Tag Archive for: testimony

Written by Kristan Christian

Hello friends! I’m Kristan Christian from India. I was a student in the mobile DTS with YWAM Scotland. It was a breathtaking experience! I had such an amazing time and I felt like God was with me every single moment and wherever I went. He is so good! This is a story about my experience during my Edinburgh outreach.

God working in Edinburgh

I was in Edinburgh on outreach doing evangelism when I met a guy named David sitting on the street. I had seen him twice before but this time God spoke to me and told me to talk to him. So I went and David told me lots of things like how he had left his family and felt like a failure.

God started to speak to me and tell he that David’s left hand was causing him pain. I doubted this and though, “that is not possible”. However, God told me “trust me my son”. He said this 5 times before I had the courage to finally open my mouth and ask David. David confirmed that he has been having pain in his left hand. At that moment I felt so connected with God, like I was just sitting in my Father’s lap.

The faith to persevere

I asked David if I could pray for healing and he said “yes”. I prayed for healing and asked if he had felt any improvement. David responded by saying “no, no improvement at all”. I prayed the second, third, fourth and fifth time but still no changes, no healing. I began to doubt again. But my Father said, “You can do this because I have given you authority and there is no sickness in my kingdom.”

I prayed again with renewed hope and faith. David suddenly stood up, gave me a hug and started crying. Father God had healed him! He accepted Jesus as his Saviour and has decided to go back to his family. I was able to bless and encourage him with the good news that his Heavenly Father loves him so much. I did not see David again on the streets of Edinburgh throughout the remainder of my outreach.

Lessons from DTS

Throughout the mobile DTS I learned a lot and grew a lot in my faith. I have learned two things from Philippians 4:13, I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me and that God is my provider. I walk by faith with Jesus who is our Lord of lords and King of kings. I encourage everyone to gaze on His face and experience the trinitarian God.

Want to hear more testimonies from the mobile DTS? Check out this story. Interested in applying for our September DTS? Click here.

Written by: DTS student from our September DTS 2019

This is a testimony about our lives and actions representing Christ, whatever we do, and how someone is always listening or watching. 

The hostel

It was about midway through the week of our mid-term outreach in Inverness. After our group had been singing worship songs in the hostel lounge in the early evening, a friend and I stayed later. We asked to join a game the group of five was playing. We went from answering trivia questions, to talking about Canadian maple syrup, to holidays/traditions we each celebrate. This ended up with the question as to why each of us were at the hostel. 

When we were talking about holidays, we had been talking about what Christmas means to us as Christians. Why we celebrate it and what it looks like in our families tradition wise. By this time, some of the others had left, so we were specifically speaking to one Chinese man. This led into my friend and I talking about what we were doing in Inverness. We explained what YWAM is and in essence what evangelism was. This led into us sharing that we believe everyone can hear God’s voice. Eventually, the man shared how at one point he had the opportunity to get baptised but felt like he had missed his chance. 

A God encounter

Then I got a word of knowledge about his back. So I asked him if he had any pain in his back because God told me he had pain. He was shocked and asked “how did you know?!” He shared that he had gone in for a doctor’s appointment right before coming on his trip. I asked if I could pray for his back for it to be healed because we believe God loves to heal people. He agreed and we prayed. I don’t know if he felt anything actually change physically in that moment, but he definitely experienced something emotionally. He said “Wow, I believe your God is real.”

We sat in silence for a few minutes and watched as God was doing something in his heart. Next he brought up some questions too. He started talking and going on about a story he had once heard about someone who got healed by a witch doctor by offering up sacrifices. My friend jumped in and said, “But that’s the difference between Jesus and other spiritual acts, Jesus gives his love and healing and talks with us freely, we don’t have to sacrifice things, it’s a free gift.” 

We talked more about what Jesus did for us and conquered on the cross. We talked about why He did it, and what that means for us now. That it is a freely given gift that brings us into relationship with Jesus. He gave us the Holy Spirit to live inside of us so He can talk with us, and He actually wants to get to know us. 

The response

Eventually my friend asked, “So do you want that? Do you want to pray?” He responded with “Yes. Yes I want that.”

We sat in more silence, and then led him in confessing his sins and inviting Jesus into his heart! As we were sitting there, we could hear him whispering “Thank you Jesus, thank you Jesus.”

Representing Christ

It was such an amazing and incredible experience that started from such a far off topic of conversation! We definitely couldn’t have guessed everything was going to play out like it did. God had our new friend’s eternity on his heart and was chasing him down that night!

The man brought up several times in our conversation how beautiful the worship music had been. It was a cool reminder that no matter what we are doing, we are always representing Christ, and there will be others watching and listening. 

Written by: Debbie Phenix

Our journey to Scotland

My story might be a bit different from some, it is all about trust in God, so here it goes. Our journey started before 2014 but culminated in coming to Seamill to do the fall DTS in mid-September 2014.  We knew we were supposed to be in Scotland at that time but in June of 2014 we still didn’t know how we were going to get there. Much less what we were going to do once we did!  

