Germany and Finland October 2010

David arrived in Germany on Tuesday after leaving Therese at Singapore who flew back to Sydney while he completes the next part of the trip, Finland and Germany.
The main task in Germany is to take part in a consultation for a new curriculum that is being written for teens in China. The impact of this will be immense so it is worth the time. It turned out to be a great time of sharing and helping them take it to the next stage.

Friday morning (15/10/10) David arrived in Finland to snow! This wasn’t expected, even by the locals so it was stop at the next shop to buy a warm jacket and a couple of jumpers.

In Finland David is taking a 5 day School of Children’s Counseling (80 delegates) after which he is taking part in various discussions with children’s ministry leaders, and doing a weekend seminar and ministry in Lahti.

In the photo you can see the delegates with some snow in the background. The location is a Bible College facility. Beautiful surrounds with a lake in the background. Couldn’t be more beautiful!

A Christian television station is talking about doing a 1.5-3 hour program with me on Friday!! Thanks for your prayers.

More Photos Indonesia

Indonesia Photos

David and Therese in Indonesia October 2010

Travel
David and Therese flew out of Sydney first thing Saturday morning 2nd October, enjoying the great service on the new Singapore airlines A380. We will not mention how many movies David watched but it was 3!

From Singapore it was a quick trip to Surabaya, East Java and a relief when all our resources got through customs without any problem.

From there we were picked up by Pastor Lexy and his wife Lies (pronounced 'A-lis'), were at the airport to pick us up and take us on the 3 hour drive high up in the hill country. They are a lovely couple who run 'Salmat' in Batu – a beautiful children’s ministry training and resource centre high up in the mountains. People travel there from all over the country for training as well as resources.

No road rules it seemed, and people ducking in and out of the traffic begging. Three lanes of traffic, with trucks, and vans and millions of motorbikes, oh my goodness, if you are not used to it, it is best to keep the eyes closed.

The training centre at Batu is lovely. The temperature is pleasant, around 22 or 23 most of the time, much easier to live with than down in the lower parts of the country.

Very quickly we discovered that every mosque has a loud speaker! The chanting starts at 3.30 am and goes for half an hour. It is a good time to have our own worship time.

At 6am a worker arrives at the door with 2 buckets of hot water for us to have a throw-over bath, so that’s a bit different, just like camping.

The people are lovely, they are so helpful. The food is delicious, every meal is lovely, all prepared by a group of beautiful workers who seem to take delight in serving in this way. “Are we really on the Mission Field?” we are tempted to ask.

Monday to Tuesday
We had our opening ceremony Monday afternoon and the first meeting Monday night. Therese was asked to sing at the opening ceremony and will be singing every day at some of the sessions, which is great; she is going to enjoy that.



David is speaking all day every day, on various counselling subjects, which include
• Defining Pastoral Care
• Families under pressure
• Self esteem
• Working with volunteers
• Team building
• Strategies to deal with anger
• Trauma, crisis counselling
• Grief
• Forgiveness
• Connection and attachment
• Burnout
• Kids Keep Safe, helping abused kids, safety and protection policies.

In between times he has had a few counselling appointments as well.



Forty three delegates are registered for the conference plus a few staff and helpers -about 50 in total.

The delegates come from various organisations that specialise in helping children and families, as well as churches. They receive a certificate at the end of the week. Only a few speak any English so all the meetings are through interpreter. We have two interpreters who work very hard. Cecile and Deborah.

Wednesday- Thursday
Therese was asked to take devotions on Wednesday morning and spoke about the woman who broke the alabaster box and poured out the precious perfume over Jesus, and I spoke about our need to pour out our praise and worship to him for all he has done for us.

On Thursday night, David spoke what it really means to forgive. This was after the session on child abuse. We discover the delegates here have come because they desire to help others, but a lot of them are broken and wounded themselves, and as they came forward to forgive, God ministered to them in a very powerful way. There were many, many tears. We asked them to symbolically break a stick – meaning to give up the need for revenge against those that had hurt them.

After this it was camp fire time which included worship and putting their broken sticks on the fire.

Then came an amazing time of fun and celebration. Each province in Indonesia has their own traditional dances. So we sang and danced together!

