13 nights of camping

In the past three weeks I've spent thirteen nights in a tent, but in the few days that I spent at home last week, my parents and I had some visitors from Canada staying with us (one of whom has the same name as me!) We had fun catching up and visiting a few different people and places around the area and I enjoyed sleeping in my own bed for a couple of nights.

After our visitors left, I made my way back to Somerset for a Christian festival called Momentum. This is the same as Soul Survivor, but aimed at people in their 20s and 30s, so it meant that we didn't have the responsibility of looking after a bunch of teenagers and also everything was a lot more relevant to us. Among other things we got to take part in a massive worship evening around bonfires with Rend Collective and go to lots of interesting and challenging seminars. It was a great week spent with some brilliant people and our amazing God who as usual taught me a lot.

The Big Top at Momentum

Among many other things that God taught me this week was this...

Kneeling on the floor with memories of people that I miss so much it hurts playing in my mind, God quietly whispered to me "if you miss them this much, how much more do you think I miss you when you take yourself far from me?" 

I find it way too easy to convince myself that by being in the place God wants me to be and by doing the stuff he's asked me to do, I'm staying close to God. In reality, I need to daily make him my first priority - even over his work. Time with God is so precious and so beautiful and the only place I should want to be is in his presence.

After Momentum, I got to come home again for a few days and to spend a bit of time with my family and also with Clare which was so lovely! In a few days time I'll be heading back to the island to make a start on my second year there... I've got plenty of vision and ideas for this year, so now I just face the task of actually making it happen!

With Clare

Soul Survivor

This week we (Isle of Wight YFC) took 2 coach loads of young people from the island to a Christian festival called Soul Survivor. Call me crazy, but spending 7 nights under canvas looking after a bunch of teenagers was an absolute privilege!

At Soul Survivor, eight thousand people get together twice a day to read the bible together, pray for each other and to go absolutely crazy in celebration of God’s incredible love. As well as this, there’s loads of great teaching on different topics, and people also get involved in all kinds of crazy activities, like ‘colour chaos’, which is basically just hundreds of people throwing paint at each other all afternoon and having fun!

Among all the fun and madness, there is a lot of time that we get to just spend with God, and as usual when we make ourselves available to God, he teaches and stretches and grows us all in different ways. It’s been so great to get to pray and chat with loads of people this week about what God is doing in their lives.

After all of the young people got on the coaches to go back to the island, I hung around at Soul Survivor for a while to see some friends who were arriving that afternoon to bring groups of young people for this week. It was so good to see them that I ended up pitching my tent again and staying another night! Tonight though, I am back in Basingstoke for a few days and very much looking forward to sleeping in a proper bed again!

Daydreaming

Well this week has brought me back to Basingstoke, but not before a bit of travelling around!
I've done some admin work with the Church of England in the past, and this week they offered me a bit of work in Bournemouth. Somehow I managed to complete all the work by Wednesday afternoon (even with a day off on Tuesday for a YFC social on the island)... So I've had an unexpected couple of days off this week!

I was on the island on Tuesday, so I spent the morning cleaning my room (and my car which seemed to have half a beach in it!) and packing. In the afternoon we had an end of year social event with everyone from the island YFC team plus other halves and families, complete with kayaking (and swimming for some) for those who wanted to, and a lot of food!

So after finishing work on Wednesday I headed up to Basingstoke and that's where I've been for the past few days. Its been really nice to spend time with my parents who I'm always so blessed by, and to have some chilled time to recharge a bit after a very busy month or so! Its also given me time to think though... and as usual my thoughts go in the direction of my heart and I daydream about beautiful people with beautiful hearts, in a beautiful country that is a painfully long way away.

Sometimes I ask God why I can't just go back to Uganda now? ...and he gently reminds me that his plans are SO much bigger than mine, and I can't ask or imagine what he has in store for me. For now, I have to trust that his plan is better than my own, and that what I'm doing here at the moment is important too, because the wonderful young people I'm working with right now are just as important and just as in need of the love of Jesus as the precious lives I daydream about 4000 miles away.

This coming week we (the island YFC team) are taking two coach loads of young people from the Isle of Wight to a Christian festival called Soul Survivor. I know that God will have some big plans for this week and I'm so excited not only to spend the week worshiping and having fun with thousands of other people who love Jesus, but I'm also excited to see what God will do among the young people that we have the privilege to take along.

Holiday Club

We've had a holiday club at the church that I work with on the island this week and its been brilliant. We had around 40 children who came along every morning and a fantastic team of volunteers from a selection of churches on the island who ran the club. The club was themed around 'Cops and Robbers' but we focused on the story of Joseph in the Bible. This meant that the crafts ranged from making police hats and handcuffs, to making pop up Joseph puppets falling in a well and on the last day we even made junk models of Pharaoh's palace! Of course we had a typically cheesy and tuneless theme song which we had the joy of singing twice a day... The kids all absolutely loved it and we all kept catching ourselves singing it all week!

My role was as a team leader, but I also had the task of running games every day with one of the other leaders... among other things we played 'police dog' (bull dog!) and relay races and we even managed to get 40 kids around a parachute! 

I think the biggest achievement of the week however was successfully getting all the kids to bake scones on Thursday! 

Cops and Robbers Holiday Club

Among it all though, we had the absolute privilege of getting to teach these kids about the gospel and to share with them the amazing news that God wants to be their friend, and that he made that possible through Jesus' death. God's grace never fails to blow me away, and the fact that he would chose to use someone like me with all my flaws and failures to tell these kids about him is just amazing. I couldn't have been happier on the last day to see some of the kids in my group telling God that they wanted to be his friend.

Holiday Club was over by lunch time every day, so we had the afternoons off. Clare was staying with me on the island this week which was brilliant. She came along and helped out as part of the team at Holiday Club and we spent the afternoons together; walking along the beach, swimming in the sea, eating cream teas, drinking hot chocolate and talking ... a lot! I can't thank God enough for blessing me with such a great friend!

With Clare on the beach