Last day in Brazil

So here we are on our last full day in Brazil. The time has positively flown by! We have had the most amazing time though.

Here is a short run through of the things we have been up to since my last entry:

We have now performed the 'Everything' skit twice. Once to the kids at 'Projecto Pescar' and once at the youth service at the main church. The drama just blew me away with how much those 6 minutes can impact people. Each time there were people who were in tears with really cool testimonies of who God was doing in their heats. For the kids at 'Projecto Pescar', a few of us gave testimonies of how our lives related to the drama, then we gave an alter call to ask if any of them wanted to give their life to Jesus. Almost all the class put up their hands, and from what their teacher said, it was the first time for a number of them. I was in tears by this point and I wasn't the only one. We then taught the skit so that they could show it to other people after we left. They picked it up really quickly! And we all loved the fact that each group changed little bits, they added their own take on how to do things. So we added a few of those into ours the next time we performed it!

One of our biggest ministries has been to make friends. So we have done a lot of hanging out with people and just loving them, showing them that with our time and effort. We have hung out with the youth, the 'Projecto Pescar' kids. We have also joined the church's community missions group on a couple of trips. We have visited a government run orphanage for kids who have been taken away from their parents for various reasons. Some of them were abused, some had parents who just couldn't cope, and things like that. It was only a small one and the had recently had a number of kids move on so there were only 8 children. That didn't matter to us though, you can get a good game of football going when you have 11 extra people there to join in! The second trip we did was to a village about 10/15 minutes from the church. It was a poor village, though not one of the shanty villages which are apparently much poorer. The houses were mostly made of wood and looked much like my garden shed with a tin roof, some of the houses not being much bigger than a shed (though some were bigger). In the village our focus was once again the children. There were about 40 kids with whom we just sang songs and played games (which of course included football).

We were working with the tiny little church that was in the village and it was to the church that we gave the big suitcase of clothes that we had brought from Canada. As everyone was packing for outreach, we asked the SoM students for any spare clothes that they weren't taking with them. We then shoved those in a case and brought them with us. They were so appreciative of them- it really blessed them. The last thing at the village was lunch. The church had cooked up a huge pot of food. The kids then all came with bowls and Tupperware and pots and were each given a big dollop of spaghetti bolognase. We got to walk the smallest children home afterwards. For both these trips we only got to have a few hours with th kids, but they left a big impression in our hearts, and I think we also made a big impression.

We as a team have got a lot closer, with funny socials where we dressed up as each other, film nights, multiple trips to the park, card games, dying each others hair, shopping, caring for each other as we all got sick (about half the team have been ill enough to miss things at various points), cooking meals, having late night chats and getting manicures (ok so that's mainly the girls), eating way too much good food and just hanging out. We had the amazing opportunity to go up the nearby mountain at dusk and watch the sunset from the top of the mountain. It was so beautiful, and loads of fun. I think we also broke the Guinness world record for the most group photos taken in a short period of time! Despite being scared half to death that people were going to fall of the edge of the cliff because they were getting so close to the edge, it was an amazing time. So we managed sunrise over the sea and sunset over the mountains!

Since being in Brazil every single member of the team (bar the leaders) have given a testimony and preached. We have preached in a number of different churches in the surrounding area, each up to 35/40 minutes drive away. Sometimes we were split into two teams and sometime we got the pleasure of being all together. God totally took over the meetings and the ministry times. We had some fantastic ministry times where we saw people getting touched by God, healed emotionally, healed physically, people being set free from things, and a lot of tears. It has been a privilege being able to come in a minister to the people here. They have all been so friendly and welcoming and people have been incredibly open to receiving what we have to tell them. We have also had a lot of opportunity to speak into people's lives through prophecy. We have prophesied over the leaders, pastors, ministry team, the 'Projecto Pescar' kids, and various other people. We have also had the chance to lead worship which was amazing fun (if a little stressful in the planning). We had Livia (a past student and one of our translators) singing with us and we did English songs for which there was an existing Portuguese translation and we sang each song in a mixture of the two languages. It sounded hard when we started, but actually when it came to it, it was really easy to worship and we just had a fun time playing.

All in all it has been an eventful outreach with a lot of 'Outreach stories' (something that Robson informs us is a vital part of outreach!). We have seen God working in the people around us, and in us too. We have made some really good friends, many of whom I am sure we will be in contact with for many years. The whole team is going to be leaving Brazil with fond memories and not just a little sadness.

Prayer points:

• Much though we loved our stay over in Miami last time, we would love a smooth journey back to Toronto

• Amber was really not well on the journey over. We are claiming 100% healing for her from air sickness. We would love you to support us in that.

• Please pray that we don't get separate from our luggage this time.

• The next few weeks are going to be hard as we go back to school and then have to leave everyone again. Some of us know what we are doing next, and some don't. Please hold us in your prayers as we recover from outreach and face the next stage in our lives.

Ho-down & Beach

I can't believe how quickly the time here has flown by. We are now firmly into our second week here and so much has happened.

Saturday evening was one of my favorite times to date. The youth of the church have their own room in the church which has recently been redecorated. Saturday was the official opening of the room, so they decided to have a big party. So the entire party dressed up like... country bumpkins! (hillbillies if you rather). There were a lot of checked shirts, straw hats, patches on jeans and girls with pigtails. It was hilarious. Now we didn't come to Brazil with hillbilly costumes foremost in our minds, so most us just contented ourselves with drawing little freckles over our checks- including the boys. Throughout the evening we played a number of games such as prince, princess and knight. You have a partner, and dance around, away from each other, while the music plays, then when the leader calls out one of the three characters, you have to find your partner and perform the correct action; prince – one partner is down on one knee and the other sits on the free knee; princess – one partner sweeps the other up into their arms; knight – piggyback. Amy and Mettie-Anne were our representatives coming in second. This was a particularly impressive feat considering they were calling the words in Portuguese and the girls couldn't tell which word was prince and which was princess, so were guessing or copying everyone else! The whole room had been decorated with paper chains and streamers and at the back of the room there was a jail set up. While all the games and the dances were going on there were 'policemen' who went around arresting people and putting them in the jail! This was a fund raiser for them, because you paid R$0.50 to put someone in the jail. The person could then either wait 5 minutes, or pay R$1 to get out. It was a hilarious idea and one that we took full advantage of starting off with Cindy and working our way through the team (plus a few of our Brazilian friends). Now the dancing! The dancing was contagious! By the end we had all succumbed and joined in, running around like mad things laughing our heads off and having a wonderful time. I don't think I have ever joined in so readily at a party dance. I was exhausted by the end of the evening!

Sunday was our earliest start since arriving, we had to be up and dressed and ready by 9am! Lol. We were up to join the leadership team having breakfast, then we split into three groups and prophesied over each of them either individually or in couples. It was a privilege to be able to speak into their lives. It's been easier doing prophecy here, I think partly because we know nothing about theses people, so there are no pre-conceptions, also we don't know them so are less afraid to get it wrong and so are just giving everything that we have (in the same was that I found it easier to pray for people). From people's reactions and their feedback our boldness was well placed as the things we were getting were really applicable to them.

Sunday afternoon was a relaxing trip to the park – which has a wooded bit at the back which, when you are walking through, could really make you think you were in the jungle!

Sunday evening was not so much fun though because I wasn't very well. I'd had a bouncing temperature all day, but by the evening I was dizzy, nauseous and very cold. I felt thoroughly sorry for myself so went to bed. The evening wasn't wasted though as I held my own healing service just for me. I felt much better by the end I must say! Yay God!

I was super glad that I was feeling loads better come Monday morning because it was our day off and we were off on an adventure. Robson (pronounced Hobson) is our main contact here and his parents have a summer apartment by the beach. So we hired a minibus and drove 3 hours to the beach! It was a beautiful sunny warm day and you could see the sea shore from the apartment windows. It did not take long for people to get changed and scramble down to the sands. We had a couple of extras on the trip, Sessile – one of the guys from the church, Alana – one of our translators who is going to SoM next school, and Sam Fowler – an ex-students and small group leader (my brother's small group leader in fact!). We spent all day on the beach in the beautiful warm sunshine, with clear skies above, had all you can eat pizza for dinner, and watched 'Bella', all curled up on one rather overcrowded sofa bed. What can I say, it's a hard life being on outreach! I think my favorite bit of the day though was an opportunity I was almost to scared to take. As we were leaving the pizza place there was a homeless lady with a withered hand sat on a shop door step near the van. So stepping out, a small group of us went and prayed for her. She was so open to receiving prayer. When we left she looked much more peaceful, and much happier. Now her hand wasn't healed on the spot, but I believe that God has started working in that hand. The next day I kept looking out for her in case she was there because I want to see this healed hand of hers. Sadly I didn't see her, but it was really cool anyway.

