CAKE!

I spent the first half of this week at home. Mum and I had good fun making some silly cakes for a Fairtrade cake competition at church and we went out for meal with the family for my birthday.
It was lovely to be at Christ Church and to catch up with everyone - and to eat loads of cake after the service! 

Our entries to the Fairtrade Cake competition

I had a lovely day on my birthday and managed to spend about 5 hours on Skype... I couldn't really have asked for a better birthday present than to get to see so many of my friends in Uganda (and the UK, and even Canada!)

Birthday Skype!

I spent the evening with the family, and we had a laugh when it came out that my brother has convinced his girlfriend that they have a ghost in their garage... that was when this happened...

Dad - the 'Garage Ghost'!

We had a brilliant Hermeneutics lecture at Moorlands on Tuesday with a guest lecturer teaching us about inductive Bible study - basically a really in depth way of studying the text of the Bible. From there I returned to the island.

We launched a new youth cafe called 'The Space' on Wednesday. It was great to see it all set up and another youth worker from YFC brought his youth group along as a one off, but unfortunately no other young people came. Things like this are really disheartening when I've put so much effort into making this happen and I feel like I've done a lot of advertising too. Its difficult sometimes not to wonder why I bother.

The next day though, we finally had some new young people come along to Rock Solid, so at least one of my groups is starting to grow! We made pancakes as it's Shrove Tuesday next week and they were very yummy! 
In the evening, some of my friends from the island took me out for birthday celebrations which was nice.

We had Catalyst on Friday evening - our monthly youth event at YFC. The theme was 'sex and relationships' so we had a very entertaining talk based around the song 'bump n grind'!

Amidst all of this, I've also been writing a sermon this week as I'll be preaching in church on Joshua 1 on Sunday. I've been really enjoying it. Its great to have a responsibility for which I have to study the Bible to get it done and I've been learning a lot. God never ceases to amaze me with the way that he fits everything together and I'm looking forward to sharing all of this with everyone at church on Sunday morning.

As always, I'd appreciate your prayers...
- Pray for me as I preach on Sunday - pray that God would speak through me.
- Pray for The Space and that more people will start to come.
- Thank God that Rock Solid is finally growing and pray that it will continue to go well.