We were asked to end the segment with a dance, but because we don’t dance together, it was pretty abysmal. Not a good representation of Australia or NZ I am afraid! Therese suggested at one stage that David did the Haka but that wasn’t going to happen!

We improvised and then everyone joined in with whatever it was we were doing. Watch out for the video!

Next, we all sat down around the fire, and prayed for each province represented after a spokesperson from each shared what the needs were. It was a very precious time. We finished off by worshipping the Lord. I could not believe we were where we were, the lights from the town twinkling below us, our hands raised praying for this beautiful country.

Friday
Friday morning David spoke on burnout. We had another ministry time with the delegates, and Therese shared a brief testimony with them her own experience of burnout and recovery, which was really the first time she had done it in this kind of situation, and as we prayed for those who had responded, the Holy Spirit ministered. The conference finished on Friday afternoon with everyone receiving their certificates.

Saturday
This morning, Saturday, we had a meeting for the 15 workers who more or less work full time at Sarfat. They had missed out on all the sessions because they were serving behind the scenes all week.

David spoke about the body of Christ and the gifts that God has given each one of us and asked them to make a hat out of paper and write the particular attribute on it that they felt was the most important contribution to the team. Together we then made a ‘living sculpture’ of where each attribute fitted in the picture of the ministry. Pastor Lexy said everyone was spot on with their own personal attribute and Lies said that it was wonderful for the team to realise those things for themselves and to see how each ones gift contributes to the whole ministry here. It was a wonderful time.

Then it was off to Malang and shopping, the traffic once again causing Therese emotional traumas as we witnessed the seemingly millions of drivers – mainly on motorbikes. Most of them were loaded to the max with anything and everything. One bike we saw had an enormous cage of gas cylinders! What was hard to accept was the bikes with whole families which usually included small children.

In the evening we ministered at a youth night for the children from the orphanage. These children were all rescued from trouble spots several years ago in a nearby province, some of whom saw their own parents killed. They are from between 12 and 18 years of age now. Pastor Lexy built the orphanage which is situated near the Bible College.

David started the evening with a game which ended up quite riotous. They loved it. After worship, Therese sang Amazing grace, and for the second time this trip called upon her fairly dormant guitar skills for accompaniment.

Their singing was amazing, so beautiful.

David shared with them an amazing mission’s story from his Sri Lanka experiences. Through that he shared with them that God gives to each one of his children a call to go and share the Gospel, and that God was also calling them to a mission in life. He asked them if they wanted to say ‘yes’ to Jesus to come forward. They all did, and as we moved around the kids praying for them, many kids cried as God ministered to them.

It is astounding to us the sadness’s children go through. We had relatively happy childhoods with wonderful parents and it is hard to even think about what so many children experience.

Jesus truly is the great healer, the great deliverer and the God of new beginnings. He gives beauty for ashes. The kids left tonight just full of joy


Sunday- Monday
More news to come….

Pastor's Conference and off to Ja-ela.

Thursday dawned and David and Hilary headed off with some of the local team to one of the local Kandy churches for a day of speaking to and connecting with pastors from all the churches in the Kandy area. It was a day of promoting children's ministry and leadership equipping - encouraging the pastors to put their time and effort into the children of their congregations and community.

While the turnout was not as good as expected, the day went off really well and the pastors and their wives who were in attendance, were given much food for thought and encouragement to keep going with their efforts with children, as well as food for the body with a great lunch at the end.

With only one more conference to go on this trip, we packed up all the books and resources, as well as our personal luggage and waved farewell for this trip to the lovely, if not chaotic Kandy.

Ja-ela next stop.

Perehera and Elephant Adventures.

A quick update about our night out on the town....and our day off in Kandy.
We caught a local bus into the Kandy city centre, much of the streets are blocked off and by the time we arrived most of the vantage points - both paid and free were completely taken. The last night is the biggest and the buddhist people believe that they will get a special blessing if they witness this last parade - so Kandy was completely full! With Asela and the local boys guiding us we walked through back lanes and around the outskirts to see if there was any places where we could see the festivities.