Monday night we stayed over at the apartment, which meant that come 6:30 Tuesday morning we were still there, so the girls all got up to watch the sunrise over the sea, we watched the sky change colour, watched the sun peep over the waves and then rises behind some clouds, did a few beach aerobics and then Cindy accidentally stepped on a dead penguin, so we decided to head back to bed for a couple of hours. Once we got up for the second time we went and explored some cliffs nearby. All except Joe that is who was the latest victim to the bug going around. We watched cliff fishermen, clambered up and down the rock, got soggy from some over zealous waves while getting a group picture taken and admired the views. Sadly once we had explored the cliffs though it was time to head back, and prepare for our evening ministry.

The first few days

We have now been in Brazil for 4 days.

Monday was our day off. After a really lazy get up and then the delight of getting our cases back, we had lunch and set off to explore the town. We went to get money exchanged, but the travel agent needed to drive to the next town to get it, so we went to window shopping for a while. Alana, one of the English speaking ladies from the church came with us – she is actually going to the school in September which is cool. Window shopping turned out really fun. We met up with another guy from the church and the whole group of us hung out in the top floor of a shoe shop just chatting. The lady working in the shop let us try some Chimarrão, which is a strange herb drink.

They just stuff the cup with these leaves and then add hot water. Apparently it is a very social thing which is often passed around in groups. I thought it smelled like a mix between liquorish and BBQ chicken, then tasted a bit like meat feast pizza. Wasn't really my kind of thing, but some of the others like it. Dinner was a trip to a local burger joint with couple of the church youth group. Then we collapsed in front of our Monday night film – Minority report! Finally everyone headed to their rooms. The guys to sleep and the girls to chat, a patten that has continued every night since- lol.

Luckily for us, we get most mornings off. So on Tuesday it was a relaxed get up and then for the girls an abrupt wake up with the cold showers. The guys don't have the luxury of morning showers. They are using a different shower which is located in the flat of a couple who live in the church. So they have to wait until after lunch to use the showers – poor smelly boys! Breakfast was at 10, team worship at 11, lunch at 12 and then an hour free before our afternoon activity. In the afternoon we were working with 'Project Pescar', a kind of youth club that they run each afternoon that church. It's more than just a youth club though because the kids are taught skills like wood work and crafts. For our first day though it was a case of getting to know them a bit and just hanging out. So we were playing lots of games like; 'kangaroo, koala, platypus'; 'Splat'; and 'flush the toilet' (which is effectively stuck in the mud- a tag game). Then after thoroughly wearing everyone out we went inside to have a snack and play table tennis and 'sinooker' which is a bit like pool but with a smaller table and rather than using a white ball you use your balls to sink your opponents. All the kids are lovely. They are all very happy to practice their limited English on us and teach us some Portuguese words and phrases. We all had a really good time with them. So we were with them from 1:30 until 5:30. Despite having so much fun, it was really tiring and most of us were quite relieved to be able to go and have a short kip before dinner. Dinner was officially our first meal that was cooked by the team was a beautiful pasta meal cooked by the lovely Mettie-Anne and the equally lovely Joe – it was good!

Wednesday morning the girls woke to find a couple of work men trying to get into their room. It was a little strange lying in bed while these work men were attaching things to our wall, however this 'something' happened to be a heater/air conditioner so we really weren't going to complain. Houses in Brazil don't have heating, so whatever the temperature is outside, that is generally the temperature inside. Sometimes though, the church is actually colder than the outside temperature, just purely because it is so big and can't heat up very quickly. Once they had finished our room became the warmest room in the entire building! Breakfast was again at 10 and team time at 11, this time though we had soaking- yay! Lunches are always provided for us by the church. Each day the food had been so good. We get a selection of the following each day; shredded lettuce, carrot and beetroot, potato, beans, rice, these cute little deep fried rice balls, beef , meat rolled pancakes, cheese and corn rolled pancake. It's generally quite simple, but as I said, so good. Wednesday afternoon was a football (soccer) game with the kids from Project Pescar. Everyone was split into 5 teams and we played each team against the others with matches lasting either 10 minutes or up until one team had scored twice.

I was aware that as a nation Brazil was good at football, and it is so true. Some of these guys were really quite good, especially some of the girls! Not all of them were good of course, but a good number of them. So it was quite an interesting tournament, if a little cold for the spectators.

Wednesday evening was the first meeting that we were taking part in. We had Johnny giving a testimony and Joe was preaching. We also had the lovely Raquel (pronounced Haquel – Rs in Portuguese are pronounced like Hs) as our translator. Those of you who have worked with a translator before we have an idea of how very different it is to talk or preach with a translator. Everything takes more that double as long, and it's much easier to loose your place as your thought patterns are interrupted. This didn't seem to be to much of a problem for our boys though. Although Joe found that his 'introduction' section took up most of his time, it actually worked out really well. They both did fantastically and had really good points that seemed to really touch people. Joe ended his talk with a bit of teaching about healing. He then called out the words of knowledge that we as a team had gotten earlier, tinnitus, a scalp problem, problem with the elbow and a load more. These people he invited up to the front and we as a team prayed for them for healing. Most of the time we didn't know an kind of specifics of what we were praying for, because there weren't enough translators for us all. So the people we were praying for were merely pointing to the general area and we were praying general prayers (unless God gave us something more specific as we were praying). Good thing is though that God knows exactly what was wrong, so it didn't matter that we didn't know- he healed them anyway! God healed a good number of people that night- it was so exciting.

Thursday we had WARM SHOWERS!!!! Apparently by trying to have both showers on, we had blown the fuse! Oops. So once the fuse had been replaced we got lovely warm showers again- a huge relief. After breakfast we had small group and then drama practice in the afternoon. We are performing the 'Everything' skit while we are here and we all had to learn our parts. The Everything skit is a really powerful skit that goes along to the song Everything by Lifehouse. If you have never seen it before you can find it on youtube. It makes me cry every time that I watch it. By the end of the practice we had choreographed the entire thing, basing it on the youtube version and actually managed a reasonably good run through. Thursday evening was another preaching night for us. This time however we were not at the church in Sapiranga. The team was split into two teams and each teams went to another of the local churches, one was about 15 minutes away and the other about 30 minutes. Team A had Roland giving a testimony and Becky preaching on 'Dreams and Destiny'. Team B had Otis giving a testimony and Mettie-Anne preaching on 'Shame to Honour'. Although I am in team B, I went with team A this time (just due to the number of spaces in the cars), so I got the joy of hearing Becky preach :) The service went really well. Becky preached the best she has ever done that sermon (I should know, I was her practice audience) and people were really touched. After the talking we had a ministry time where we were praying for people. It is very strange praying for people when they don't understand what it is that you are saying. In the end though I found it actually really freeing knowing that they don't understand you. It removed all of the possible performance issues of “Am I saying anything wrong?” “Have I head this word of knowledge from God right?” all of that was moot. I'm not the only one who found that we just got something form God and prayed into it without questioning. After the service we prayed for a man who was severely short sighted and saw his eyes improve while we are there. I am excited to see him next week to see how he has improved over the week. Then it was time for food. The church had put on a lovely spread for us. We had hot chocolate made with condensed milk – oh my word it was so sweet, hot dogs in pancake kind of things, cheese bread, chocolate cake and more. It was a real treat to round off the evening.

Prayer points:

• A number of the girls have got colds, so please call in that healing

• The damp weather is also not helping those with Asthma

• We were so excited to see real healings in the first meeting that we held. Please pray for an increase of that anointing, that these miracles will just continue to flow.

• Blessing of Portuguese. We are learning piece by piece, so just pray that God would cement what we have learned in our minds and give us even more understanding.

• Homesickness. Most of us are missing the school and home a bit. So pray for a release from that.

Our mamouth journey

So then lovely people, let me tell you a little story, all about our adventures on the way to Brazil.

So we started out in Toronto and right from the word go we had change. Our original flight with American Airlines was canceled and so to get to Miami we were re-routed via Montreal. So that was fine, we hopped on a plane to Montreal. It was Otis's first flight – very exciting for him. Not so exciting for Amber who wasn't feeling great. Now Montreal is a rather strange airport where you have to pick up your bags and re check them for connecting flights. We had been told about this so we naturally went to baggage collection when we got off the plane. No one had mentioned that our bags would go somewhere else though :S so we ran back up stairs, well we got the lift, but we were willing it to go faster. Then had to go through US customs. I had managed to fill in my Visa Waver on one side only so then had to go fill it in and jump back in the queue. I was by this point more than a little flustered. Then we ran for the gate. I was the last one to go through so was feeling even more pressured (because of course in my head I thought that if we missed the plane it would have been because I hadn't filled in both sides of the form!). Amazingly though the flight had been delayed and so we were in plenty of time. So we were off to Miami – plane number 2.

