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.