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!