On the flight I watched Spiderwick, which was pretty good and then chatted to the lady next to me. She was a francophone, but spoke perfect English as well. She was asking about the t-shirts we were all wearing, so I told her all about the school and what we were doing. Then we got into a deep conversation about what it was to know God and have a relationship with him. It was so cool. She was from a Muslim background which made it really interesting.

Once at Miami airport we were due to take our connection with TAM airlines. However because of the extra connection we only had about 40 mins to get the plane and by the time we got the the check in desk the entire airport was all but deserted. There was no one there. Eventually someone wandered up asking what we were doing and he explained that the check in had closed quite a while before and that we would not be able to get the flight. So then he went off to see if he could get us on another flight later on. So we waited and amused ourselves by weighing various things on the check in scales and pushing each other round on the luggage trolleys. After an age of walking from counter to counter and some fantastic negotiation and arrangements by our amazing leaders we had a new plan. The new plan involved a revised flight time of 8, in the evening, the next day. So now here we were having to stay in Miami for another 24 hours, being put up in a hotel, having all our meals provided- I mean how rubbish is that! ;-P

The hotel was lovely and once we had all sorted which rooms we were in the girls headed down to the pool. Now the only draw back of our little stay in Miami is that we only had our carry on luggage. Our main luggage was going to make it's way to Porto Alegre and we would see it there. So with no swimming costumes, the only way of going swimming was to go in with what we were wearing and hope that it all dried over night! Lol. So I can officially say that I have had a midnight swim in Miami!

Thankfully all my clothes had dried by the next morning, so with a late start we grabbed breakfast/lunch at the airport and headed down to Miami Beach (which as I found out is a separate city to Miami itself!). The first place we went was to the beach- golden white sands, beautiful blue sea and clear skies. Now tell me, could you have resisted going in the water? Every single one of us (bar Cindy) succumbed and removed as many clothes as would keep us acceptably dressed and then trusted that the hot Miami sun would dry the rest. The water was beautifully warm and again for Otis it was a first – the first time in the sea ever! He remarked that it did taste slightly funny! Eventually it was time to head back into shore, and try to dry out a bit. None of us had a change of clothes or a towel so there were quite a few pairs of under pants making soggy patches on jeans as we wandered along Ocean Drive. We saw coconuts growing in the trees, wild green parrots, beautiful cars and a lot of very tanned people. We even got a free ice cream from a van giving out samplers. It was the best afternoon. God is so good- giving us a Miami holiday right before outreach. He made what could have been a nightmare event into a huge blessing.

Our transition onto our plane at Miami was simple and straightforward and the 8 hour flight passed without incident. On arriving in Sao Paulo we checked up on where our luggage was, to see if we had to pick it up and re-check it. Turns out that our luggage hadn't made it out of Miami! So we spent another half hour or so making arrangements for our bags (when I say we I of course mean Johnny and Cindy, the rest of us lounged on the floor). Then we rushed through customs and tried to find our check in. With the huge queues and the delay due to the luggage problem we managed to miss our connection – again. The funny thing is that by this point we were all so tired and so used to missing flights that no one even cared. We were laughing and joking and all planning what we would put in our hand luggage on the way back. Once check in Johnny and Cindy went to call our contact at the church to let him know what was going on. The rest of the team collapsed in a heap and almost everyone else fell asleep. I however had a good book so was content to stay awake and keep half an eye on the luggage. My good book wasn't good enough to keep me awake once we got through to the gate and like everyone else I decided that the floor looked comfortable enough and had a bit of a kip.

It was a two and a bit hour flight to Porto Alegre, until finally we landed. Each of us let out a sigh of relief as we realised that we had no more flying to do for a whole 3 weeks!

In Porto Alegre we were met by the church youth pastors, who took us to the church to drop off our bags, then to the house of some of the church members who fed us up good (Junior wasn't joking when he said we would have the best food ever!). Then back to the church for a short rest before the evening service started. The worship was good, even though we couldn't understand it all God was clearly there. After worship we were all introduced to the church- just name, where you are from, and age (well except for Joe who decided he would rather tell the church how long he had been wearing his t-shirt!). After that though we all deserted the service and headed to bed. I think the boys went to sleep fairly quickly, though the girls of course stayed up for a while chatting. However it was still lights out at 10 for us.

No one in our room stirred for a good 12 hours. Then after 10ish we started the queue for the shower. Now Cindy managed to get some hot water, none of the rest of us were so lucky (and Cindy only got about 3 mins of hot water). So after a very cold shower we had to go and put on the very same clothes that we had left Toronto in – eeeewwww. A couple of us had brought one change of clothes, but only one. So when the news came at 12 that our bags had arrived, you can imagine just how excited we were. So now, 74 hours after leaving the school in Toronto, we are all safely in Brazil, with all our luggage safely in our rooms, with clean knickers on. We are very happy and contented monkeys.

Outreach

So the time for outreach is fast approaching, so I though I would give you a bit of an update on what is going on with that.

We can start off with a HUGE thank you prayer. When we sent off our passports to the Brazilian embacy, there was a mix up somewhere and they all got sent to America! So we had a really big pray that God would come in and bring them back to us safely and quickly. The passports have now all been found and they are at the Brazilian and we are going to get our visa's (by we I am talking about the Americans and Canadians on the team, the Europeans didn't need a visa).

So here is our flight itinerary.

Toronto	Miami	27th June	13:40	16:50
Miami	Sao Paulo	27th June	21:20	6:30
Sao Paulo	Florian- Apolis	28th June	8:10	9:15
Florian- Apolis	Porto Alegre	28th June	9:45	10:40

Porto Alegre	Sao Paulo	19th June	19:20	21:10
Sao Paulo	Miami	19th June	22:45	5:55
Miami	toronto	20th June	9:40	12:50

Prayer requests:

• Safe Travel

• Easy changing on flights

• No lost baggage

• No air sickness

• Ease of keeping together

Then when we are in Brazil, we have draft schedule, but I have a feeling that it is all still very likely to change. However some things that we have planned are:

1. Visiting an orphanage

2. Working at youth centre for recovering drug addict teens, teaching them skills and working with them (we have at least 6 slots booked, two each week)

3. Possibly visiting a local hospital

4. An outreach to one of the local villages

5. We are also preaching almost every night!

Prayer requests:

• Open hearts for the people we talk to

• Ease of communication across the language barrier

• That we would stay open to what the holy spirit wants to do

• That we would grow in unity as a team

When we are in Brazil we will be staying in a church, on their floor. However, the only issue with this is that the church has no heating. Now this might not sound so bad, but we are in south Brazil and it is their wintertime, so it's going to be below freezing at night. The other thing about there being no heating is that we are going to have cold showers :S However we will be staying in a good safe area, we have shelter and running water, so that's a blessing.

Prayer requests:

• Patience & good coping (I love nice hot showers, so cold showers is going to be one of my big hurdles)

• Supernatural warmth at night.

• Good sleep even though we are sleeping on the floor.

So that's a bit of a breakdown of what we are doing on outreach and a few prayer requests that we have. Obviously there are more things that can be prayed for, so don't limit yourselves to what I have pointed out ;-)

I look forwards to telling you all about what happens

Home alone

I had the 'Home Alone' post all done and ready to be posted on Thursday. All I needed to do was wither borrow a laptop, or sit next to one of my friends as they used their mac (I love mac's internet sharing). So I was planning to do that at break on Friday morning. This plan, as you can see, failed rather.

Friday morning dawned far too early. I got up and finished packing, tried to call my mum, got breakfast and came to morning worship. We had got about 6 or 7 minutes into worship, still on the first song, when suddenly the music and the lights all stopped! We had had ANOTHER power out. It was awesome though, because everyone just carried right on and we worshiped mainly using the drums as backing. So we sang and danced for a while before starting a fire tunnel. Teams Mozambique and Brazil had done a fire tunnel for the other's when they went off on min-outreach, so they returned the favour. It was so funny, it being in the gloom of the emergency lighting, accompanied by about 5 of the guys on the various drums we had on the stage.

We had the first part of our lessons in the dark as well. We have had Rick D'Orazio this week, speaking about church planting. He is an amazing speaker, so immensely likable and entertaining and he had some amazing messages to give us.

Right after the morning session we were off to mini outreach.

