India, here I come!!

Hey everyone! This is going to be my last blog post before I go to India and I am going to try to kind of sum up some of it so that it doesn’t take three days to read. While I am in Inida I will try my best to post a blog or two, depending on how often I am able to have internet access but please, it I do not get a chance to, please don’t hold it against me. I will write heaps about the entire trip when I get back from India, so don’t worry about never finding out what happened. Here is what has happened these last two weeks before outreach.

The Sunday following Patrick Dodson’s teachings I co-led the older children’s Sunday school service at the Maungaturoto church. That sunday night, instead of our normal lectures, we had an Indian couple come and speak to us about India and what is going on there concerning missions. On Monday we started our normal lectures for the week. The speaker was named Teki. He spoke to us on Cross-Cultural Introduction. It was very interesting and he taught us a lot about Muslims and their beliefs that I did not know before. One of the main things for the week that Teki was trying convey to us was about how we should act in different cultures. One question that really got me thinking was “What makes you an American?” Besides the fact that I was born there I couldn't really give an answer. Teki told us, “while you are in India be an Indian,” and that is what I am going to strive for while I am there, to be as one of the natives in how I relate to them. That weekend we got to go camping as our last adventure as a school. We went to Pahi and camped near the beach. It was amazing, the sunset that was there the first night was so beautiful. At the beach there is a huge rock called Lion Rock and it really looks like a lion sitting at the waters edge. On the way home from camping we stopped at the airport to pick up two Mission Builders and while we were waiting I got to eat Dunkin Donuts. It was amazing! I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw it, I had no idea that New Zealand would have Dunkin Donuts. It made my day.

Jono Turner was the speaker for the last week of lectures. His topic was on the Holy Spirit. The whole week was one of the best weeks that we had. It was just what we needed to finish off the Lecture Phase with. One amazing story from the week was that on Tuesday during lectures we decided to pray for healing in a few different people so we started praying very fervently. One of the girls we prayed for had some pretty severe Carpal Tunnel Syndrome in her wrists and all throughout her forearms from playing the piano and drawing (she’s pretty artistic). While we were praying for her she was healed and she had absolutely no pain in either of her wrists. It was definitely God performing a miracle. It was truly amazing to see God work in such real ways and I know that this was only a small taste of what will be happening while we are in India. The rest of lectures wasn’t quite as exciting as Tuesday but it was still a really good week and I think that Jono was one of my favorite speakers overall. On Friday we had a fancy dinner as an “End of Lectures” dinner. After that we had a Talent show that was pretty awesome. As the end performance me and two other guys got up, dressed in tights and danced to the Cotton Eye Joe song, it was so much fun.

This past Monday morning we had a pancake breakfast as a final breakfast with everyone from both outreach teams. On Tuesday we said goodbye to the Chennai outreach team. It was so sad, I may have cried, I don’t remember, it was probably just that dirt unfortunately got in my eye the whole time the Chennai team was saying goodbye and driving away. What bad luck I have with dirt, that it would happen when I don’t want it to. After they left we went to the beach to help get our minds off of the other team and to stop us from skulking around. It was a really nice way to get us to not think about being sad. I realized that after this I will probably only see the people from the other team for another three weeks and then most likely never again after that and that made me really sad.

I leave tomorrow the 26th of November which will be the 25th for all of you. I am extremely excited and only a little nervous. We have a twelve hour flight to India. Here is a rough itinerary of what I will be doing and when so that you have an idea about what I will be doing when I am there.

MY ITINERARY:

November 26: Leave New Zealand for Calcutta

November 27-30: Orientation on culture by YWAM Calcutta

December 1: Travel north to Darjeeling (hopefully see Mt. Everest :] )

December 2-10: Partner witth YWAM Darjeeling ministries

December 11: Travel back to Calcutta

December 12-16: Partner with YWAM Calcutta ministries

December 17: Travel south to Orissa

December 18-

January 9: Partner with John Bridges’ ministry

January 9: Travel north to Calcutta

January 12: Depart India and arrive in Thailand

January 12-14: Debrief and relax in Thailand

January 14: Leave Thailand for New Zealand.

January 16 or 17: Travel south to Tauranga for the week and serve at YWAM ‘Jubilee

Celebration’ followed by ‘Call to All’

January 24: Return for report back week

I have some pictures that you can look at in a second but first I would really like to thank you all for your continued support through prayer and I implore you to continue praying for me and my entire team as we are in this foreign country that is very dangerous. I ask that you would pray for our health while we are there, some of our team is not feeling well and have been in bed resting and it would be terrible if anyone were to get that sick it would be very disastrous for our team and ministry. We need everyone to be in full health. I would also ask that you keep our safety in your prayers. We have many long train rides and many trips that we require us traveling great distances and traveling can be very dangerous. Some of the leaders who have been to India before have told us that on trains anything that is not secure on your person can easily get stolen and we do not want anyone to lose anything. Again I want to thank you all so very much for all the prayers and support that you have given me during this entire adventure that I am on. Your prayers mean so much to me, it truly is an encouragement to me to know that I have people back home who are interceding for me. This school so far has been amazing and I know that God only has more amazing things in store for India. God sure knew what he was doing when he led me to this place. I love you all. May God bless you all richly and may he reveal himself to you in new ways everyday.

