Did I Mention I Hate the Number 700???

Well this has been quite the week! We certainly did not work as hard as we did in the previous weeks and we had a TON of fun, but we also had a very sad goodbye. One of the guys on our team, Joe, decided to leave without completing outreach. He is leaving for home on Monday and leaving behind a rather large hole in our team. When you have lived and worked so closely together even for just one month and then someone decides to leave, it is a bit like losing a member of your family. Our outreach team truly is our family now and we have become quite a close family, but now we must go on down one family member. It was a hard decision to make I'm sure and we are all very sad about it, but at the same time my team knows that God is not sitting up in heaven wringing his hands thinking, "Oh no now what I am going to do??? Joe wasn't supposed to leave, this ruins EVERYTHING!" It is sad and we do have a hole to fill now but we know that Joe's decision did not throw a monkey wrench into God's plans. God still has amazing plans for how He will use our team and His plans will be fulfilled with or without Joe.

Speaking of God's amazing plans for our team we finally received information this week about where and with whom we will be working in Mexico. My team will be located in zone 6 of the city (Megacities has divided the city into 30+ zones) called Azcapotzalco. It is connected to the central zone of the city (Centro Historico) which is where Mexico City was originally built around and houses all sorts of interesting things! There are ancient ruins of an Aztec temple in the center of the city with the government buildings all around it as well as the first Cathedral built in the city which was started in the late 1500's. Centro Historico is the center of everything in Mexico City and I definitely want to visit it so I am very glad to be so near to it! As for the zone I will be staying in it seems to be one of the nicer regions in the city. There isn't a whole lot of information about it, but it is the section of the city where a lot of Italians settled in the late 1800's so that is where the Little Italy of the city is with a lot of Italian restaurants and bakeries, so that's interesting. We will be staying and working with La Iglesia Cristia de Bethesda and one of our main obs will be to work with their youth group of 120 students and provide discipleship training to them and mobilizing them and giving them a heart for missions. I was super excited to hear about that since I love working with youth! It will be interesting though since I have never been a part of a youth group that big before! Plus I'm wondering how big this church is if only the youth group is 120! Apparently one of the other groups from my DTS will be working with a church of 6000 people! It absolutely blows my mind!

As for what we actually did this week, well it was a lot of work on the base and bonding as a team. We did a bible study Monday morning and went up to King's Park Tuesday morning and did intercession and proclaimed scripture over the city, so that was all fun! In the afternoons we worked on base and did a variety of jobs. I used a paper cutter to chop and neatly stack 737 name tags, a large group of us put together 730 cookie packages to give people at the celebration which contained a total of 2190 cookies, and yesterday I helped to stitch the edges of about 700 meters of shade cloth! Hence the title of my blog . . . because yes after all this work with 700, I am truly sick of that number! It was good though! I had fun doing all of the jobs and certainly enjoyed them more than scrubbing oil stains off the parking lot which is what I was prepared to do. All the preparations for the celebration are going well though I think. The base is really starting to be transformed and is looking really nice. The celebrations officially start on Sunday after lunch which is Saturday night your time! It will be amazing! I am really looking forward to it. Loren and Darlene Cunningham (the founder of YWAM and his wife) are coming for the celebrations and should be arriving either tomorrow or Sunday morning. It is very exciting for all of us DTSers to be able to meet him since we were all required to read the book he wrote describing the process of how YWAM was established. It was a great book and I am excited to see him and here him speak. Plus Tuesday is also Australia Day (basically the Australia version of Canada Day) so there will be national celebrations going on as well as our YWAM celebration. We are all going to go down to the river and watch the fireworks show and it supposed to be phenomenal! I am so excited for this week!

