Off To Work With the Homeless In Cairns!

Greetings, Loved Ones!

I am here today to tell you that I will be away on missions work for 3 weeks, starting on Monday! A team of 9, made up of myself and 8 others (basic math skills), are heading 5 hours south to stay in Cairns (and Mossman- a nearby, smaller city) for three weeks. Our accommodations will be purely generosity based; we will be staying both on the floors of churches and at one particular charity based home for the homeless. We were originally going to be living in tents at a trailer park for half the time, but a church (who has never interacted with YWAM before- which makes us a "pioneering team" as we are experimenting and cultivating a new relationship!) came forward and asked if we would stay in their building.

When asked if there would be opportunities for us to contact home during these three weeks, our leaders informed us that, hopefully, we'd get at least one time per week where we had wifi. I will hold myself, obviously, to updating all of you as frequently as possible. Thank you again for your prayers.

In other news- the Lord is speaking. The past two weeks have been a whirlwind of life-changing happenings. The reality of God speaking in a way that is comprehensible to me in addition to His keeping His promises has come to absolute fruition in the past ten days. Absolutely wonderful. I have come to the conclusion that God loves to be wrestled with- I fought Him for three hours straight over something that appeared two weeks ago and let me just tell you: in all my classical training and the college courses I've done and the theological classes I've taken, I have never been taught so much than in those three hours and the days immediately after. I was DEMANDING that He tell me what was going on or, at the very least, tell me how to fix it. I couldn't understand the logic behind Christ putting something in my life to distract me from Him. What I've learned in bullet points:

A) The Lord doesn't particularly cater to worldly logic.

B) I cannot force the Lord into telling me anything.

C) The Lord truly does have a plan for me that I cannot alter in my foolishness.

During this whirlwind, the Lord has spoken audibly, visually, through prophecy, through the mouths of people, and through my own mind. Yesterday, at the very end of lectures, I was somewhat divinely showed the verse 2 Corinthians 12:9-10. Then, as I was meditating on the passage, my eyes drifted up to verse 8, which says exactly (in the NIV, anyway) "three times I pleaded with the Lord to take it away from me BUT HE SAID 'My grace is sufficient for you for my power is made perfect in weakness." That was me two weeks ago. I wasn't just pleading though, I was both BEGGING and DEMANDING with all the strength I could muster. Just as an encouragement to all those out there who aren't sure if the Lord does or will ever speak to you in a way you can clearly comprehend: He will take you hand in hand, step by step, through whatever you honestly desire Him to.

Random fact of the post:

Whilst camping, I was awestruck at the abundance of small beauties the Lord has put on this earth. There were sensory activated plants all over- plants that, when your finger tips brushed them, folded up like a Chinese fan. There were dragon flies that were, every inch of their bodies, purely neon colored; not just neon green striped though- I mean brilliant colors like neon red and neon blue. Their entire bodies were these shades of bright, saturated color- when they flew by, your eyes had no choice but to follow them. There were flowers that had, in every one "flower head", 6 smaller flowers- 5 of them a beautiful periwinkle color and one in the middle of those five that was bright orange. Inside each of those 6 would be about 10 more tiny, whitish-blue flowers. We could see the entire Milky Way Galaxy on a clear night. There was a plethora of shooting stars nightly. Even the spiders and the lizards were brilliant colors and shapes and sizes. To top off my excitement about nature, just tonight, as I was walking along a bridge alone in the dark, a possum showed up. Not an opossum- those are the ones in the states. A possum is different, though looks quite similar (they are a bit different in size, I think?). At any rate, I was able to pet it for a short while before it returned to its home in the tree tops. It's tail wrapped around my wrist. Those things are quite strong. Click Here to Read More..

Camping in the Bush (pt. 2)

Greetings, Loved Ones!

So, part two: picking up from my last post - I believe I had to stop right when Katrina and I heard the call of a frantic leader from the other side of the tent divider, hey? So we jump up, trying to find a torch to figure out how to unzip the divider, listening to her yell that "the door is broken". Katrina unzips the thing and right as we're about to go through, the poles on our side of the tent twisted inward (the poles were shaped at an angle) and the wind began to blow the entire side of the tent INTO the side of the tent we were going over to. I jumped at it and began to hold it up against the wind (which was the STRONGEST WIND I've ever felt in my LIFE- Aussie storm season is not one to be messed with, apparently) while Katrina went to help with the door. The whole zipper of the door had been torn away by the wind and, as there was no tarp just then, rain was coming into and onto us and our tent in heavy sheets. As this was in the middle of the night, it was not cool rain, but COLD rain, and we were not at all prepared for it in our pajamas!

We had to switch positions after a bit because, no shame, I was the only person in the tent tall enough to hold both sides of the door up while also trying to zip it back up from the bottom... Basically, it was a nightmare. One of my good friends back home would have described it something like this: "Doors be breakin', rain be poorin', people be yellin'." A startling bolt of thunder struck just in the field next to us- suddenly, a quite loud and very clear "moo" sounded from one of the surrounding areas.