After walking and trying a few places, we finally found a road, way back from the middle but looking down over part of the parade. So we stopped, found something to eat and waited....and waited.... and the rain came...and went...and came....
and finally, the parade came into view - we could see the fire throwers, and people marching, but it was quite a long way away, so some of the boys went scouting and found a better place. So off we all went, wending our way through the crowds and the backstreets to very close to the middle. There was thousands of people already there, with a big screen showing the parade which is televised on the final night. But we worked our way through the crowd and got quite close to the action. With the kids on shoulders they could see over everyone but it was still hard to see over all the people.

Then the police came in numbers and started yelling for everyone to sit down, on the pavement or street...where ever they were. The problem being that people take up less room when they are standing and there was so many people crammed in that it was quite difficult to sit down. For a brief time we had front row seats, rather front row standing, and we all got see some dancers, maypole runners, drummers and brightly coloured and fairy light covered elephants. But after a couple of minutes the police were back yelling and forcing people to sit or move so we had to sit down and could no longer see very well. We decided we'd had enough excitement for one night and squeezed through all the people and back to the buses. As it turned out, the Williamses got two more chances to see the Perehera as it is performed during the next day at some of the other temples in Kandy in the morning, and then one last time in the afternoon in the city centre - which they saw while munching down on some KFC (another thing ticked off the list of things to do in Sri Lanka).

The next day we had a rest day - which we spent catching up on washing or shopping or the Williams arranged to pay a visit to Pinnawala Elephant Orphanage. A huge population of tame elephants who are fed, and then watered twice a day to the great delight of many tourists who come along to see it every day. While it's not possible to get too close to them most of the time, it is fun to watch them go down to a shallow river flat and wallow around in the water. There was also the opportunity for the whole family to have a ride on an elephant and Ebonie's highlight for the whole trip was when the elephant sucked up a great trunkful of water and sprayed it all over them as they sat on its back. It really was a great day for everyone, whether out and about or just taking it easy close to 'home'.


Kandy Perehera - many elephants from around Sri Lanka come to Kandy and wear their sunday best.


Bath time at the orphanage.


A chance to get up close to a baby elephant.



A study in opposites!


All Aboard!

Nuwara Eliya Conference!

It's been a busy time over here. We left Ampara and travelled for 7 hours back to Kandy with a dinner stop in the middle. The van carrying the Australian team overheated on the steep, windy road and the bus was down to 3 out of 5 nuts on one of the wheels. Needless to say, we were praying all the way back.
We were all asleep by about 1.30 - 2.00am, and then David, Hilary and Sarah were straight back into it with preaching at three different churches in and around Kandy, being picked up from 6.45am.

After preaching and lunch with the various churches, we packed the bus once again and headed south to Nuwara Eliya...high in the tea plantation region of Sri Lanka. We discovered that it is really quite cool up there - especially compared to Trinco, Batticaloa and Ampara. We stayed in a mission house right next door to the church which was hosting the conference, a place which also provided our meals. It was lovely to have everything so close and convenient. We were also within short walking distance from the centre of town.

The conference was slow to start with people dribbling in over the first session, to about 70 people in total. We found that the mostly Tamil population were quieter and and more serious than the previous conferences - but very keen to learn and take in everything we had to say. Everything went well with all the workshops - although it seems that a few team members had caught a cold along the way and so Yan and David took things easy and it was great to be able to go back to our accomodation during the conference for a time of rest if needed.
Given the temperature and the rain which was on and off for most of the time, we took the opportunity to go shopping down in the main town for some good quality and very reasonably priced jackets and jumpers.

Shanthi finished off the conference with her Heart of God message and a time of prayer for all the delegates and we were back on the road again - Yan and Michelle making sure that we we left on time...we had to get back to Kandy as early as possible because it's the last night of the Kandy Perehera - the big Buddhist festival when the tooth relic of the Buddha comes out on the back of the biggest tusker elephant. The festival gets longer and more elaborate as the parade continues, over 20 nights, so the last night is the biggest and most chaotic for Kandy city. Roads closed, police everywhere, carnivals dotted around town, checkpoints - the Prime Minister and the President of Sri Lanka in attendance. We made it back in quick time and Sarah and the Williams family went with the boys on the local team out to see the parade. A story in its own right. But it sure is good to be back in Kandy and we have a couple of rest days before our last conference in Ja-ela.



Michelle's Workshop



Hilary's Workshop


The Nuwara Eliya Conference


The Williams Family 2010


Beautiful Sri Lankan Tea Plantations