AND after this week of celebration is over we leave for Mexico, so that is a pretty sweet deal! Celebrations end on Friday night, Saturday is our free day, then Sunday we pack and prepare to leave for Mexico since we all need to be at the airport sometime in the night between Sunday and Monday morning. It will be crazy, but good I think! I am definitely going to take a ton of pics of the celebrations and I will have hours of free time in various airports to post them all! Speaking of time in airports though reminds me of our prayer requests for this week. First of all we still need prayer for the Asian visas to get into Mexico. We had breakthrough in other areas this week where one guy who lost his passport and was really starting to stress about whether his new one would arrive in time for him to go to Mexico received the passport on Wednesday, so that was a total praise item. Also my Swiss friend Joanne suddenly found out this past week that she needed to get a visa to go to LA for the layover on the way to Mexico because she had an older Swiss passport that didn't have the biochip the new ones had to allow for easy access to the country. So that also was a major stressor since it had to happen fast, but she went for her interview at the American Embassy on Tuesday and received the visa in the mail on Wednesday, so again praise God! But we still need breakthrough for these Asian visas. We also need prayer against discouragement since many of them are finding it harder and harder to trust God when the day they are supposed to leave keeps coming closer and closer. Another prayer point is for safe and smooth travel with no complications between connecting flights. I am only in the Sidney airport for about 2 hours and 20 minutes which is cutting it close to make my next flight since it is an internation flight, so I need prayer that my first flight is not delayed and that God really works out the connection between these two flights. Other than that again please lift up everyone's health as we go into this busy, hectic week of celebration and for amazing rest in the coming week and on the way to Mexico that we don't arrive there already completely burnt out!

I'm not planning on coming into a coffee shop next weekend to write an update, but I will be in the LA airport 9 hours on February 1 so my plan is to use internet for much of that time and I will try to get in an update there. Once we actually hit Mexico I may cut back to every 2 weeks if at all just based on the ease of finding internet access. However whether I have internet or not I will take a lot of pics and can catch you all up once I get home at the end of March.

Hard Hard Hard Work and Some Well . . . Not So Hard Work

Well you'll never guess what I was up to this week! On Sunday we went to church and our outreach team split into 2 groups and went to 2 different churches. I went with a group to a Metro Church and it was very interesting. I'm pretty sure the building must have been a movie theatre at one point because we were definitely sitting in movie theatre seats! And a lot of the time it felt like it was still a movie theatre because everything was so high tech! There were probably 5 big screens at the front which showed the videos of the worship team and speaker just like in a concert. Actually it reminded me a lot of being at CreationFest . . . the only difference was they used the screens at CreationFest so the thousands of people could see what was going on at the front since everyone couldn't see. Let's just say there were not thousands of people at Metro Church . . . there were barely hundereds! I would be absolutely shocked if there were more than 250 people in the building! So pretty much the screens weren't so necessary, but hey whatever floats your boat, right!??? Another thing I noticed about Metro Church which I wasn't a huge fan of is that they have about 20 people at the front leading worship in a church of only about 200 . . . huh??? How does that ratio work??? It didn't make a lot of sense to me, but hey who am I to judge??? I can safely say though that I miss The Forge! I like our style of worship and life in general much better! There was one thing I really loved about Metro Church, however, after the service we were all invited into the visitor's lounge since we were first timers and they had amazing food to feed us! Brownies, springs rolls, mini quiches, orange juice! It was fabulous! With nearly 500 people on base right now and the kitchen used to cooking for only 300 let's just say there hasn't been an abundance of food lately and the food we are eating is mostly bread and rice so the food in the visitor's lounge was such a treat for us!

In the afternoon we had an evangelism time, so we waited on God to see where He wanted us to go and what He wanted us to do and it turns out God wanted us to evangelize at the beach! Sweet deal! So we headed to the beach and we drew prophetic drawings on the sidewalk in chalk and had a great time talking to different people about what we were doing and why we were doing it! And we got to do it all at the most beautiful place ever . . . Fremantle beach! It was pretty awesome!

