Phew! I made it through!

Thanks to all of you who were praying for me this past week, I certainly felt it! We put together our first English Camp, together with a team of teachers from South Abbotsford Church, and our ACTION team. It felt like we were meeting resistance from start to finish, but we definitely sensed God's power and His presence as all the details finally came together. We ended up in Tapalpa, which is about 2 hours away, into the mountains. Lots of people go to the cabins up there in summer to escape the heat, and enjoy the significantly cooler weather.

The night before we left for camp I was asked to fill in for one of the English teachers who couldn't come at the last minute (due to tragic news she received in the airport). I was very nervous and a wee bit panicky the night before my first class, but the other teachers helped me out a lot, and I really feel like God was in control of the whole situation.

Here's the class of 4 that I taught, 3 hours a day, for the week, together with Melissa's help from SAC.

We had a number of youth from our church (RETO), and two girls from one of our other churches join us for the week. But, we also had a family of four (Jesus, Lorena, Jorge and Alejandra) join us. Lorena's mom is a faithful member of our church and has been praying that their family, and especially Jesus would have an openness to Jesus Christ. This week was so encouraging as we saw him open up more and more throughout the week. Please pray for them.

We also had a 15 year old guy named Bruno join us...he heard about us through one of our flyers. His mom has been worried for him as he's been getting into trouble recently, and hoped this would be a spiritually helpful experience (they are Catholic). He mentioned many times how free he felt to be himself throughout the week, and how open and accepting everyone was. He loves Canadians!! And hopefully he recognizes that it's not being Canadian that makes us special, but rather our relationship with Christ! He will be participating in this weeks Sports Camp with ACTION. Please pray that he will recognize his need for a relationship with Christ.

Along with English classes, we had a lot of fun playing different games and sports. I even scored a goal in soccer!!! Yep, it was a surprise to me too:) We had a fire going non-stop in the cabin to ward off the cold, especially since it rained so much. We also taught a lot about Canadian culture, complete with Krista (one of the teachers from SAC) teaching a line-dance.

It was a very fun week, and it was great to build new relationships, and go deeper with some of our youth. Please pray that these relationships would continue to grow. Thanks so much to the South Abby team for leading us, teaching English (Krista and Ruth), for spiritual direction and excellent talks on Mark each night (Steve Klassen), for some amazing games (Melissa and Jackson)!! Here's a picture of most of the group...some had to leave camp early to see off their sister who left for Switzerland for school.

Which reminds me...last weekend we had a farewell for Miriam. We set up a big piece of plastic on our newly cemented court, and using water and soap had a lot of fun on our "slip'n'slide".