Break down to follow

Last weekend 4 of the 6 outreach teams when off on their mini-outreach. Mini outreach is basically a shorter version of our main outreaches. The team goes away for the weekend and works with a church preaching, doing worship, running car washes, prophesying- anything really.

Team Brazil (that's me) and team Mosambique however are going this coming weekend, so we were, for a whole weekend, home alone. Ok so there were about 20 of us, but after having 60 or 70 of us around for 2 months, it was a big shock.

Throughout the day we waved off the various teams. Lizzie and I were so sad to see them go that we sent them off with waving hankies and tears, running alongside the cars – it was good fun.

Later on in the day both teams bundled into the cars and headed off to Woodbridge where we went to see the latest Narnia movie... AHHHH FILM, it's a film! I have picked up so many americanisms! It's awful! So anyway we saw Prince Caspian. Personally I thought it was an amazing film, but it differed from the book so much that it really detracted from my enjoyment of it and I came out feeling really betrayed by the film makers and really quite angry. After journaling about it for over an hour and talking to God about it (no joke I was journaling for about 2 hours on Saturday morning and about half was about the film!) I feel much better and can say that it was an amazing film with some fantastic points. So after the film we came back and had a late night boogie in the car park (was just about to call it a parking lot!). It was hilarious, because Otis' car was blaring out music and whenever a heavy base part came on the lights on the dash board would dim and you could hear the engine revving harder to produce enough power!

Saturday I woke up at about 12:30, so after my mammoth journaling session it was half two before I even thought about getting dressed. But get dressed I did and went to read my book out in the sun. It was incredibly windy though and after having to chase my notebook and my pillow across the carpark I decided to re-locate to the other side of the building. Here however although the wind was as often, when it gusted round it would pelt me with bits of debris. So I had to find a place that was in the sun, but out of the wind and away from the bits of grit that were now peppering my clothes and hair. Shawn's truck! Bingo! So I clambered up in the back of Shawn's pick up truck and lay reading my book and soaking up the rays. It was bliss.

Saturday evening I helped out with soaking in the main church. They were short of a keyboard player so Jonatas asked if I would help out. I'm up for getting all the practice I can, so I agreed. The soaking session is two hours long, so as you can imagine we played quite a lot of songs and we didn't manage to practice many of them before hand. To add to that I hadn't played with anyone in the band before and they use in-ear monitors which I have never used before, so I didn't really make best use of the sound check, meaning I couldn't hear everyone in the levels I might normally ask for. So it was an experience. However I did it, I played the majority of the chords right (though there were some stonkingly bad ones which I really hope didn't distract everyone else too much). Was fun in the song they transposed though when I realised halfway through that there was another chord that I hadn't worked out and I had to do it on the spot. Like I say, it was good practice. I'm glad I did it, and God came which was fab. After soaking it was party time. We had food, we had music, we played games in the dark, and games in the gloom, we ran up and down, scared each other silly and just had a great time. We were up until about 1:30 playing games!

Sunday was it's usual long day, with church (where we prophesied over the entire youth group), a trip to Nandos for lunch, kids ministry and then the glorious return of the other students. I went quite silly as I realised just how much I had missed everyone, even after only 2 days. I can't imagine how bad it's going to be for the 3 weeks of normal outreach! I was so pleased to see everyone that I just talked with everyone, ran around and beamed at them all. Then stayed up till half three talking. I didn't stop talking on Monday either as I used the day off to sleep, and talk, and talk, and talk. I didn't really manage to do any more on my book report! Woops. Oh well got a few more days to do that.

My day off

After each conference the SoM students get the Monday off, mainly just because we are all completely exhausted! However, I was so stoked to have a day off that I didn't want to waste it all by sleeping (not that sleeping is a waste of time, but I wanted to go and explore somewhere). So at a very bright and early 10:30 Candice and I headed off to Woodbine Mall with Lizzie and Rebeka. So I got shampoo, flip flops (which when I wore them then rubbed my feet raw in 1 minute flat), jelly beans and phone cards. Lizzie also got phone cards and while she was there she made friends with the guy on the stand. We were just chatting and talking about where he was from and what we were doing in Canada, and Lizzie led him to the Lord! It was crazy exciting. She told him the gospel message, the fact that Jesus loves him and wants a relationship with him and all he needs to do is ask Jesus into his life. She asked if he wanted to ask Jesus, he said yes and so we prayed with him and he accepted Jesus. WOW.
So then on the journey home, we got in the taxi and Lizzie struck up a new conversation with the cab driver.
Every time I complain to God that I don't know how to talk to strangers he reminds me that I have seen Lizzie do it a ton of times. We went to Tim Horton's once and when she came to join us with her drink, she already knew where the server was from and how many kids he had! She has an amazing talent for talking to people.
So she started up “So what's your name?”
“Kingsley”
“So Kingsley are you are believer?”
“A believer? A believer in what? God?”
“Yes”
“Of course”
“So do you have a personal relationship with him?”
“You can have that?”
Oh my word, if there was an evangelism text book I think that would be one of the examples you never expected to get! We of course lept on this golden opportunity to tell him all about the fact that you can have a personal relationship with Jesus, because of what he did on the cross. All you need to do is believe that he died for the sin in our lives, the things that separate us from God and ask him to come into your life. Tell him you know that your way doesn't work and that you want his way. Kingsley had grown up in a Catholic background but hadn't ever really know God and walked away from him. So we asked if he wanted to start walking with Jesus and he said yes. So we sat in front of the SoM building for about 10 minutes talking to him, answering his questions and praying with him.
So there we were, lunch time and I had just been a part of two people becoming Christians! Completely unrequested, both guys had given us their numbers, so Lizzie has been in contact to invite them along to TACF and stuff- so we didn't tell them the gospel and leave them stranded. My goal now is to not make such things any less exciting, but for them not to be so much of a surprise. I want to see people come to Jesus more often!

After lunch we once again rallied the troops and a group of us sauntered down to the bus stop on the start of our adventure to Toronto Island. Well I saw we sauntered, 5 of us sauntered, the last of our member was doing more of a hobble. Poor old Mark was helping set up at his church on Sunday morning and had the 120 pound sound board fall on his foot. He then spent the rest of the morning in casualty. It wasn't broken, but even with a bruised foot I thought he was a bit silly to come on such a long trip, but he insisted. So equipped with a pair of borrowed crutches, old hobble-along joined us on the adventure. To get to the Island is not a hard journey, but it is reasonably long. We took the number 58 bus to the end of the route, the subway to the bottom of the loop, we then had a 10 minute walk to the lake shore and a beautiful voyage across the waters to the Island.
It was one of those times when I truly felt that the atmosphere changed the way I was thinking. I felt alive, there was grass and green and water and ducks and trees and squirrels and birds. It was amazing. So we wandered by the water, swang on the swings, got lost in the maze and strolled along the pier. The pier was strange because the island is on Lake Ontario, however the lake is so huge that it looks like it's the sea. However, seeing swans swimming in the shallows and having fresh water blown in your face rather than salt water, was very strange. We also played pooh-sticks over the slowest moving piece of water I've ever tried to play it on. We must have been standing for about 10 minutes waiting for the sticks to come under the bridge, but it was hilarious fun.
At 6:45 we jumped back on the ferry and headed back to the mainland. We were all flaking a bit by this point (some more than other's), but were all starving, so we wandered and hobbled to find food. We settled on Jack Astor's for dinner, and although the restaurant was far too loud, making ti quite hard to talk to one another, we all had fun. The table cloth was a nice long strip of brown paper and on every table was a pot of crayons! So we were all drawing little pictures on the table cloth while we were waiting for our food. After a hearty meal, we were all stuffed to the brim, so we rolled back onto the subway and headed home, ready for a thoroughly good sleep!

