A month of gatherings

This has been a holiday weekend in Spain - not a particularly cheery one, though, as 1st November is All Saints' Day - the time when Spaniards take bunches of flowers to the graves of dead relatives. Yesterday at church, we came in the opposite spirit by holding a special family service that celebrated the life and power of God. Adults and children alike enjoyed making the armour of God (see Ephesians chapter 6) and dressing someone up with the belt of truth, the helmet of salavation and the shield of faith, etc

November is going to be a month of seminars and conferences for me, starting this week with our all-Europe KKI staff and leadership conference in Barcelona. I fly up to Barcelona tomorrow for some days of meeting with the European Leadership Team (ELT) and then the conference itself will run from Thursday till Sunday. Nearly 400 people from all over Europe will be joining us for that time, a time of tapping into God's heart for the children, youth and families of this continent. We've found an excellent facility very close to Barcelona airport for this event.

I'll get back to Malaga next weekend, just in time for a week-long training seminar we're running on the topic of Christian leadership coaching. This will be with a much smaller group than the Barcelona gathering, but people are coming from as far afield as Scotland, Latvia and Romania for that week.

Then, in the third week of November, we'll be gathering together in Malaga as the steering group for a training event that we're holding in Austria next summer..... and the following weekend I head back to Barcelona again to teach on a PCYM training seminar for child and youth workers.

All in all, a busy month of leadership gatherings, conferences and seminars. Thanks for your prayers during these weeks of travelling and meetings.

Building blocks...

Our little ministry team in Alhaurin de la Torre is starting to grow. A new couple has arrived to work with us in running seminars and pioneering the leadership retreat centre. Having just arrived from Germany this month, they've signed up for four months of Spanish language classes at the University of Malaga and have found themselves a flat there in the city. Even so, we've begun meeting together twice a month for prayer and for planning some of the things that will be happening at Villa Rehoboth over the coming year. Having a team of five instead of three will allow us to build and strengthen the retreat centre and local expressions of the leadership development ministry.

However, we're still trusting God to add new members to our team; a particular need at the moment is for people who could help cover some of the practical areas like the cooking and the accounts. In the absence of long term people in these roles, we are also happy to host short term volunteers who might come to cook for a week or to look after delegates' children when we run the LDC.

Russians in the family?

Something rather strange happened to me in the library today. I was sitting working on my computer when an English voice whispered from behind me: "Oh, you've got a Siberian!" My first thought was of a husky, until I realised the woman was looking at the picture on my computer of Gabriela and Teddi. (Like this one here.) "He's a Siberian, isn't he?" she asked me.

The strange thing is that earlier in the year I saw some photos about a cat show in one of the English newspapers of the Costa del Sol, and there were some Teddi and Tobi lookalikes that were actually pedigree cats called Siberians. Turns out that this English lady has three Siberians - all with Russian sounding names like Sasha and Koshka. But I told her that Teddi, huge and fluffy as he is, couldn't really be a Siberian because his mother was just a short haired street moggie.

So she said, who knows, maybe the kittens' father had Siberian in him, and did I know that Siberians continue growing until they are around five years old. The funny thing is that Gabriela had said just last week that Tobi seems to be bigger than Tamba now, and that Teddi is bigger than the neighbours' dog! (The dog's a yorkie, so that's not hard.)

I've always said that Teddi is like a substitute dog for me, but Ada and I just had to laugh at the idea of his continuing to grow even bigger over the next four years. Watch this blog to see if he really does get any bigger.

A matter of perspective?

As I left Edinburgh airport yesterday, the daily weather forecast for the East of Scotland announced a top temperature of 8 degrees and a minimum temperature of minus 2. The people boarding the plane were all wearing jumpers or jackets. The forecast for Malaga, on the other hand, was for a top temperature of 23 and a minimum temperature of 8 degrees. My flight was delayed and so I only arrived in Malaga in the evening - when the sun was setting and the cooler temperature was beginning. So I came out of the airport, wearing the same jacket that I had worn in Scotland.

To my amazement, though, I noticed that some of the passengers from my flight had undergone a sudden transformation while in the baggage reclaim hall. From wearing jumpers and jackets in Edinburgh's 8 degrees, they emerged from the airport wearing sleeveless tops in Malaga's 8 degrees. I suppose the shedding of clothing was because they were no longer at home, but were now on holiday in Spain! As for me, when I got home, I dug out my duvet for the first time since June.

Today was even warmer in Alhaurin de la Torre - a pleasant 24 degrees in the afternoon. When I was walking home from the library, I noticed that people were still sitting outdoors at the ice cream parlours in the afternoon, even though the stalls selling hot roasted chestnuts are setting up in the streets and preparing to do business throughout the colder winter season.

November's going to be a busy month for us - with a leadership training seminar here in Alhaurin, as well as a PCYM seminar and a KKI conference up in Barcelona. Much of the time during this second half of October is taken up with the final preparations for these events.

Dog years...

Sorting through some old albums today, I had to smile when I found these "me and my dog" photos taken over the years. My first dog, Darkie, was a collie cross who had actually belonged to my grandmother, but decided to move into our house when I was born. Rusty, the Irish setter, was my dog when I was in high school... and Kylie, the border collie, was my dog in Cape Town. In Spain, as you know from previous postings, it's not possible for me to have a dog and so I currently have three cats! (One or two of my dog-lover friends have commented that it takes three cats to make up for a dog. I'm sure that cat lovers will have a suitable comment to make in response.)

Scottish snippets

Well, this has been a very full week. I spoke at a morning service in Falkirk Baptist Church, and at ladies' meetings in Bathgate and Polmont. I went to a housegroup in Brightons and I also caught up with old friends from Falkirk, Grangemouth, Glasgow and Paisley. I went to the doctor twice (once for my injured ankle and once for my flu vaccination) and I went out for a meal on my niece's tenth birthday.

Kasey also came for a sleepover one night and we made another birthday cake together, putting on Spanish candles that read "Feliz cumpleaños." And finally, I made a (not very successful) attempt at beginning my Christmas shopping (as I'm not yet sure whether I'll definitely be visiting Scotland again in December.) But my autumn visit is almost over now and I'll be returning to Spain on Tuesday this week.

Stanely Revisited

I've spent this week at a gathering of twenty missions leaders from all over Europe. It was a combined meeting of the Western Europe Leadership Team (WELT) and the Central Europe Leadership Team (CELT). These two regions stretch from the UK and Ireland, right across Europe to Romania, Bulgaria and the Balkan nations which formed the former Yugoslavia, so our gathering included YWAM national leaders from many of these countries. It was a time of praying and partnering together to see how we can see mission initiatives strengthened and extended in these regions of Europe. I was there as a representative of our King's Kids youth and family ministry across the continent.

It was interesting for me that these Leadership Team meetings were held in Paisley, Scotland, at Stanely House. This old house was my home about seventeen or eighteen years ago; it was the base for our KKI Scotland ministry at the time, and I led several PCYMs there in the early 1990s. It was kind of fun to return there after a ten or twelve year gap, and discover that things looked much the same as they did back then. A different YWAM ministry is based there now, running discipleship schools that consider new expressions of old Celtic traditions of Christianity. The above picture is a sketch of Stanely House that was drawn by my South African friend, Helen, when she was a PCYM student in 1992.

Next year's WELT and CELT meetings will be held in Malaga again, in October 2011. As I'm here in Scotland this year, though, I'll be staying on another week to speak in my home church and at a couple of ladies' prayer groups, before returning to Spain on the 19th.