Team RnB are on the way!

I'm just off the phone with Team Rwanda & Burundi! They left this morning for their journey to Rwanda and are currently wandering through Heathrow airport trying to convince the airline to take their bags a little bit earlier so they don't have to sit with them for their 9 hour wait until the next plane!

As we dropped the team to the airport this morning, it was an odd feeling. Not just because I'm not going with them just yet, but because that moment in the airport really has been the focus of the last 7 months of my life. This is the reason why we on DTS staff do what we do. We're here to get these guys ready for mission, to prepare them (and ourselves!) to live lives set apart for God. That moment in the airport is a pretty momentous one. It's exciting to watch the team as they stand on the cusp of this adventure, knowing that the next time I see them, we trust that God will have done some pretty incredible things in their lives. Please pray that He will do a great work in these students as they travel and seek to be His hands and feet in these countries!

(back row: Lindsey, Jon, Tom & Rowan
front row: Meg, Amalia, Alison, Laura & Kellen)

Meg will be our official communicator for the trip. If you'd like to receive her emails (and, be in no doubt that you DO want to receive them...see her blog for an example of what you can expect) you can sign up for them at:

http://mail.ywamni.com/mailman/listinfo/team-rnb-updates_ywamni.com

Good Friday

Today was Good Friday and we had a chance to be a part of a peace and reconciliation walk with churches in North Belfast. It was a pretty special time, and as we walked, it hit me just how radical and pretty incredible a thing it was that Catholics and Protestants walk up and down the Shankill and Falls and through the peace walls together. It really is an incredible testimony to the reconciliation that we can see if we focus not on earthly issues, but on God.

A pretty special experience for our team in particular was that this walk is the only time in the whole year that the peace wall gate right beside our house is opened up. So we finally got to walk through it after living beside it for a year! (Although, the whole thing was nearly hampered by Erin, who parked her car in front of the gates and the guys opening it had to come and find her on the march to get her to move it so they could open the gates before we got there! These are the moments I will think back on and laugh to myself in years to come).

Amalia leading the march holding the cross that went in front:


The march goes through the gate beside the houses:

Outreach musings...

Last week I was having a funny week. The life of a DTS staffer is a funny one, in some ways, it feels like I shouldn't feel busy or complain about a busy life. There aren't many things I'd like to do more than spend my days with these 12 people who have come here to Belfast in search of God and to discover what it means to be a follower of Him.

But particularly around this time of year, things get pretty busy... At the minute, I'm trying to do a few things at once, finish the lecture phase of the DTS well, start to think about next years DTS (which, I recently was asked to lead...and said yes...but that's another story for another day!), and all of this while having this trip to Rwanda and Burundi to plan for (never mind PACK for....i haven't even THOUGHT about that yet...)

A few weeks ago I found myself getting pretty overwhelmed by a lot of things, particularly the idea of this outreach. While talking to a friend, I came up with a bit of an analogy for it.

It's almost like the plans for outreach are like a big plate of spaghetti, everything that we need to do, all our contacts and the plans that we have are all sitting here in front of me, but sometimes it feels like when I sit down to look at it, like it's just a big plate of spaghetti, everything is overlapping and pretty overwhelming...I'm not sure if I'm making sense! I think what i need to do is take this plate of spaghetti one strand at a time, but sometimes it can be difficult to not look at the big picture when everything needs sorted!

Things have been going well since I had this revelation...the spaghetti seems to be somewhat unravelling, but there's always room for more!

As such, I'd really appreciate it if you would be able to pray, here's a few points that would help to direct your prayers:

• Praise God for the things that have come together already and that we have a place to stay and ministries to work with for a lot of our time away
  
• Pray that the rest of the time we have unfilled would fill up, that i would effectively communicate with our contacts and be able to fit all these pieces together
• That I wouldn't be overwhelmed by this big plate of spaghetti!
• Bonding for our team as we prepare to head off

Thanks a lot! Your prayers are very much appreciated!

Table Quiz

I think i completely forgot to do something that would probably have been a good idea...which was to put up a shout-out up for the table quiz that we had to fundraise for our trip to Rwanda & Burundi....hopefully any of you who read this and would have been able to come heard from some other source!

We had a really great night...table quizzes are great craic, and there was some healthy (or unhealthy?) competition going on between a few of the tables....neither of which ended up taking home the crown though. This honour belonged to the slightly less vocal dark horses of the competition, a table from Bible College. They always did train them smart up there...though i may be biased...

So it was a great night with a load of people coming, and an incredible £463.21 (and $5...) raised for ministries that we're going to be involved in in Africa. Thanks to everyone who came and supported our team, it was a great night when we felt really well surrounded by people who were behind us in what we're doing.

Same time next year....?