For the rest of the week we were working with ARMS again, but we just did that during the morning. In the afternoons we were working on the base helping to get things ready for the biggest 50th and 25th celebrations that are coming up in a week! So the ARMS work was pretty much the same as last week . . . lots of yard work in the hot sun, but we also had a couple of days when my team had indoor jobs and I cannot even believe some of the places we went to! My last ARMS case was Saturday and when my group walked in the front door we all looked at each other in disbelief and were thinking, what are we supposed to do with this??? I know you are all probably thinking that it must have been a huge mess to stop us dead in our tracks that way, but in reality this was the cleanest house I have ever been in! It is cleaner than our house at home and we were called in to clean it because the woman was suffering from post partum depression and couldn't manage on her own. So we did clean her bathrooms and kitchen like she asked us to, but we felt it was pointless because they were already pretty much clean! So that was interesting! But usually the places are much more of a mess and we work really hard!

And of course we work hard on the base as well although this picture may hide that fact well! It turns out that for 2 days we were working on the base I got to be on the baking team! We had to write down any special skills we had so they knew how best to use us so I wrote down that baking and cooking were 2 of my special skills and I actually got placed on a baking team which I didn't really think would happen when I wrote those down in the first place. So that was nice! On Monday night we got to bake chocolate chip cookies which really didn't even seem like work, and then on Thursday we baked bran muffins! It was quite a daunting task to bake those though because for the cookies we only baked 410, but they need about 1400 and that is just for 1 afternoon tea! There are going to be about 700+ people on base for the celebrations so there is going to be a lot of food happening! It is madness to even think about since it took us 3 hours to bake those 400 cookies and it was only a third of what was needed! But it was still fun, so that was good! It was definitely far more fun than the job I had on Tuesday afternoon (which was a hot day I would just like to add!) On Tuesday afternoon me and 3 other girls were dressed in coveralls and sprawled on the super hot ashphalt car park to scub oil stain off of the ashphalt! We worked for 4 hours in the sun pouring degreaser on the stains, pouring sand onto them, and then scrubing at them with scrub brushes. It was terrible! And of course we were working with stains and stains by definition are messes which are not easily removed so it felt sort of hopeless as we were worked because at times we were literally pouring our blood, sweat, and tears into our work and the difference was barely noticeable! And by far the most discouraging part of that job was as soon as we were finished they parked all the oil leaking vehicles right back where they were so it was like what was the point of it at all when the mess will be right back??? So yeah that was fun!

This coming week we will be solely working on the base getting life ready for the celebrations. There is only 1 week until the celebrations and the transformation that they are planning has yet to be implemented so I have a feeling we will be worked just as hard this week as we have to pull everything together and get the whole base decked out and decorated before people start arriving next weekend! Hopefully I will get to do more baking (the not so hard work) and not have to do anymore oil scrubbing (the hard hard hard work!), but it is outreach so I just do what I am told and try not to complain because I know how much it irritates me when other people on my team complain; it just brings everyone down and doesn't help anything! I do have to say though that I am pretty much counting the days until we leave for Mexico! I am so excited to get to Mexico City that I can't even stand it! We had a Mexico City orientation at the very end of December so got to see pictures and hear more about what we would be doing and the whole time they were giving the presentation I was just thinking about how I wanted to leave the next day not wait a month and then get there! However, I did have to wait a month and now that month is coming to a close! We leave in 15 days and I am stoked! I never thought I would want to get on an airplane again when I got here, so I am looking forward to being on a plane again and I feel far more confident going back than I did coming here because I already know that I can make it through all the hoops you have to pass through in airports and all that jazz! Plus eventhough a lot of us (those from North America) booked their own flights back to LA I am on the same flight as a bunch of people from my school so I won't be travelling alone this time which will be far more fun! I do have to say I am not really looking forward to the 9 hour layover in LAX before we board a flight for Mexico City, but even that won't be so bad because I will have people to explore with! Yay!

There are some points of prayer for our travel, however, that I would love for you all to keep in mind. First obviously is safety while travelling. We have about 40 hours of air/airport time before we get to Mexico City which is a lot and we will need lots of prayer for energy and safety as we go. My flight from Perth leaves February 1 at 5:45am and I arrive in Mexico City at 11:43 pm on February 1, but we cross the international day line and since Australia is a day ahead of North America we pretty much get to live February 1 twice . . . either that or it is just the LONGEST day in the history of the world! Also we are still having issues with receiving visas so the Asians in our group are allowed in Mexico. If the visas do not come through my team will be short Malaysian and the other 2 teams will each be short 2 Indonesians. We are really trusting God for the visas to come through but time is growing short so we really need everyone to stand with us in prayer. Other than please continue to lift up the health of everyone on my team especially as we are soon off to Mexico the reputed land of intestinal discomfort!