Here are two pictures of the sunset at Pahi.

This is 'Lion Rock' and see, I told you that it looked like a lion.

Here are just a few random pictures that I took at Mangawhai on Tuesday.

The red algae was really cool.

Yet Another Post...

Since the last blog post a lot of things have happened. On Sunday before our new speakers Hinrich and Katrina talked to us on their topic of Back to the Basics, we got to play rugby. It was pretty awesome. I don’t understand why we don’t play it in the states. Although it was fun, I did get a little hurt. What a surprise. During the first lecture Hinrich and Katrina had all of us take pipe cleaners and make our dreams out of it. That was really cool because I got to see what some of the dreams of the other people on my team. The next Tuesday was a good day, I made friendship bread. Mmmmm, so delicious! It was also a good day because, instead of normal lectures, we got to act out stories from the Bible with a partner. Not to brag or anything but we were pretty much the best, my partner and I did so well that we were asked to perform it again for open meeting on Wednesday.

For our biweekly adventure we went to Waipu caves and got to rock climb. That was a lot of fun. I never knew how much fun climbing things actually was until I got to rock climb here. There was a cave there at the caves, wow, fancy that, a cave at the caves. Anyways, the cave was massive, it wasn’t huge as in the ceilings were super high but inside you could just keep going it you climbed far enough. I went pretty far inside, far enough so that I couldn’t see the light from the cave entrance. As soon as I got far enough into the cave as to not be able to see the light from the entrance I noticed little lights on the ceiling. Glow worms! Glow worms are so cool, there must’ve been at least a thousand little green dots on the ceiling. It looked so awesome, it is too bad that cameras can’t get that kind of image. If you could see into my head though, you would be amazed at them. I would say that that was a really successful adventure. That was a friday, so that night we had a team of DTS students from Newcastle who were on outreach come to our base and stay with us for about a week. At first when they came I wasn’t too sure about them because they were very quiet and didn’t seem to want to interact with any of us, but after a while they eventually opened up to us and I was able to get to know them actually pretty well.

Kevin Stitt was our new speaker for the week. Hew spoke on the topic of the Character and Nature of God. That week started off really frustrating. Something about the topic made just about everyone in the group start to hate Kevin, but someone mentioned to us that no matter who the speaker was, everyone hated the person who spoke on the Character and Nature of God. Once we started to realize this, we were able to focus more on figuring out what we believe because the things that Kevin was bringing up were challenging us in our faith and in what we believe in. It was overall a good week, lecture-wise. But it was a really good week mainly because we had the Newcastle team stay with us. Over the week I got really close to just about all of them. Now that they are gone I really miss them a lot. During the week while we were having lectures the Newcastle team was speaking in schools and other places advertising about the main program that they were doing which was a huge event on Friday night.

Friday night was amazing to say the least. Friday morning we woke up and found out that the power was out. That was not very good at all. As you can imagine, we needed power to do everything that we wanted to do for that evening. Everyone was praying for it to be turned back. Apparently a major power line had gone out and just about everywhere north of Auckland was without power. It was such a major line that we were told that it could take up to a few days to repair, thankfully it was fixed in a matter of hours. We were expecting somewhere between one and three hundred kids and there ended up being at least three hundred, maybe more. The whole program was amazing, first we introduced the Newcastle team and then they played a few songs for the kids. A few of the guys on the Newcastle team are in a band back home. After that my team got to play a song for everyone and yes, I played bass in front of all of them. Go me. After that they did a pretty sweet skit that I will try to add a link to it or add it to this page but i’m not too sure how that will work out, we will see. Anyways the skit was very similar to the Lifehouse skit which some of you may or may not have seen and they did an amazing job with it. After that some of the Newcastle students gave a testimony and talked to the kids for a little while. When they had finished with that one of the Newcastle students hopped on his skateboard and did some fancy tricks for the kids and they all loved it. Afterwards the gospel message was given to everyone and then anyone who wanted to talk more about it was encouraged to come to the front and talk to any of the YWAM students. That was where the real fun began, I got to lead two boys to the Lord. Pretty sweet if you ask me. Anyways that was the main event and it was a huge success. The Newcastle team had to leave the next day and that was a sad day for sure.

This past week we had Patrick Dodson as our speaker and he talked about Identity, the Character and Nature of God, Biblical Worldview, and Your Future. It was a really packed week, especially because we had two lectures a day since Patrick had to leave on Tuesday night to go to his son’s sixteenth birthday party. The week was really good, it went by way faster than I had expected it to. On Friday a few of us went to the primary school in Paparoa and held a disco/dance party for about half of the kids at the school. YWAM has had a disco/dance party for the school kids for about four years now and we were told that we had done the best out of all of them. Probably cause I was there.... just kidding. Because some of us had gone to the disco party we were able to have Saturday afternoon off to ourselves. It was amazing how quiet the base can get when you take out most of the loud people. It was a very appreciated day of rest. There are only a little over two weeks until outreach and the time keeps going by faster and faster. I can’t believe that it has gone by as fast as it has. Before I know it I will be back home with all of you. So that has been my update for this time. I hope you enjoyed it and I want to thank you for all of your prayers, it really means a lot to me. Have a wonderful day.