September

Family and friends around the world....

September proved to be a very busy month for me! As I talked about in my last post, Laura and I visited Newcastle for a week at the beginning of the month and saw JJ off. After returning from that, we spent almost 2 weeks at the base - in that time, we worked a lot on developing new dances and dramas and I've also been working on promotions for the base, among other things. I am definitely keeping myself busy!

From the 19th to the 30th of September, 13 of us (Oxygen and others) traveled 8 hours to Melbourne to work with an Anglican church there (check out photos in the "photos" link on the left). The church we were working with has a beautiful cafe set-up and we helped them start out a ministry through that. All week, in the mornings and evenings we gave away free espresso to anyone passing by. We had several people just come in and grab coffee, but others would stay and chat. We had a few different opportunities to have good conversations with people. One inparticular was a group of nursing students, all from overseas, who came in a few different times. We talked to them about their religions, their plans for the future etc. One of their instructors came in with them, and he said that he had previously been involved with curch but had gotten burnt out and wasn't going anymore. We hope that we were able to help in the healing of that experience for him, he was at least very grateful and positive about what we were doing. 

In the evenings, in addition to coffee we had a program each night that included 2 people from our team, Zoe and Fauger, singing playing live music, our team doing dances and dramas, and then people from the church shared testimonies. Although we only had a few people from outside the church come in the evenings, it was the first time many people had shared their stories and so was a great first step to the people around them The pastors and church in general had a huge heart to reach out to their community, which was very encouraging. All in all, it was a great week - and we were kept going by lots of free coffee! :)

In the coming weeks and months, I'll continue working on promotions for the base and also making new dances for us to use. The whole focus of our base is changing a lot, so it's interesting and exciting to see how many things are shifting and changing. We're getting a lot done - becoming a lot more involved in the community, doing fundraising, getting lots of building projects done around the base. At the same time, this entire year, God has really been challenging all of us to prioritize our relationships with him, rather than just doing all the time. That has been a personal challenge for me: it's so easy to just feel good about myself because of all the tasks that fill my days, but lose sight of why I'm doing all these things. God is calling me, and all of us, to be working hard and getting things done, but it must all come out of my love for God and nowhere else. Quite the challenge! 

That's about it from me! I'll be traveling to various other places before coming home for Thanksgiving and Christmas. To all of you back in Minnesota, I look forward to seeing you over the holidays! I'm hoping for a very white Christmas!

God bless you all!

~ Cait