So another couple of weeks have past and the pace is beginning to slow as we approach Christmas and the Australian summer break. There are fewer camps booked for the next few weeks which means Katie and I will be doing some catch up bookwork and training. We have a final week on camp followed by a couple weeks of training which takes us up to our Christmas break from the 24th of December to the 6th of January. We are very much looking forward to our training, as we will be back out to Stanwell tops to be assessed in our vertical rescue techniques in abseiling that we completed our training in last weekend. We will also be on a 4 day hike through the blue mountains, to complete our next section of training in navigation and bush hiking. We will also be doing our sail training but to what extent we will be involved in the learning process I am not sure. I say this because from last week Katie has decided to be both surprising and awesome and having not done any official lessons in sailing or ever taught it before, she is now taking groups of students out sailing and has even done an assessment on one occasion!
This last week has been a great week because God allowed me to experience the love he has for the youth of Australia. I was able to spend quite a lot of time with one group this week, as opposed to changing groups throughout the week, which meant I could begin to build a bit of trust with them. We had 2 Christian discovery discussion groups together and I asked God to speak through me to my group. I encouraged the students to tell me everything they struggled to believe, didn't like, were angry about and just didn't understand about God and Jesus. This led into some really great discussions in which the students began to understand different aspects of living for Jesus at their own levels. The best aspect about talking to the students is that I never know what to say, and by allowing them to ask honest questions means that I have no choice but to trust in God for how I should answer their questions. I really felt God speaking to them as we discovered together that to trust and have faith in God in the big areas of our lives, we often have to recognise God’s answers to prayer in all the little areas of our life in order to build our faith. I have no idea what they were really thinking and how our time together will affect their lives, but as I felt God encourage me to pray for them individually this morning, I really felt Gods love for them and knew that he will continue to be with them in their lives. We are so blessed to have the opportunity to build relationships with the students out here and chat so easily with them about God! Awesome!
Over to Katie to tell you about wildlife and our plans for Christmas. I miss England still very much and hope you are all doing really well.
Hey hey everybody! We wrote our first Christmas cards tonight and on the front were two cool looking Koala bears in Christmas hats, sitting in a Eucalyptus tree decorated with baubles. It kinda summed up how random and different Christmas feels over here! It’s nowhere near as hyped up as it is at home which we kind of miss, and it’s just a bit bizarre that it’s summer, but we have some great plans and we’re really looking forward to it.
We’ve been blessed so much since coming here not only by our awesome friends Sam & Lex (from Samos), but also their amazing parents Andrew & Keena who have helped us feel so at home. We’ll be spending Christmas with their big family. We’re really looking forward to it and feel so blessed for being invited to share it with them. After that we’re heading up to a place called Wagstuff, where we’ll have a week with them in their holiday home. Really looking forward to just chilling out after being so busy lately, and we’ll hopefully get some sailing in.
Speaking of sailing – on boxing day we’re going to be on their family yacht in Sydney Harbour, watching the start of the big Sydney sailing race to Hobart! (Tasmania). I’ve been checking it out on google and still can’t quite believe we get to do that, it’s going to be incredible seeing all those awesome boats!
Some quick highlights from the last week;
- Seeing a 2 metre long diamond python snake slithering up a tree in front of us at work and coiling itself around the branches
- Seeing 2 lorikeet birds land right in front of me on my way to work. They look like mini parrots – bright green, purple, yellow & red, and they always seem to fly in twos, which I think is nice. (check them out on google images)
-We were invited to help at a recent Church youth event on Cronulla beach, where they were being taught to surf by Sam and a few others in the sea, and a guy from Christian Surfers came to speak. We got fish & chips afterwards and watched possums climb the trees.
-I joined in the Church choir practice this week to sing Oh Happy Day, which was pretty fun. Reminded me of choir days in school with Mr. Williams
- Last weekend we went windsurfing! No-one’s into it here, but we found that one of the boatsheds in work had some very retro looking kit, so we put it together and had some fun. The board is the longest I have ever seen, but Sam still managed to plane on it!
- Much to our delight and after a few weeks of looking around in the shops, we found scrabble!
Thank you for all your support and prayers – we appreciate them so much! We miss home a lot, I guess especially now that Christmas is coming, but we know that this is exactly where God wants us for now. Please keep praying for us, and particularly that we would continue to feel more settled in Church and at home there.
Big love from us both x
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