That is about it for now I think! Just one more post in Australia and then who knows what internet will be like in Mexico. Hope everyone is enjoying being a part of my Australian adventure and is ready for the next chapter in Mexico!

Dirt, Sweat, and Birthday Bliss!

Well we have just wrapped up our second week of outreach and it was sure an interesting one! We began work this week with the ARMS ministry of YWAM Perth. ARMS provides different services for families in crisis, so our role to play is to do the yard work services the families need. Since ARMS only has about 10 people as a part of the ministry and there are lots of families in crisis there are often waiting lists for an ARMS representative to actually be able to provide whatever it is the family is needing and as is to be expected yard work is of low priority so it gets pushed way down the list until ARMS can get to it and there is often a 6 month waiting list for people to get the yard work done that they need! So my outreach team has been able to tackle that list for ARMS this week and it has been great! This is exactly the kind of thing I love doing: serving people and showing them God's love with my hand rather than having to tell them about it with my mouth. We also do a lot of street evangelism so I still have to do the speaking of God's love thing, but I enjoy working with ARMS much more! So yeah since the temperature ranged between about 32 and 40 degrees Celsius this week and we were doing physical labour outside in the sun we certainly had our fair share of sweat and we were always covered in dirt! It was great though! And what I really love about ARMS is that once you have worked for these different families and done nice things for them for basically no reason they are so much more open to hear about because they want to know what drives us to do what we do so we still get to share God with them; it just isn't as forced!

It was definitely a busy week though! We would work with ARMS all day and we had some pretty huge jobs so we didn't always even make it back to the base in time for meals, so we had pretty much no free time at all this week, but apparently that's what outreach is! It takes some getting used to, but I think it will be fine. The only issue with no having free time this week is that yesterday it was the birthday of one of the girls on our team so we were planning a birthday party for her and had to figure out how to do all the stuff for that when we had no time to even shower some days (and boy did we need to shower!). It was definitely hardest on me because each person on our team has their own job like accountant or nurse or whatever and my job is hospotality so I was the one who was having to do all the details for the party like buying and wrapping the gift, making a card and getting everyone to sign it, making the cake, etc. So that was stressful just trying to make the time to fit it all in, but in the end her birthday was really great and she was so blessed by all the effort we all put in! So it was definitely worth it!

Next week we will be working with ARMS again but apparently we will just be working with them in the morning and then in the afternoons we will be working on base trying to get life ready for the big 50th anniversary of YWAM celebration which is coming up at the end of January. It is because of this celebration that we are staying in Perth for the first month of outreach . . . usually outreach teams go to 2 places, but even if the first is in Australia it is in another part of Australia. So it has definitely been interesting being in Perth for this month because I know for a lot of people we feel a bit ripped off like we are missing out on our real outreach because we are stuck here in Perth until the celebrations. But really God wanted us here in Perth because He has really been moving. So far my outreach team is the only one to see anyone come to Christ and we have actually had 2 salvations already! Plus God has asked different ones on our team to pray for healing over different people in Perth and some people have received at least some degree of healing. So even though my team had a pretty bad attitude about being in Perth for the first month of our outreach, amazing things are happening and I think this time in Perth is preparing us for what we will see in Mexico because the word God has spoken to everyone on my team is power: He is going to move in power through us in Mexico City and we are getting to see glimpses of it here in Perth as well.