Going Higher, Going Deeper

The past week, as I mentioned before, was conference time. We started the week with a soaking school on the Monday and Tuesday. This is basically a very short version of our 'core value month' with soaking time to let God deal with the stuff that came up. Most of it was repeating stuff from our first month, but even so it was very useful for a number of reasons, 1- You always have more stuff to deal with in your hear, so another opportunity to work it out is a good thing, 2- I am writing my sermon on hearing God's voice and so to hear someone else preach it was really helpful (I took plenty of notes!). We all got to catch up on a lot of our missed rest as well, what with the 45 mins we had at the end of most of the sessions where we all just grabbed some floor space, listened to some gentle music and just soaked up God's presence. God loves it when we are willing to just be with him, not trying to do anything, not striving to get closer, just resting in his presence and soaking him up! I did find that it messed up my sleeping patterns a bit though because I was so rested that I wasn't tired come bed time!
Come Wednesday it was time for the main conference. The soaking school was for those who were going to be on the ministry team (ministry team meaning those who have been given permission by the church to go and pray for people). The rest of the week had hundreds more people from all over the world who were there for the “Going Higher, Going Deeper” conference. So 9am Wednesday morning I was there reporting for my work duty. I was once again in the kitchen with Francis. I must admit that I was quite disappointed when I first found out, because I did that for the last conference and wanted to see something different. However I love working with Francis. He is an absolute sweet heart and we were some of the very few who ever got let off early from our shifts. Mikayla and I were chopping tomatoes and celery, unpacking chicken & salmon, and defrosting about 50 packets of mash potatoes for the 4 days we were there. I am now an expert at chopping tomatoes!
After kitchen duty I was always off to get some food and then go to the afternoon sessions. Since being here we have had about 40-45mins of worship at the beginning of every week day. The soaking school was the first time we hadn't had it and I missed it so much. It came as a relief when the conference started up and I could leave my shift and go to worship. I'm not quite sure who I'm going to survive when I leave. I guess I'm going to have to get up half an hour earlier each morning and have my own little worship session!
It was really exciting getting a chance to hear all about the things God has been doing all over the world. We had people from England telling us about the string of nightly meeting they had been having because God was showing up so powerfully that they just couldn't get enough. Reports form Iceland about how the country is lighting on fire for Jesus. Patricia King (on of the speakers) had actually just come from Lakeland in Florida, so was buzzing with all God is doing over there in what has become the largest healing revival that we have ever seen. But then God showed up in a powerful way here in Toronto. We saw a lady who hadn't walked in 4 years, due to Lupus, get up and walk with help one day and the next day she was running and jumping and preaching the power of Jesus. She had been a Christian who most definitely didn't believe in the power of the holy spirit – God sure showed her how wrong she was. We saw other people healed of muscle pain, back ache and headaches among others. One of my friends had a set of prominent scars on his fore arm and God completely removed them. I was standing next to him at the time and his face was an absolute picture! Other people (including a few of the other students) had supernatural money appearing in their wallets and bank accounts. It was crazy cool.
The talks were good, my favorite was a talk Duncan Smith gave on Boldness. He was talking about a fairly obvious thing really, that if you want to blind healed, you need to pray for the blind! So he was talking about stepping out and trusting God to fill the gap. He also prayed an impartation of his boldness to us. There was a lot of impartation at this conference actually. The thing with the holy spirit is that whatever you have can be given out. So Duncan Smith has been given a real spirit of boldness by the holy spirit, so he was giving it out to us.
The hardest thing about the conference for me was probably not singing. I was trying to take care of my voice and not damage it so I was limiting myself to talking. But when you are so used to singing in worship it is really hard work not to sing. Thankfully the school has taught me enough about being creative during worship that I just sat there drawing pictures instead :) Actually the Saturday morning I was described as a female Barry White because my voice was so low when I woke up.
We finished of the conference in the normal fashion, with one of the student's favorite pass times- fire tunnels. They are so much fun, but absolutely exhausting. I was very ready for bed when it came to it.

End of an era

So after a wonderful year, Charl and I have decided to call it quits.
Part of me is really sad about this, but the other part is just incedibly grateful for the time that we shared together.
We have parted as friends though and I pray that we remain good friends for many years to come.
So thank you my friend for the best year ever

Jesus you’re my superhero

So right after our prophetic evangelism on the streets, we had a school social and the theme of this social?... Superheroes!!

So everyone in the school dressed up as a superhero, it was an absolute hoot. At 5pm we all assembled in the fire hall (the hall in the SoM building) and got the hilarious chance of helping with announcements.

Each week at TACF there are video announcements made. These announcements are then given to each of the 7 churches and get played along side of the normal announcements made by each church. These announcements get funnier and funnier each week. The guy that does the filming and directing for them is a guy in the marketing department called Mark who is originally from Sheffield!

So anyway the announcements were following 'Announcement Girl' as she was teaching at the superhero school. So we were prominently featured learning about the up and coming encounter weekends, how to throw cartoon punches and slow motion fight.

I think all of the announcements are up on the web so you can check them out at http://www.tacfvideos.com/. And it's "Leadership in Action". You can see me a bit, but I have a mask on so you would never know it was me!! MWAHAHAHAAAAA

So yeah, I was Super Sixties Girl. The name sucked I know, but my costume was amazing. I am not one for dressing up normally and was stressing a bit about this, but the day before I found some amazing shoes and a sparkly dress and I was away. I actually didn't get anyone to take a picture of me with my camera so I can't stick a photo up at the moment. Those of you on facebook should be able to see a couple though. My shoes though are platform heals and make me about 4 inches taller (no joking). My dress was a very pale pink sequin covered miniskirt dress which I wore over leggings of course and I had a green cape and black eye mask. I was so chuffed with myself.

We had some amazing costumes; Dan- a smurf (OK so there wasn't as much of Dan's costume as everyone else's- more blue paint than anything else), Shawn- Jesus (best superhero really), Jonathan- Aqua man, Candice – The Super Sleeper, Amy- The Invisible Girl, Otis and Jon- Jedi knights, Team Mozambique- The Power Rangers

My favourite though was Faith who was one of a couple of Super Grannies, but she was so well made up that it was very hard to recognise her. It took me a good few seconds to work out who was under the big pile of tea towels.

The prize for best entrance though goes to the boys from 207. We were halfway through filming the announcements when we heard this Spanish guitar starting up and suddenly in runs the Mask of Zorro pursued by two musketeers, each with big hats and coat hanger swords. The trio (Johnatas, Mark and Andy, with Justin on the Guitar) fought their way round the whole room, up onto the pool table and everything. It was fantastic.

So we all had dinner and then, in our outreach teams, we had to do a photo scavenger hunt. Basically we had a list of tasks and each task was worth a certain number of points. Each of these tasks required either a photo or a video of the task being performed.
The tasks included
• Take a photo with a Tim Horton's staff member
• Take a photo of the whole team up a tree
• Take a photo of the whole team with a dead animal (though you can't kill it yourself)
• Take a photo of the whole team with hairnets on and with a worker at the bread factory
• Get a video of one of the team singing to a stranger
• Get a video of one of your team break dancing on a box

So we all traipsed along the highway in our costumes getting stares and honks from the passing motorists. It's amazing how many people were willing to smile and wave when a crowd of superheroes waves at them. It was a hoot. For peace of mind for all of you worried souls, I did change my shoes before heading out. So with our efficient German leading the way (did you know that if you select very carefully which tasks you perform at which time you can maximise what can get done?) we went through and did quite a lot of the tasks on the list, including filming Otis (bless him) snorting Wasabi through a straw! Thankfully he only got a tiny bit, but even so he was reeling from it.

Once everyone was back we all gathered and watched all of the pictures and videos on the big screen, while totting up the points. We ended up coming in 3rd which was pretty good really. But at the end of the day it was a hilarious fun evening and a good old team bonding experience! lol

Prayer request

Hey All

Well we are once more mid-conference. So life is hectic with long days and lots of work. I however don't feel up to doing any of it as I have the scratchyist throat ever. It hurts to swallow, let alone sing or pray for people. So if you could pray that God would heal that supper fast that would be great.

If you are interested to see the conference you can subscribe to the TACF 'Revive TV' and watch it live or recorded.

