As my wife and I watched our 18-year-old son work his way through airport security, we both had knots in our stomachs. He was boarding a plane to Australia without anyone he knew. He had never flown anywhere by himself, let alone half-way around the world. We knew very little about the YWAM base he was going to other than what we had read online. In our eyes, he looked like a child winding his way along the security line. Were we crazy, letting him go do a DTS?
The strange thing about our emotions was that for the previous 10 years we had been YWAM staff, ourselves, leading DTS’s. We had received hundreds of other parents’ children over the years and taken them all over the world on ministry outreaches thinking it was the greatest thing a kid could do. But it felt very different now. This was our baby, and all kinds of “what-if’s” rose up in our minds. What if he got lost? What if he got sick? What if he didn’t fit in? What if this YWAM base ended up not being a good place? The worries felt endless. It finally dawned on us that God might be trying to teach us something while our son was in a discipleship program. Maybe He wanted us to learn to trust Him with our most precious possession—our child.
As the weeks passed and we talked with him several times, our anxiety subsided. He sounded like he was enjoying it. And the way he communicated was different. He had rarely talked of spiritual things in the past. Now, he was speaking as if he knew God and could hear His voice. He finished the lecture phase, and went on outreach to India. The stories he told of ministering and sharing his faith in another culture amazed us. Our little boy was becoming a man of God. His beliefs were no longer merely what his parents had told him; they were his own.
He ended up returning to Australia to do a leadership school with YWAM. Though we missed him, we couldn’t help but feel proud. After finishing the secondary school training he returned to Minneapolis and enrolled in a local Christian University. To our delight, the school gave him 15 college credits for his YWAM experiences (we now know multiple Christian schools do this). Not only did he come home with a living relationship with God and greater maturity, but he also had a much clearer picture of what he desired for his life and the vocation he wanted to pursue.
Over the years, we have seen DTS transform so many lives. And we now know too that DTS was the best thing our son could have ever done right after high school. It changed him for the better. His mother and I now cannot imagine his life without it.
