Outreach Week #2-Dalby

Hello,
Well I thought that I would be able to update my blog every week but look where that got me? No where. lol. But here's how the second week of outreach went. Well we arrived in Dalby on June 17th after leaving Byron Bay. Dalby is 5 hours away from Byron so by the time we arrived it was around 5p.m. We went to the house in Dalby where we were supposed to stay which was across the street from the Presbyterian Church called the Edge House. The house was old and unsafe for the church to use anymore so they have been trying to sell the building or just tear it down to rebuild, but that's where our home was set up to be for the whole week. The building unfortunately didn't quite lock so we got into the house and one of the burners in this huge old school looking building was on with a pot of water on it. We also looked in the fridge and there was food in it so we phoned one of the contacts and asked if there as anyone else staying in the house. So he came over and told us that no one has been in that house for a long time and that it must be some squatters that have been living there for shelter. He then invited us to the service and checked out the rest of the house and left. So we all decided that we were all going to barricade ourselves in one of the rooms; the guys at all 3 entrances and the girls at the other entrance to the room. So we unpacked then went to the church for the church service for the rest of the night where we met some of the young adults and grew friendships with them. Before going to bed the guys had great fun scaring us and telling us that the squatters were coming to get us. They kept on making noises and a couples of the girls were acutally really freaked out. So we made a game of just saying all of the words starting with the S sound to go to bed. On June 18th we woke up and called one of our contacts and met up with a guy from the Bible Society who spoke at the church the day before. So we went with him to a high school in Dalby where he did a presentation about the Bible. Both grades 7 and 8 were there so he talked about Jesus' love and how that is so different than anything else you may find in your family or even a boyfriend. Then he got all of us to come up and give a 1-2 minute talk about how the Bible has impacted us. So we went up with only 15 minutes of preparing and went at it. It was really cool how in Australia you can just go to the schools and you can give the Gospel message. It's legal to talk about God and they even have Religious Education classes where you can talk about Jesus. So for the rest of the day we followed this guy to another school and after he finished his presentation we handed out Bibles to all of the kids. That night we met up with some of the young adults and played soccer with them. The next morning we had our daily meeting and prayer time then we spoke with our contact and we were told to go do some of his R.E. classes because his wife just had his first baby the day before. So we went to Cecil Plains which was a very small town nearby with a guy named Cole. We went to a couple of classes and basically just had a Q & A time with the kids. Then we separated and went to some different classes. We went to the grades 4 and 5 classes and had more Q & A times and some of our group went to another class and did Jonah and the Whale. For the rest of the week we basically did the same thing. We went to many classes and just talked about our countries, shared our testimonies, or just sat in the class. Some of the classes were actually reading the Purpose Driven Life while others were going through Sunday School type courses or just reading the Old Testament. It was so good to be able to talk about Jesus in just regular public schools. The teachers could do anything they wanted it was amazing. During the week we also went to a couple of Youth groups which was awesome. We spoke at both of the youth groups and during our free evenings we got to meet up with the same teens and have dinner with them. Fortunately we also met the youth pastor who found out that we were staying at the Edge house (the old cold house)and he felt so bad because they had record low temperatures in Australia and it actually reached the minus' one night. One of the nights when it was minus 8 a hour from us so it was relatively the same where we were and you couldn't even put your head out of the sleeping bag it was so cold! I kept on thinking about when I was about to leave for Australia and everyone was saying how hot it'll be but here it was in the minus' and back home it was in the 30's. lol. But the youth pastor Stu took us in his house (his heated house, the Edge House didn't have have working plug-In's so there was no heat) and we got our own mattresses which was awesome! On the last day of being there we ran a sports day for one of the schools after sharing some testimonies for grades 5-8 so it was a good end of our time there. The church and the young adults there were so much fun to hang out with. We were so blessed being there, we were invited to meals almost every night and the hospitality we were given was so incredible. It was great to just build friendships and be a encouragement; to just build each other up and to minister to young kids at the schools and just reach out to them. It was a small town of 10,000 that usually doesn't see people from other countries so it was good for them to see young people just wanting to have fun with them and share their faith. It was a awesome week!