Prophetic Evangelism

All this week our teaching has been from a lady called Patricia Bootsma and has been about prophetic evangelism. The whole idea of this is that we use prophecy (asking God what they want to say to someone and then telling them) as a tool in evangelism. If someone came up to you and knew something about you that no one else should know, you would probably want to know how wouldn't you? So sometimes God gives people what are called "words of knowledge" which are things that no stranger should ever know, this gets people attention and then gives you the opportunity to talk to them, tell them whatever it is that God wants to say to them and maybe pray with them and if they are ready even lead them to Jesus. It's all very cool, and when Patricia talks you get these images of these amazing bang, bang bang encounters where everyone one gets saved and everyone gets healed and it's all amazing. So on Thursday morning, we were given the opportunity to try it all out. Once again God taught me a lesson in my expectations- never expect God to do the same thing twice, to work the same way in two people or to say the same things to different people. Before we went out we prayed and asked God for words for the people he wanted us to speak to. I saw a lady with bright pink in her hair, others saw a yellow jacket, a certain type of hat etc. So then we went out to the border of the Chinese sector by Kensington market (yes Ontario has a London, Stratford, Kensington). We first started chatting to this homeless guy, got him some food and a couple from the group talked to him. I was with another student called Dan, and we started talking to another guy, funnily enough called Dhan (pronounced the same though), who was hanging around. This guy could have talked for Canada. He was on about Shakespeare, the English and the Irish not getting on (or leader was an Irish guy), loving Dan's accent, telling Dan he needed an English wife..... on and on. Occasionally we got to talk and he seemed to really like what we said, was well up for praying, but then got distracted again and again. It was really frustrating because from what he said, he knew stuff about Jesus and believed much of it, but didn't really know him as a friend. Eventually though Dan suggested that he pray with us. So we prayed and the guy repeated, and his attention was fixed rigidly on us and on God which was really cool. We prayed for a deeper relationship with God and for release from his alcohol addiction. Then he went off and we wandered on again. As we were walking along I suddenly saw her- the lady with the pink hair. She was sitting at a cafe on her phone. Not wanting to interrupt her phone conversation, we went and got a drink, sat down and waited. She was making call after call while we were getting our drinks, and so we ended up spending about 20/30 mins waiting for her to finish her call. After waiting that long, there was no way I wasn't going to talk to her, so as soon as she had finished on the phone I was there. "Hi, my name's Sarah. I'm from a school near here where we are learning to hear God's voice. I was praying before asking god who to talk to and he showed me a picture of you. I really feel that he want to tell you that you are not forgotten, that he really cares for you and has not forgotten you" Woman nods politely whole way through, "I was wondering if I could pray with you" So you ready for the amazing, life changing answer, with which I can rival Patricia in her amazing stories? "No, sorry I don't pray!" Well there's not much you can say to that is there? So I said that was cool, wished her a good day and turned back to Dan and my milk shake. l was a bit disappointed, but at the end of the day I did what God asked of me and, even though I didn't see it, I have no idea how much what I said might have actually affected her. Now I had approached one person (me doing the initial talk as appose to letting someone else start and me jump in) I was raring to go. So we went into the flower shop next door and chatted and prayed with the lady in there which was really cool. Then we wandered down the street and joined the others who were talking to two lads a bit older than me. One of them looked so down and quite ill really. Simon, the leader, was just chatting to them and as is his was he leads the conversation as the Holy Spirit leads. Patricia is very in your face direct about the fact she has words about you from God, Simon, however, is much more disarming. He strikes up conversation and then if God gives him a word of knowledge he just prompts them to talk about it, so for these guys he simply asked "What is your dream" and the guy just lit up totally and was talking about his dream of opening an eco-store selling solar panels and educating people about renewable energy sources. As he spoke I could see him doing it- it fitted so well with even the little I had seen of him. His friend was also interested in doing that, but much more in being an advocate for the cause. So we were able to pray with them that God would open doors for that dream and he would guide them through. Finally it was time to think about heading back to the van, but first I saw something that just made me laugh. When we had been praying for pictures of who to talk to, I saw a picture of someone on a bike. I remember telling God just how stupid that was because of course if they were on their bike I wasn't going to be able to talk to them- he was silly to even suggest it. So we are standing on the street corner and low and behold browsing the display outside the shop across the road was a lady and her bike! I didn't even question that I was supposed to talk to her, I dashed across and went and started explaining who I was, what I was doing and asked if I could pray with her. She looked rather shell shocked but agreed and suddenly I was stuck- I now had to say something, so I called Marta over and told her we were praying for this lady 'Sarah'. So we started praying and I got a picture of God holding her really close so I told her that God really wanted to draw her in close and tears started to fall down her cheeks. It turned out that she was a Christian and new God, but was just really blessed by the fact that we came and prayed with her. It was a lovely end to the morning :)
So although the morning didn't pan out the way I expected, it was amazing fun and I am just waiting for the next opportunity to go and do it again :)

The heart of worship

My outreach group is amazing. When we were first put into outreach groups I really didn't know any of my group, however since being put into outreach groups we have spent a fair bit of time together, and now I love my team! We play silly games in outreach prep, all go to the same church each Sunday.
The most fun time I have had with them has to be leading worship. Some of the outreach teams have got fully formed bands from the worship school. We however don't have anybody from the worship school. Many of us don't have much, or any experience in playing in a worship band. However when we lead worship one Thursday in the school it was amazing! We were not a perfect band, we weren't always in time, we weren't always in the right key- but we worshipped! It was really cool because at one point everything pretty much fell apart musically, so we all gave up and just sang. However I have never seen everyone get into worship so much! Everyone was shouting and cheering and dancing and just having a great time with God. We then kept it together when we started the next song, and actually were pretty good- if I do say so myself :-P We had those members of the band who weren't playing, come forward and give hugs to anyone who wanted. We were singing "Arms of Love" and basically the idea is that although God shows himself to us in many different ways you can't reach out and touch him in the same way you can a person. So sometimes he asks people to be his physical arms. Our team was there to give a hug to anyone who felt they wanted or needed a hug. This is something we have done in the school a fair bit, but never during worship. People responded though and most of the school came forward- some a couple of times. I felt incredible privileged to have been part of that band as we just worshipped God regardless of what happened. Apparently the worship school all went into their class afterwards and said "See, that's how you let go of perfectionism and just worship". It was certainly a lesson I learnt, that God doesn't care how you sound, he cares where your heart is at.

After leading at the school, the next Sunday we lead worship again at our church. It was really occasion for God to teach us another lesson - "Never assume that God will work the same way twice". We used the same set of songs, but with a completely different group of people. The school are very really to jump and shout and really are open to doing anything as part of their worship. North's average age is a bit higher than the school's and some there find it hard to jump and shout, some just don’t feel comfortable and some might want to but just don't quite know what to do. So the reaction was very different, and the way that the Holy Spirit moved was different. We did the hug idea again, to see how that went down. Once Amber had explained that they were there to be God's arms of love and give a hug to anyone who wanted on, the others stood at the front. Apparently not everyone understood and this one lady came up to Amy and gave her a hug, thinking that she was there to receive one! Even so it was good and we had a chance to see what work with different groups of people, what looked like it had potential and what really wasn't so appropriate with the different groups. At the end of the day though, God showed up and really touched people- including us- so it was all good!

Revival in Florida

Hey Guys
I am so sorry I have been so bad at keeping this upto date. I still don't have my own internet, though my laptop now has a new hard drive and is semi working (won't recognise my wireless card yet though). I don't have much time either, we have sermons to write and class and outreach prep and everything. I though this would be easy ish, this is called a school for a reason- they work us hard!

I am part way through an update, so hopefully should have something for you soon. However in the mean time I have to tell you about the revival that is happening in Florida. Google the great florida revival. Todd Bently is in Florida and there is a HUGE healing reval going on. We have been seeing this happen in africa and india etc, but we don't see this in 1st world contries. It is amazing. If we have the chance, some of us would love to go down and get some of that. The most exciting thing is that IT IS GOING TO ENGLAND!!!!!!! So guys keep your eye open and your ear to the news. If you hear where it is going on- then get there if you possibly can.

Wow, God is amazing!!!!

I miss my laptop

It is really hard when technology that you are relying on is taken away. I didn't realise just how much I used my laptop until I didn't have it anymore. It's been ages now and Í so want it back. However I was grumbling to God about it and he said he did it on purpose to teach me a lesson! nice isn't it. Well I hope I've learnt it now so I can have it back.

So I am going to have to give you a breif synopsis of what I've been upto since my last post, otherwise we are are all going to be here until Jesus comes back!

So since my last big post I have sung in a choir in the main church - that was hilarious fun. If anyone fancies paying the subscription to the TACF internet TV thing you can watch all the services they have recorded for the last... months, years dunno. But yeah you can see me on there- apparently a bit fuzzy, but it's me. (www.tagc.org and click on "revive TV")

I have as I mentioned, found out that I am going on outreach in Brazil. The outreach is on the last month and will be for 3 weeks. We are going to Porto Alegre. We will be going in their winter so it will be cooler than other times of the year, but still quite nice I think :) I am so excited. I have never been to South America before, or past the equator which I think is cool.

We went to our host church last sunday. Each of the outreach groups has a campus church that they go to each week. TACF has planted 6 churches in the greater Toronto area and so each outreach group goes to one of those churches from now on. Ours is TACF North. They were lovely and actually they got to tell us a bit about Brazil. I'm even more excited after that because it sounds like Brazil is all ready to hear about God and really receive him. It's going to be intence!