In a series of miraculous events, we ended up finding out about YWAM, Seamill and the date of the DTS.  It’s much more exciting than the way I just phrased this but I don’t have that much space! We applied in July and because we weren’t the normal “age” they questioned us several times. They asked if we wanted to do a Crossroads DTS. Honestly we didn’t know what a DTS was, we just wanted to get to Scotland. So we said no – “if you want us we’ll come, if you don’t we’re coming to Scotland anyway!”. I guess they knew we were serious and that’s exactly what they wanted to hear, so we came.

A change in pace

Through a lot more miraculous events, we got to YWAM Seamill and completed most of the DTS. With two weeks left to go on our outreach to Cyprus, I lost the use of my hands and feet. We had established some wonderful relationships with the local church in Larnaca and my friend took me to her doctor. That doctor then referred me to a neurologist. They did an MRI on my brain and found a tumour which was pressing on my brain stem. I had to go back to the States right away and have brain surgery.  

You may think – this isn’t very uplifting – where is the Lord in all of this? I also had my own questions, “God, why did you tell us to be here and have all these miraculous things happen? What is the point, why don’t you heal me, why am I going through all this?”

Well I had the surgery, the tumour was benign and I began my recovery process. I couldn’t walk, couldn’t feed myself for awhile and went through depression, frustration, etc. But I came through it and 10 months later we finished up the last two weeks of our DTS in Louisville, Kentucky.  

The call of God remains

You see as my husband and I came home from Cyprus, we just knew that God still wanted us to be in Scotland. We didn’t know what was ahead of us but we knew we had a word from the Lord. We needed to finish well so we could go back to Scotland when this was all over. I wasn’t sure if I could – the surgery changed things. Physically I wasn’t the same but I had a trust in God that I didn’t have before. 

I thought I had a lot of trust in God before, I mean didn’t we change everything in our lives – quit our jobs, sell our house,  move away from our family, blindly move to a new country without knowing anything about what we would be doing? But God remains so good and so trustworthy! When you are facing death and you have no fear, there is a trust there that is supernatural and I thank God for that. He is everything He says He is and He is worthy of our trust (and everything else we could possibly give Him).  

An unshakeable trust

I wanted to tell this story because only God knows what He wants to do with our lives. Only He knows how He will lead us. Proverbs 16:9  “A man’s heart plans his way, But the Lord directs his steps.”

We’ve been here 4 years and the Lord is still directing us step by step.  We still don’t know exactly why we had to be here when He said but we trust Him – now more than ever. None of us know the impact of the small or big things we do, but if we listen and have a trust in God, we can rest secure in His outcome.

Written by: Rachel Armstrong


One of my favourite outreach stories does not sound all that spectacular on the surface. It was just a simple conversation with a church. But for me it sums up what outreach is. 

I was in Nepal working with Titus Project. Titus Project is the outreach for the School of Biblical Studies.  The main focus is teaching how to study the scriptures. This is so that pastors and church leaders who are unable to attend seminary can still study the word. They can also have access to solid biblical truths.  

The Struggles

We had been teaching for almost 2 months at this point and we were tired. It was a struggle to figure out how to fit our western style teaching system into an eastern world view. We wanted to do this without compromising the content of what we were teaching. Which is no easy task. We were also a team of all introverts who were trying to connect with a group of extremely extroverted people. It was not going well and was rather discouraging. We were questioning the point of us even being there. Especially since we had not seen much fruit from anything we had done. 

The location we were in was a church in a small village somewhere in the Himalayas. Honestly I still have no idea where we were exactly. We had been teaching all week, and as I said pretty exhausted. 

A Surprising Moment

It so happened that our week of teaching landed on a Major Hindu holiday. The tradition was that the oldest son in the household would come around and bless each member of the family. He would then give each of the daughters the bindi (the red dot on their forehead). 

The pastor of the church and his oldest son were both believers. The mother and rest of the household were Hindu. 

In the middle of one of our worship and teaching sessions the mother walks in and tries to get her son to leave with her so that he could perform this ceremony.  He refused and chaos ensued. I have never seen such an uproar. She was publicly shaming him, calling him a bad son and all sorts of other things. Immediately the pastor jumped in and started yelling, then all the other  women got involved. It was a very noisy chaotic mess. In the midst of it all the son just sat there. He seemed so stoic and peaceful. He refused to leave with his mother and eventually the dust settled. We were able to finish our worship session in relative peace. 

Once everything was over one of my teammates asked him what happened and why he responded the way he did. He said that the only reason he had been able to sit in the church and not respond out of anger is because of something that another YWAM team had told him a few weeks earlier. The rough translation of his answer was about Jesus being with us in the middle of our hardest moments.  

The Ripples of Influence

What is important to know is that that team had no idea the influence they had on this boy’s life. In fact they were probably rather discouraged by the lack of response they had in the moment; we often don’t get to see the impact that we have on others. I was privileged to see how much this team had affected his walk with the Lord. Our team was also extremely encouraged by it at the time. But the team still have no idea.

God gave me the revelation that just because we hadn’t seen the impact we were having didn’t mean it wasn’t happening. There have been many outreach teams that come back discouraged because they didn’t have what we would consider “amazing stories”. There were no salvation stories or spectacular moments, no one broke down in tears or got miraculously healed. But we can all take this story as a living example of how God’s word never goes out without making a change in someone’s life. That is what outreach is.