At this point in the story I'll make a quick excerpt to elaborate on the fact of wild cows: they were everywhere in the Valley. They would roam through our tents, up to our lecture tent/shed, grazing through the fields and such. Obviously I have a deep love for animals and so this fact excited me quite a bit.

My excitement got the best of me and I yelled at the top of my lungs "COWS! ITS THE COWS! I'VE BEEN WAITING FOR DAYS TO SEE THE COWS!!!

Everyone in the camp who was not awake yet was certainly up after that.

After quite a while of running about in the rain, putting tarps up, breaking out those emergency towels I told you all of before (thanks, dad!), we eventually got to the point where, as the wind and rain subsided, we just put up with our damp clothes, beds, and bags, and just went back to sleep.

The next morning we all showed up for breakfast in damp clothing accessorised with puffy eyes and aching muscles. We sang praise to Christ that morning with more fervour than I had heard yet that month.

My tent mates and I were brought back together and given a new tent- a six man, praise the Lord- and it held up the rest of the time. Not much excitement in the way of weather after those first few nights.

That's the end to the first major story; I'm sure I'll be mentioning others for the next couple of weeks but for now I'll let them lie. Thank you for praying for me as always. For those of you who may not have known, a cyclone has just swept in from the sea and has hit the island next to us along with a couple other areas- we received heavy rain but no damage was done. Thank you for praying! May God bless you all!

Random fact of the post:

There were so many spiders during camping. For one, there was a Bird Eating Spider hanging over my head once (about 6 inches long, maybe more?) which was great. There was also a lethally venomous one crawling on my leg- though I didn't realize it at the time and so I flicked it off with my fingers. Looking it up later, I realised my mistake. Another time, I was changing in my tent and asked my friend to hand me a pair of my shorts from the line- She did, and as I was turning them around, there was a Huntsman spider climbing rapidly upwards onto my hand due to my disturbing its sleep from the underside of my shorts. Huntsmans, though not incredibly poisonous, can still do some serious damage- the real reason I yelped in fright and threw the shorts down, though, was simply because they're big. They can grow to the size of a man's stretched out hand and bigger. This one was about the diameter of a grapefruit. SO MANY FUN TIMES.

Thank you all again! Lord be with you! Click Here to Read More..

Camping in the Bush (pt. 1)

Greetings, Loved Ones!

My back is doing well. I was somewhat miraculously healed after a session of prayer in the middle of lectures yesterday (today is March 10). (If you'd like the full story, email me. Now that I've had few days to recoup, I'm excited to share with you my adventures from the Bush.

First off, it was a two-and-some hour drive to get to the campsite, which was in a small valley (named Hidden Valley) on the top of a mountain chain. We got to the base of the mountains after about forty minutes, if that gives you an idea of how far away we were from, first of all, sea level, and, secondly, civilization. We drove through a rain forest on our way up the windy, un-railed mountain sides-- absolutely beautiful.

When we arrived, I could already see (and hear) the storm clouds on the horizon. My three tent mates and I snatched our backpacks and our four-man-tent and set off to find a good, high-ground place to set up. There were no high ground places anywhere. There were low places, and there were lower places.

Once our tent was up, we set about trying to situate all of our belongings: 4 full sized hiker backpacks and two duffle bags. It worked quite well until we tried to add our selves; for those of you who don't camp much, the equation for the size of tent you should use goes something like this: however many people you have, you get at least one size tent bigger (eg. if you have two people you get a four man, three people you get a 6 man, etc.). We had a four man tent with four people plus our luggage. Not fun.

It began to rain about 30 minutes after we all got into the tent. The sides began to leak almost immediately. Through fits of laughter, we managed to waterproof most of our belongings with trash bags. The next afternoon, we were hit with a storm so strong that we originally thought it was a cyclone. Our tent was literally ripped from top to bottom. We scrambled around in hysteric laughter to get our things out of the now-flooding tent only to find that the only place we could put them was in "the shed" (a large lean-to type deal with a tin roof) where EVERYONE was mingling around. It was a hysterical night. We were then told to split up and share two tents with two of the leaders who had their own 10-man mansion tents... Katrina and I (we were one pair - the other two girls went to the other tent) snuck into the tent around midnight to find locusts flying around inside, spiders the size of an adult hand crawling on the floor, and puddles everywhere but the very middle of the floor. There was a woman sleeping on the other side of the divider inside the tent and so we had to take care of all of these obstacles silently- quite the task in the dark.

Katrina and I fell asleep shortly thereafter, curled up in the dead middle of the floor, in between the dead spiders and the puddles, only to be rudely awakened an hour or so later by the side of the tent concaving and hitting us both in the face. We woke up, looked at the warped side of the tent, laughed at each other and rolled over to fall back asleep; we were brought to our feet by the leader on the other side yelling "Girls? GIRLS! Come here!"