Teaching wise we have had prophecy, Intimacy and half or boundries. I will at some point give a more detailed look at those, but here is a breif look at what each of those week's looked like

Prophecy - Isabel and Ivan Allum gave us practical teaching on how to prophecy, what not to do when prophecying and how to give prophetic words. Prophecy is accessible to all christians because all it is, is repeating what God tell you and if you can hear God's voice then it's fine. It was really helpful practicle teaching. The two of them also prophecied over each student which was amazing. I'm so excited by all that God has planed for me. But the this with Prophecy is that it is an invitation from God. It is him saying "I want you to have this, will you step into it" It's not fortune telling. I liked God's offer so I want to step out into that and take all he wants me to have for my life. They talked about teaching (ties in very well with my current plans of a PGCE) and about doing some pastoring (which I had never concidered before). So it was both confirming and challenging which was exciting.

Intimacy - AJ and Allyn Jones gave, again, very practical advice on how to get closer in intimacy with God. God doesn't just want followers, he wants friends. Friends are people who spend time with him and know him, not just in their heads, but just in their hearts. I found this really useful and have taken a huge jump in my own intimacy with God after this week.

Boundries - Chip Judd has been teaching mostly on establishing healthy relationships where you know what you are responsible for and what you aren't responsible for. Learning to say no when you want to and we even got a free parenting class thrown in. We have just come out of the 'sex talk' where the guys and girls were split up and given the chance to hear from older more experienced christians about sex and your sexuality without pussyfooting around. The church is so good at skirting around key issues in our lives so many people feel they are the only one struggling, or they feel ashamed. It was so refreshing to hear people being open and honest for a change. It was very liberating. Not sure what we are learning in the last day of boundries tomorrow.

Getting closer to God has easily been the most exciting thing in the last three weeks. However the most eventful and the one I have the most photos of is easily the baseball. On the 4th April a load of us when out tothe baseball to see the Toronto Blue Jays vs the Boston Red Socks. It was so much fun. The stadium (in my eyes) was huge, and we, in the cheap seats, were very high up. I felt quite funny when I stepped out onto the stands. The game was a really good one because not much happened for the first 6 innings (in basebal there are 9) so I could enjoy my hotdog, the atmosphere, take pictures, talk to people etc. Then in the 7th inning the Blue Jays started to win!! In the end the Blue Jays won. I don't remember what the score was, but it was exciting. We were all getting really into it, screaming with everyone else, waving our free Blue Jays' towels. Once I have them off my camera I will post up some pictures. If you look at pictures of me on facebook you can see a few that other people took. We got a mirical bus on the way back too which was cool. We were waiting and my prayed for a bus, the the next second two buses turned up, neither of them ours. Now if you haven't come across this before I will let you into a secret - God has a real sence of humour (make sence concidereing he created ours). So we were aware of some of God's workings so tried to be a little more specific "Ok God, we would like our bus to turn up. And we want it to be a clean bus". The Toronto buses are really skanky and we didn't really want another of those buses. So three seconds later a 58 pulls up and it is the newest, cleanest, nicest bus I have seen since being here! we laughed so much! God is so good.

I don't feel I have done any of these stories justice, but I wanted to update you all and not post a world record on the blog post length, so I hope they give you a bit of an idea as to what I've been up to.

Prayer points:

• My laptop- it is really hard not having it now and bugging me
• Home sickness - not having so much conact is making me even more homesick, I have spoken to charl about 3 times in the last week and a half which sucks big time (called him this morning though which was fun- made my day)
• Physical health- my knee and ankle are both playing up and I can't dance and jump in worship like I would like to.
• Continued word- God is doing stuff and I want him to carry on and do more

Sorry if there are lots of spelling mistakes, spell check isn't working!

Outreach

I´m going to BRAZIL!!!!!!!!!!!

we have just beentold our outreach groups and I am going to Brazil! I can´t beleive it. I am so excited!!! My team should be realy cool as well. I don´t know them as well as I know some people at the school, but they are all lovely. So anyone know any Portugues?

Also I must appologise if I don´t write for a while. My computer has died- won´t boot up at all, so it might be a bit before I have good access to the net again.

But until then,

So long

I have no breath to shout, I have no breath to sing, I have no breath to dance, but I will praise you

LONG POST ALERT!!!! (well it was a long weekend!)

Fresh wind is the youth conference that TACF puts on every year. It is aimed at teenagers and is always on the Thursday, Friday and Saturday of Easter weekend. This year there were about 2 or 3 thousand people there at the peek, and it was… intense.

Each of the school of ministry students had a work duty assigned to them where they had a job for 4 hours each day. Some people were on security, some were car park attendants, some where serving the speakers in ‘Speaker’s lounge’ and some where on maintenance. I got kitchen duty!! I have to say that I was not particularly thrilled about this to start with, but Francis who runs the kitchen here is so lovely that you can’t help but enjoy yourself when you are with him.
So my shift started at 8 in the morning and we were supposed to work until 12 each day, but for the first two days we had a really light load. The kitchens were running a meal plan for delegates at the conference and it was to be served in one of the overflow rooms in the back of the church. So the first day we cut a few peppers, and arranged some pieces of chicken on trays (OK so over 400 pieces of chicken). Then we loaded up the trolleys with all the equipment we would need for the overflow room, set that up and that was about it. The second day we needed to check the overflow room, take over a few extra drinks, and that was about it for day two. Day three was more eventful as we had to take lots of new stuff over to the overflow room (crisp, bread rolls, a huge bucket of mayonnaise), then we had to pre-mayo about 300 of these bread rolls. It was disgusting! I am not a fan of mayonnaise in anything but tuna mayo, so having to dollop out this jelly like white gloop and then splatter it over some poor person’s lunch, was just not nice. However in all of that I learnt a lot about what is needed when catering for 500 people, and gained a new respect for the kitchen staff.
Apart from work duty all of the students were expected to be somewhere at all times. We had to be in the worship sessions (not that many of us would want to miss them) and attend on of the workshops, and in the evening we were part of the ministry team. Meal times were our only free time at all. I made full advantage of my first batch of free time by catching up with my beautiful friends, Becky and Lauren Ede. It was so nice to see more familiar faces and to be able to chat and catch up. We went out with Maretha to Boston Pizza,



where we had a lovely time and the other girls decided to stretch their prophetic wings and left messages on the napkins for our waitress, hee hee. After that though I spent each meal time in my room getting a bit of quiet and recovering a bit.

So the timetable for the day was as follows:
10:00 – 10:45 = Worship
10:45 – 12:30 = Workshop
12:30 – 14:00 = Lunch
14:00 – 14:45 = Worship
14:45 – 16:30 = Workshop
16:30 – 19:00 = Dinner
19:00 – 10:30 = Evening meeting

There were 4 streams in the workshops – Intersession, worship, prophecy & lifestyle. I went along to the worship ones (when I wasn’t working). They were so cool! One of the sessions was about using dance and art as a form of worship. The church for so long has taken sung worship as being the only type of worship that we have in church that the other creative arts are often overlooked. In the Freshwind band, who played for some of the worship sets, the group consists of about 15-20 people (all on stage at one time) and they include three dancers and two painters. It is so inspiring to see people giving their all in more than just their voice. This session gave us all the chance to stretch those dance and artistic muscles. So the room in which we were meeting (and it was filled to capacity) was dancing and stamping and marching around as they worshiped God and interceded for our generation. It was exhilarating, but so exhausting. At the end I just collapsed into a heap and wrote on my pad “I have no breath to shout, I have no breath to sing, I have no breath to dance, but I will praise you”. That is so how I felt. God was so real and so close and even though I had used up every ounce of my physical self I could to praise him, my whole being was still praising him. When I gathered enough breath and the meeting had finished I ran across to grab some lunch and headed back to have a shower. Worshiping God with all you are can turn into a rather hot and sweaty affair. Actually I discovered this many times over during Freshwind. Each day was at least two outfits, because in each time of worship I was jumping and dancing and shouting and just generally having fun, but when there are a couple of thousand people doing that in a confined space- well it gets a little hot.
The worship was great though. It was very much a concert where everyone was worshiping with the band, with house lights down, concert coloured lights going and speakers loud enough to make your ears ring (I had ear plugs in a couple of times :S what an old lady! But at least I can still hear!).

I know a photo doesn’t give it justice, but maybe it gives you an idea.

We had Starfield playing for some of the time, and the in house Freshwind band for some. The energy of all the youth was incredible and God’s presence was so tangible. It was so obvious to those who didn’t already know God, that many of them decided to give their life to him there and then (I know it was at least 200, because they did an alter call, where people are asked to come forward if they want to respond to a word spoken).