Team unity is still somewhat of an issue since we do not really do much as a team right now. Even as we do our ARMS work we are split into 3 different teams so only ever work with 4 other people at a time. We are definitely doing better in terms of unity this week because we voiced our concerns to our leaders so have been using our evenings to do team things where we are all together, but unity take work and prayer and we definitely still need more of both! We also need continued prayer for health (I don't think that prayer request will leave until my DTS is finished as health is always an issue). We have been fairly lucky healthwise so far, but we have had issues of car sickness this week as we have been driving to the different ARMS cases and some of them are quite far away. So prayer for health in general would be fantastic. Another issue which isn't for me so much, but definitely affects my team is the issue of visas for getting into Mexico. On my outreach team we have a guy from Malayasia and the other teams have Indonesians and Mexico is being very difficult about providing visas for them because they are very strict about who they let into the country since many people view Mexico as an entry way into the US. So far all our attempts to get visas for them have failed and we are definitely running out of time. Already they are having to take different flights from everyone else because they were denied access to the US even as a layover location to fly into Mexico so are having to fly the opposite way around the world through Singapore, Germany, etc. We really need all the prayer support we can get on this one as our teams just would not be complete without the gifting these amazing Asians bring!

I think that is about it for now. We officially only have 3 weeks left in Perth which is crazy! I'll be off to Mexico before I know it and leave this beautiful country and amazing people behind. I will still try to update weekly for those 3 weeks tho I may not be able to, and who knows what internet will look like in Mexico, but until then I hope you continue to enjoy my updates about my amazing (though stretching!) adventure!

Busyness, how well I understand you!

Well regardless of where I am and what I'm doing, the holidays always have this nasty habit of sneaking up on me and flying past. Surprisingly enough the same phenomenon continued here in Australia! The week leading up to Christmas was filled with food, fun, and friends, but we also managed to squeeze in 3 days of lectures in there too. The topic for our last week of lecture phase was Evangelism which is quite applicable seeing as we were about to launch into Outreach which is basically 24/7 evangelism! It was a good week of teaching from Steve Ahern the national director for YWAM Australia, but it was challenging as well. It is funny how some things topics and teachings can be both encouraging and challenging at the same time. Probably the biggest thing I took away from the week was the knowledge that when we go out and do evangelism our number one goal is not to get people to accept Christ. Every person we meet will be at a different stage in terms of their knowledge, understanding, and acceptance of God, so our main job is just to get them to the next step of that knowledge, understanding, and acceptance of God. Steve Ahern gave us a nice number scale to represent this. If zero is where someone accepts Christ, there is a set of negatice numbers previous to zero and positive numbers after zero. If someone is at a minus 10 spiritually, it is completely unrealistic to expect them to accept Christ because they have pretty much never been exposed to any part of who God is and what He has done. So that was encouraging because there is a whole lot less presure . . . all we are responsible for is being obedient to God and bringing them to the next number. Of course that still involves speaking to people which for me is definitely the challenging part :-S

So our lectures ended on the 23 of December and we had a nice Christmas Eve breakfast for our DTS the next morning as a celebration of our time together before we all get split up and spread out across Perth and later Mexico City. It was quite a nice breakfast and lots of fun for everyone. After that we had the rest of the day free and I spent the entire day completing the Christmas gifts I made for everyone and the encouragement cards to accompany them. And when I say I spent the entire day doing that, I should clarify that it was the entire day and on into Christmas morning! I got about 2 and a half hours of sleep the night before Christmas because we had breakfast at 8am and I was at the base until 5am finishing Christmas gifts and stuffing stockings! Sometimes it almost feels like God tricks me into doing things, because He gives me these ideas to bless people, but He fails to mention how long it will take! But it's all good! Everyone I talked to was incredibly blessed by both the gifts and the notes so it was all worth it! Even on only 2 and a half hours of sleep though, Christmas was a lot of fun! After breakfast we all opened our stockings then we had a couple of hours of free time until lunch at which time we all came together for a Christmas feast! Meat is sometimes hard to come by here since it is so expensive and the kitchen here feeds probably about 300+ people for every meal, but we had platters piled high with meat and potatoes and then a buffet line filled with all sorts of salads and other yummy side dishes! We all ate so much that we didn't even go to base for dinner because we were so full! After lunch was a nice gift exchange which was a lot of fun, though absolutely crazy when it is for 300+ people! Then we had more free time and later watched Christmas movies and ate yet more food like chips, cookies, and cake at the Christmas cafe!

