Saturday, November 25, 2006

The latest and greatest

This past week was little tough for me. In Australia when the kids graduate from high school, rather than doing an "after grad" night...they do an after graduation WEEK. A whole week away from home getting drunk every night. Obviously along with that comes drugs, sex, violence, death even. Anyway, during this YWAM links up with an organization called the "red frog crew" named after the frog shaped candies they hand out. Basically we serve the people by making them breakfast when they are hung over in the morning, cleaning up there rooms...and PUKE, getting them out of trouble with the hotels by fixing things they break etc....etc.... Through serving them we get a really good reputation with the kids and the eventually ask for counsel from us or the red frog hotline which are all Christian certified counsellors, or they just call us up to hang out with us etc... But in short there are so many kids who go and realize that partying doesn't fulfill there lives and every night they just have to do it again until they can't do it anymore. SOOOO MANY salvations happen in this week, real, authentic, genuine salvations, mid to high hundreds I'd say. People getting prayed for, healed, set free, emotionally healed, receiving the Holy Spirit, everything redeeming you can think of.
Anyway, my side of this story is that Wayne, who is in charge of maintenance around the base, had to go to this. SO, that meant I couldn't go, I had to cover for him. I really loved doing the "red frog crew" last year and would have liked to have done it again! But thats alright. However having NOONE around base because they were all doing ministry all week meant that some work loads were lighter and some were heavier. In my case I lost a lot of workers and had many jobs to finish, so I had to work triple hard and I got quite sick as well. I'm feeling much better this weekend though! Anyway, it was a tough long week this week. Its been great hearing all the stories of salvations and amazing things happening from all the people back on base, but even through this hard week I came away with some amazing stories. One of which I will share.
I eventually stopped pitying myself for not getting to go and do ministry this week and 1) saw the work I was doing as ministry and 2) dug in and prayed like crazy for these guys. One day while taking a load of "rubbish" (garbage) to the "tip" (dump) my friend Gill (its a nickname: Nathaniel McGILL) got a text message from the Frotiers school leader in the Gold Coast doing "red frog crew". She said that it was getting difficult, people were getting tired and they felt spiritual attacks coming on them. Me and Gill prayed while we worked and then when we finished working sat down and really prayed for them together! We both really felt like God was saying that they needed to continue to be offensive and take ground for God. The enemy just wanted to scare them so they would become defensive and stop winning victories. Then I said just tell them to remember that God is on there side. It turns out that he was just texting those words to Gen as I said that. Then on the radio on a completely non-christian station, at that exact moment the lyrics "ever wonder what its like when God is on your side" came on. Me and Gill just looked at each other and laughed. God is cool like that. Short and seemingly insignificant story, but if God was speaking to us, we can be sure He answered our prayers as well, and I definately know that just as your prayers empower me greatly, mine affected the Gold Coast greatly that week! Praise God for the way we can do His work even accross the globe!

Thursday, November 16, 2006

Back in Brissy

Hello everyone, I'm back in Brisbane. Had a great flight, even though extremely long and God actually blessed me quite a bit on it, I got a pretty cheap low level hotel room in Hong Kong and they upgraded me to the Penthouse for free! lol, How random is that!
Anyway, I'm back on base and back to work. I've been thrown in charge of maintenance for a couple weeks because our maintenance man is on an outreach for a couple weeks in Airlie Beach up north. I'm going to be taking care of getting the new classroom we are building all built and everything. You can see pictures of the building at www.ywamoz.com on the homepage. After that I will be preparing and planning the January Beach to Bush school and kicking things off for that fresh start.
Just a little info to let you know what the next couple months will contain (generally speaking).

Peace, Love and Prayers!