youth, white kangaroos & wakeboarding

Two weeks ago we did our mini-outreach in Bordertown, which is a small town (~5000 ppl) on the border of South Australia and Victoria.  Our first week there was a lot of fun in that we got to do a lot of Australian type things.  These would include: seeing koalas and kangaroos, driving in red dirt, shearing sheep, catching lizards in the bush, eating yabbies, having a large huntsman knocked into my sleeping bag, etc.  We were also blessed to hang out with families from the church doing water sports at the lake or just relaxing at their homes.

My first kangaroos

sheep shearing - Ya I did!

Arty is a real Aussie - he saw this blue-tongued lizard on the road, jumped out,

chased it into the ditch and caught it!  Wowie!

A Love Was Lost...

wakeboarding (where was Ash for this water activity?)

Freshly caught and cooked yabbies

In terms of outreach, we were given a lot of opportunity to hear from God, and to go minister how we felt lead.  Often this turned out as a prayer walk, declaring God's truth over the town or buying popsicles and giving them to people on hot days.  We also volunteered at a band program in a smaller town called Keith, and taught English to adult immigrants who needed 500 hours of English training to gain their Australian residency.

For me the coolest outreach thing that happened was partly as a result of our helping with the English class, and partly from a sports event that we held at the church...all a result of God's purposes.  While volunteering with the adult English class, one of the YWAMers (Mike) found out that his student had a teenage son.  So Mike told the man about the sports event that we were holding that afternoon and invited the son to come out.  A few hours later we started the event, and about half way through four chinese boys walked up and asked if they could join.  Turned out that one of the boys' father was the man from the English class!  Well, these four had such a good time with us that they came to hang out with us EVERY DAY for the second week that we were in Bordertown.  One of them even asked me if we were going to come back next year and have another sports event.  Some of the other YWAMers got to pray with them, and ultimately we had a chance to share God's love with them.  It was so sweet!

 Some of the youth at our sports event
(it was about 34 degrees out so those are well-deserved popsicles!)