had all semester was that Friday night, not because of the campers, but because of everything else going on, my mind was non stop racing, trying to figure out...

Intro to Spiritual Theology taught a lot about slowing down and living in the moment, we learnt a lot about being present, with our self's, with our friends and with each other. Applying this to a Friday youth night would just be being intentional with our students, spending time to talk to them and ask them about their week, slowing down and just talking with them and getting to know them better. We also talked about different spiritual disciplines and how some of them are best used, things like spending time to connect in fellowship with our church community, or acts of service around camp, just different ways of showing our love for one another in our daily lives. Applying this to my current ministry at youth will help me create deeper and better connections with the youth, or with campers during camp. Youth and Camp ministry has been my favourite class so far, being (in my opinion) the most practical class we have had so far, I found it pretty simple to f...