Yet Another Tale from the Nude Beach

I hate when I haven't posted in a while because I feel like I have so much to talk about and I must mention it all. This creates painfully long blog entries that maybe only Luke Sexson will read. So, I will try to hit the high points without a tremendous amount of detail.

Money Problems
YWAM Maui has been going through some lean financial times for the last few months. We've cut the budgets of all the departments and got rid of unnecessary expenditures. In the past, our base could afford to be forgiving if someone couldn't pay their tuition or outreach fees on time. This is no longer the case. Three of our students, Myles, Chris and Victoria do not have all the money they need for lecture phase. This Friday was the deadline for all the money for lecture phase to be in. Tomorrow there will be an announcement about whether they have to go home or not. This is a really big deal.

 We have two teams going to a large Asian country. If we lose some of these people, there is a good chance that we will only have one team going to Asia. This will greatly change the team dynamics we've been trying to create. Luckily it is a small school and I know all the students well. There are several other people who have paid for their lecture phase but still need significant amounts of money towards their outreach. If they don't get that money in, they will not get to go to Asia. The work we are doing in Asia needs as many students to go there as possible. Please pray that this all works out.


Nude Beach
In lighter news, I took four of the girl students to Big Beach on Saturday. This is one of my favorite beaches on the island even though it's pretty far away. It almost never rains and is beautiful with blue water and a long stretch of sandy beach. There is also a powerful shore break. This is when the waves crash really hard in a shallow area near where the ocean meets the sand. I like to watch unsuspecting tourists get pummeled by the shore break. (As long as they don't get hurt, of course.)

There is also a nude beach called Little Beach that is just on the other side of a large rocky cliff. Another thing I like to do is swim from Big Beach to Little Beach so I can see the nude people from a safe distance. I like to watch how weird they are but I don't want to see details. From about 100 yards out, you can do just that. People who hang out at nude beaches are weird and participate in some strange naked activities like yoga, sit-ups and abnormally wide-legged stances. This is all hilarious to watch from a safe detail-less distance. I decided that I wanted to swim over to Little Beach and I took two of the students, Grace and Johanna along with me. Our plan was to swim over, gawk at the nudes and swim back. It's a bit of a long swim and we were tired when we finally got in view of the nudes.

We treaded water and giggled at the nude people's antics for a while. When we were ready to leave, we were faced with a tough decision: swim back the long way to the non-nude Big Beach or make the easier swim to the shore of the detail-filled Little Beach and climb over the rocks to get back to the beach where people had some sense of decency. We decided we could try the shorter swim onto the nude-filled shore of Little Beach as long as we stayed close to the rock divider between the beaches and kept our eyes averted from potential details. We started swimming back and quickly came upon a guy surfer wearing a rash guard (ie: surfing shirt). Grace said, "At least he is wearing a shirt." Then I said, "There's no guarantee he is wearing pants." I was right, the dude was not wearing anything but the rash guard. What a weirdo? Why wear a top and no bottoms? Luckily the only detail I saw was his butt.

We tried to quickly swim in but the waves were a bit strong. At one point the surfer caught a wave and it looked like he might hit us. Luckily I didn't look directly at him. As we were getting out, Johanna cut her foot so we had to go to the lifeguard stand. They joked with us about going to the nude beach. They told us they'd had to rescue nude people before and even did CPR on a naked guy, who ended up dying. What a undignified way to die!