Boxing Day was much more low key, but fun all the same. We spent the day at the beach and it was absolutely gorgeous! The water was so warm (which is quite rare since the current along Perth brings water up north from Antarctica BRRR!) and the weather was perfect. We even had lunch at the beach, but it was no ordinary picnic food! We had barbeque chicken legs and wings, ice cream, Thai noodles, etc. It was very yummy and a nice way to spend the weekend. Sunday was very low key, but we did all have to pack :-S Monday was the first day of outreach so we had to pack up all of our stuff and leave our cushy rooms! Since everyone is staying in Perth for the first month of outreach most people are still staying on base, but there is a whole crew of new students coming in for the January quarter (which is the biggest quarter here at YWAM Perth!) so accomodation is quite interesting at the moment. Every girl on outreach is staying a giant warehouse YWAM owns and is turning into several classrooms. The room was are all staying in has not yet been worked on or transformed and is seriously just a giant warehouse room. It is currently housing 68 women and is packed with bunkbeds! I have heard several people (who don't even live there) say it looks like an Asian orphanage or even a concentration camp in there! It is fun though . . . of course also a challenge since I came from a room of only 4 girls and didn't even have the experience of sharing a room with 24 girls like most of the girls on my DTS did. The only real drawback about where we are living is that it has no air conditioning and gets SUPER hot since it can get to about 40C during the day!

So yeah we started outreach this week and oddly enough I realized this morning that since week 1 of outreach was done, we only have 11 weeks left which is really not much time! My outreach team starts work next week with a ministry called ARMS here on the base which is Australian Relief and Mercy Services. Basically they provide assistance for families in crisis, so we will be doing lots of housework and yardwork for people who are in crisis and cannot manage it on their own. It will definitely be interesting, but I am very excited about it! Serving people is far more up my alley than approaching random strangers on the street to ask them if they know Jesus! Of course we will be doing our fair share of that as well both here in Perth and in Mexico City, so that will be interesting. This week though my team did a lot of preparation work like learning dramas and listening to God to hear how He was wanting us to spend the time we have outside of our ARMS work. Then on New Year's Eve all the outreach teams here on base got together and did a huge open air worship session in Northbridge (a suburb of Perth) and witnessed to people on the street. I have definitely never spent New Year's Eve like that before but it ended up being a lot of fun and we had some really good conversations with people.

Oh, and I forgot the most exciting news! Last Sunday we were supposed to do a bunch of carwashes because we were still missing a bunch of outreach fees and those people who didn't have all their money in couldn't start outreach with everyone else. On Christmas Eve at our breakfast we were still short about $10,000 and saw a little bit of movement over Christmas but we were still short thousands of dollars by Boxing Day. Then on Sunday (the 27th) just as my group was getting ready to do our carwash timeslot we received word that all our outreach fees had been paid! No one knows how or where the money came from, but we received about $10,000 in 3 days and everyone was able to start outreach on time! Plus we didn't have go carwashing, so it was SUPER exciting! So thank you for standing with us in prayer for our finances! And thank you to everyone who supported us through the trashathon and helped us to collect all of our outreach fees!

Speaking of prayer, now that we are on outreach we will need a ton of covering! It has only been one week, but we can feel the difference already. There have been major spiritual attacks on our team this week, and everyone is feeling the fatigue from the increased pace and workload of outreach. We need prayer that we will adjust quickly to all the changes and that our bodies will adapt to the changes in our routine as well. We also need continual prayer for health as outreach is notorious for bringing illness upon people especially once we get to Mexico and have to adjust to different food, climate, and even elevation! We also needed continued prayer for bonding as a team. Since everyone is on base together there is not much time with just our team where bonding can take place, but we also don't want to waste time trying to build our bond once we get to Mexico; we should be bonded already by then. Unity is really important for outreaches and is one area the enemy loves to attack! So with the odds already stacked against us because of the nature of this first month of outreach we need a lot of prayer for unity!

I think that pretty much wraps things up for now. As I have mentioned before I don't know how often I will be able to update my blog on outreach, but I will do my best to keep you all informed and let you know how you can continue to support me!