In the evenings we were on the ministry team which was very exciting. Each night at 6:15 we had a time of soaking and prayer- such a good idea for a ministry team!! It was very cool that on the first night we also got to pray for the speaker and the band, which for that night were Starfield. So yeah we all got to pray for Starfield, which was really strange because at the back of your mind you were thinking “These guys are internationally famous, and I get to pray for them!! AAAHHHHH” but they were just regular worship leaders who needed prayer for the work they were about to do. I actually felt that it was a huge privilege to be given the opportunity to minister to them.
Then we were on call for any of the alter calls that I mentioned earlier. And if people were called to go forwards then one of the teams would go to the front and pray for them, or if they were just asked to stand then the other teams would pray for those in their sections. The speakers were all really good and talked about the revival generation that we have called to be. It’s so exciting. It was really nice, and again a great privilege to be able to pray for people during those meetings.
The last night was a special one though. At the end we did fire tunnels for everyone! For those of you who can’t remember what that is (or are new to this blog and don’t know), a fire tunnel is when the ministry team stands in two long lines and prays for everyone as they walk through between the lines. They are so much fun and most people end up being really drunk on the Holy Spirit at the end. They went on for ages and ages, but we were all having such a good time, praying and being prayed for as well, that no one cared!
Eventually the conference was over, the tunnels had dissolved and it was time to start the clean up. The task of encouraging people to leave was given, in part, to me. So I wandered round firmly telling the groups of people lazing around that they really did need to go home. It was nice doing it in a Christian environment where everyone was so understanding and agreed at once to move. Like any other crowd though they promptly forgot and had to be re-reminded in Sarah’s “I am going to impress this thing on you so strongly but kindly that you are just going to be compelled to do it right now” attitude (those from LINKS will know the one I mean). Eventually the room was pretty much clear and we could hoover, pick up litter, put away the rope barriers and put out the 1500 chairs that were needed for Sunday church. By the end of clean up it was about 2 in the morning and I was tired enough that I literally had difficulty staying on my feet, so despite the promise of pizza in 10 mins for those who had helped with clean up, I headed back to my room. I had a quick shower before bed. Though my shower was a little strange, it started off fine- like any normal shower, but after a bit the who room went rather foggy. No people, don’t worry I was not passing out, I was so tired that I had forgotten to take off my glasses before getting in the shower! So I was giggling at myself as I crashed into bed, where I slept long and deep, well until I had to get up for the Easter morning service at church of course!!!

Week 3 - Healing Life's hurts

Ultimately this week has been about Forgiveness and repentance. It has been about forgiving others for the hurts that they have done to us, forgiving ourselves for the things that we have done or not done, and forgiving God for anything we hold against him for the situations we have been in.

Forgiveness is not excusing what people have done. It is not saying what they have done doesn’t matter or that it hasn’t affected you. It is merely choosing to give them grace, just as God gave to us.

For each of the following sections we were taught about what they are and then given a chance to ask God to come and work in us with regards to that issue. As with everything I am only giving a very brief overview of each one. If any of these speak particularly to you, you feel that what I have described fits you, they I would suggest that you talk to God about it. Even if talking to God is not something you normally do. Ask him about it and see what he does. If you are brave enough invite him to sort out some of it. I can also try to give you more information if you want.

Heart of Stone:
Ezekiel 36:26 “I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you, I will remove from you your hearts of stone and give you a heart of flesh”

A heart of stone can’t feel God or know him. Our aim to know God to the full, so we need to get God to remove the hard places in our hearts.
A heart of stone (or stony places in our hearts) is a defence mechanism, built up inner walls which we have put up to stop our selves from becoming vulnerable. They are often formed as small children, though you can of course develop hardened hearts later on in life too.
Checklist for a hidden heart of stone

• Keep people at a distance
  
• Protect yourself
  
• Keep up a good front but have trouble being real
  
• Find it hard to show emotions in front of others
  
• Stuff your emotions down
  
• Or maybe you can’t feel emotions
  
• Live life “Keeping it all together”
  
• Have the role of “the strong one”
  
• Find it difficult to ask for help
  
• Minister to others but can’t be ministered to
  
• Wish other people would/could keep it all together like you do
  
• Look down on those who express emotions as being immature or weak.
  

Any of these can be an indication of a stoney heart, you don’t need to have all of these.

Inner vows
These are things that we have made promising our selves that we will never, or we will always. There are some inner vows that are totally right and godly (such as marriage vows) but may other vows, even if they are constructive on the face of it, can be ungodly and destructive.
“I will never let anyone hurt me like that again”- You stop letting people close, close of your heart and so keep God at a distance as well
“I will never get angry”- This can result in people shying away from even a good debate or discussion, because it ‘might’ end in people getting angry.

Soul Ties
A soul ties is a joining of peoples spirits so that they have a bond with each other.
As with inner vows, there are good soul ties. Us and God, Good friends (David and Jonathan – 1 Sam 18:1) family. These soul ties will lead to wholeness and good things will come out of them.
But soul ties can be warped and created wrongly.

• Parents and children – When the parent doesn’t allow the child to individuate and become a mature adult independent of their control and domination.
  
• Child and parent- when an undisciplined child manipulates and controls the parents
  
• All abusive relationships which are or have become manipulation
  
• With sexual partners other than one’s spouse
  
• People who use occult power to exercise control over you.
  
• Two people who share amounts of personal information more than is appropriate for the relationship.

Ungodly beliefs
Ungodly beliefs are as they say on the tin, beliefs that we have formed due to experience, lack of understanding, or misinterpretation of events.
The thing with ungodly beliefs are that often they aren’t obvious until someone points them out to you. To break out of it you write down your Ungodly beliefs.
“I am not important because my dad never had time for me”
“My life is a mistake”
“God loves other people more than me”
Then write down godly beliefs that counteract that (not necessarily the opposite, because sometimes ungodly beliefs are warped versions of the truth)
“I believe I am important, and my heavenly father will always have time for me”
If it is too hard to say “I believe” then write that you choose to believe (you’re not there yet, but you are working towards that)
“I choose to believe that I am not a mistake. God planned me. He chose for me to be born when I was and where I was”
“I chose to believe that God loves me just as much as anyone else”
It’s always good to find scriptures from the bible to match up to your godly belief.
Then read these each day until you start to believe. It’s not easy and it’s not quick but with God’s help, it’s perfectly doable.

Rollercoaster

I thought last week was an emotional rollercoaster, but that was nothing to this week! This week was “Healing life’s hurts” and basically it is giving God permission to root out anything in our past that has created problems in allowing us to meet with him. I’ll go into that a bit more in the teaching summary post.
But we started with some teaching on Monday morning, lunch time to recover and then more teaching in the afternoon. The day hadn’t finished there though, after the afternoon teaching we had small group and I have to say it was the scariest small group session ever! Emily took us to the upstairs storage room, and we all sat there in our duvets (because it was really cold in there). Then we did a thing called ‘Walking in the light’. Basically Emily sat us down and we were given the chance to confess any deep dark secrets, any hidden sins, that we felt we should share. Although I trust my small group this was not nice. However there is something very powerful about confessing yours sins out loud. It means they are no longer secret and the devil can’t hold that “Oh you could never tell anyone about that, you are so awful, no one will ever like you if you tell them that” kind of line on you. I was of course adamant that I wasn’t going to go first as we all sat there for a minute, two minutes, five minutes with no one saying anything, I realised that I was going to share first, so I promptly shared half of mine. You kind of feel that you want to know how bad everyone else’s is before telling yours. However once one person had gone everyone went and many people’s were very similar. To be honest despite it being horribly scary, it was incredibly releasing. Emily prayed for each of us after our turn and it was so releasing we went round again to add if we wanted to (so I said the second half of mine). We then did some painting :) and we were all chatting much more than before which was cool. Each of the small groups had done the same thing and so it was really odd talking to everyone after because obviously you can’t share what people in your group said (the whole point of small group is that it is a safe place), so we were all talking really abstractly about what we had done and the experiences we had had. It was quite strange.
Tuesday was another hard day, but made much better by the fact that I got a couple of parcels through the post. One was some birthday presents that mum sent on, the other was from my wonderful friend Jo who picked the best day for her ‘Chocolate ministry’ package to arrive. It was a lovely bar of English galaxy, and I finished the whole thing myself (except for two squares that Sophie had). I felt piggy but I felt much better afterwards! We had soaking in the afternoon which was very much needed. It helped to calm everyone down, catch up on a bit of sleep :-p and meet with God.
Wednesday afternoon was small group again. This time though it was all about having fun. We teamed up with Kaleena’s small group and spread out some large sheets of paper, then went wild with some paints.


Some people finger painted, some brush painted, I hand and foot painted! It was so much fun hee hee.



So now we have finished healing life’s hurts (the teaching at least, I have a feeling God will carry on working in us on this for quite a while to come). Now it’s on the the “Fresh Wind” youth conference!!!