The story does not end here of course, but this post is already quite long, so I'll finish the story in the next post. All of my love to all of you! Thank you, as always. The Lord bless you.

Random fact of the post:

The morning before we left the valley, everyone in my tent woke up and set out for the creek-side to watch the sunrise. Then, as we were sitting on the curb of the bridge, we began to see bubbles in the water, traveling towards us slowly. We all stood up, having heard the rumors of what may be in the water, and suddenly a platypus floated up to the surface and swam right underneath us, waving all its legs and paddling its little tail. Apparently it was a rare sight! They're much smaller than us Northern Americans often think- about the size of a medium size flip-flop (or thong, for the Aussies). It was absolutely darling. Click Here to Read More..

Back from the Bush

Greetings, Loved Ones.

Today (March 6) I had my first taste of how hard missionary life can really be. I returned home from camping today with an excited and rejuvenated spirit. That spirit was slightly dampened by the fact that my lower back went into a severe spasm - which means I am unable to sit up without assistance and must lie flat on my back to avoid excruciating pain. This happened because I have severe scoliosis, and whenever I do strange things with my back for an extended period of time (which in this case was sleeping on the ground for two weeks, frequently swimming in rainforest pools - which was awesome by the way!, working hard and then sitting in old camp chairs for HOURS at a time) it (my back) goes "out" for a while. The longest time I have had to lie flat on my back was my first back spasm which lasted 10 days! Thankfully none of the subsequent ones have been that bad, and I am hopeful to only be laid up for two or three days with this one.

But all of this is really inconsequential. My point is that despite my back spasm - my heart was on cloud nine! The Lord spoke to me over the past two weeks and revealed things to me that excite my spirit. I arrived back at base to three care packages waiting for me, all of which contained wonderful goodies. The third, though, had in it a heartfelt letter from my mother. She had emailed me last week asking me to call her as soon as I got back but I neglected to do so, seeing that it was nearly 3 AM where they were. I figured a Facebook message saying I was happily home was enough to get us by until the next morning. Alas, but I misunderstood the reason why she wanted to speak with me: as I opened the letter in my room later on, I read with sobbing lungs and a broken heart that my precious cat Kiwi had died. My mother was hoping to tell me in person before I had to read the letter.

Kiwi, my darling kitty, was given to me on Christmas morning of 2010. I had wanted a kitten since I was 4 and I cried with joy and unbelief when she sprung out of the decorative gift box onto my face (still my favorite Christmas present ever!). It seems as though I cried when she came into my life and also when she went out. She had been with me through all of my high school years (which, without going into detail, were very, very hard). The Lord works in mysterious ways. On our last night in Hidden Valley (where we were camping), we sang songs around the campfire, and we finished the night with "It Is Well With My Soul." Even now as my eyes sting and my back quivers in pain, I rejoice in the Lord that He is with me, and it is indeed well with my soul. I vowed yesterday to lay down my calloused heart and any bitterness it still nurtured. And can I tell you something? I think pain like this hurts more when you have a soft heart because that bitterness, that anger, is no longer a response option. All I am left with is to praise the Lord for all He has done.

My two weeks of camping were absolutely and literally out of this world, and I can't wait to tell you all about all that happened to me, but I am afraid my heart can't handle right now relating stories of laughter and joy.

I know to some of you losing a cat may seem rather petty or inconsequential, but let me tell you, it is not. No objective disaster could have hurt me more - not if all of my belongings had gone up in flames. Kiwi was my precious little one who snuggled me through the hardest times in my life and now she is gone; I was not there to say goodbye, I was not there to see her gone, I do not have my family nearby to comfort me. I rejoice in what the Lord has called me here to do. I will rejoice in the wonderful moments and the terrible moments. I absolutely refuse to give any of my heart to anger. My Father in heaven is the WONDERFUL Counselor and the PRINCE of Peace and I will go nowhere else but to His throne to receive that peace and good counsel. He is refining me to be more like Himself, and through my pains here and now, I will be more like Him later on.

Pray for me, if you would. It is oh-too-possible to rejoice in the love of the Lord while still feeling the full force of raw pain; I will be hurting (emotionally and physically) for at least a little while still. I greatly appreciate your support. You can email me, as always, by clicking here for my email address.

Random fact of the post:

Kiwi was not a very good-natured cat- she loved me, but most others she would attack (which only made me love her more, since she was unique like me!). She would often hiss and growl if you moved too much while holding her- when she would do this in my arms, I would put my finger on her little snout and kiss her on the nose and snuggle her all the closer. I will miss her so much. (Ugh, I'm crying again! I hate this!) Thank you all again for supporting me. Be blessed. Click Here to Read More..