Day four of ILT

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It's Sunday in Hawaii and we're on our fourth day of ILT meetings. We've had a rich time of remembering and thanking God for the fruit and blessings of the past four decades, and this afternoon we're moving on to a time of prayer for each other. We're around 25 leaders in the international leadership team but, as you'll see in the photo, we're a bigger group when you include families and helpers. Thanks for remembering us in prayer over the coming days.

Aloha - e komo mai

Aloha! It's the well known Hawaiian greeting that doubles as hallo and goodbye. Like the Hebrew "shalom," the literal meaning of aloha is something along the lines of affection, peace, compassion and mercy. So it's not only a greeting, it's also a way of pronouncing a blessing.
Another phrase we've been hearing since arriving on the University of the Nations campus yesterday is: E komo mai! It means "welcome" or "come on in." In true Hawaiian style, we were welcomed last night with the placing of a beautiful floral lei around our necks. Mine just happened to colour coordinate beautifully with my T-shirt, and the lovely fragrance was all around me for the rest of the evening. Sadly, the flowers are dying now, but the sweet perfume still fills our bedroom.

This morning, after a time of worship and prayer together, our little group (25 ILT members, plus around 15 other family and friends) headed out in several vehicles. We went to some of the locations where the very first King's Kids children and teens heard from God and took steps of obedience, back in 1976. As those who had been there forty years ago relived some of the stories and testimonies of that time, we spoke out prayers of thankfulness for the way that God had led then, and over the four decades since then.

One of our legendary stories is of the very first KKI outreach experience, which happened right here in Kona. As the children learned to hear God's voice, and waited on Him in prayer, they received a variety of different impressions and Bible verses. One child had a scripture from the book of Isaiah; another had a picture of a green frog, and still another child saw a picture of a rainbow. In the end, the children prepared a musical programme to share the gospel, painted their own scenery (the rainbow) and made a papier maché frog which they painted green.

We all remember the story of how a summer storm made their performance a washout: the colours of the rainbow all ran into each other, the green frog became rather soggy in the torrential rain, and the children themselves looked like drowned rats. It felt like a disaster…. but not a single person in the audience left. Quite the opposite: several came forward, knelt down on the wet ground and gave their lives to God that day. It was the start of something that would multiply over the coming years, and we in KKI know the account as "the green frog story."

When we reached the location where it had all happened, and had taken time to pray, worship and thank God in that place, I surprised everyone by producing a mid-morning snack, and calling out, "Get your green frog chocolate bars here." In anticipation of hearing the story again, I had taken forty Freddo bars with me from the UK, and this produced a laugh from our very international team, most of whom weren't familiar with our British chocolate bar. Someone even asked me if I'd had the green frog bars specially made for our group. This afternoon, we'll continue our consideration of the ways God has led us and the lessons He has taught us over years of ministry with young people and families, before moving on over the weekend to consider the things He is saying to us for the future.

Back in Kona

Yesterday morning I once again took the commuter bus right across the big island - a three hour trip from Hilo to Kona, where I'll be staying for the next ten days on the University of the Nations campus. Based on my previous experience of the bus's air conditioning (the trip from Kona to Hilo had been like travelling in a refrigerated van!) I was wrapped up like an eskimo: pyjama trousers on underneath my trousers, and a blanket ready to wrap around me during the journey. As it turned out, however, this driver was a bit more moderate; the air conditioning was at a reasonable level, so a jumper and scarf were the only protection needed. Once again, it was interested to watch the landscape change - from lush green jungle-like vegetation in the east to dry lava-scattered fields in the west. Soon I was back in Kona where a friend picked me up and drove me to my accommodation at the university. I'm in kind of a student dormitory - a four bedded room with three good friends that I've known from many years of KKI in Africa and Asia.

Our group had been arriving over the previous twenty four hours and was already nearly twenty in number by the time I arrived. After lunch, there was a two hour break before our first meeting began, and so someone suggested going down to the beach for a quick swim. After Wednesday's swimming with sea turtles, I wasn't expecting any "wildlife" this time, so it was a surprise suddenly to spot a large fish, the same bright turquoise colour of my swimsuit.  I didn't have googles or snorkel to see it more closely, but I guess it was the Hawaiian uhu, or blue parrotfish. Beautiful!

After our quick swim, we headed back to campus, where we met over dinner and were honoured with a  lei welcome (they put a garland of fresh flowers around your neck.)  Thursday night is community worship on the campus, so we joined about a thousand others for that in the semi-open Ohana gathering place. Then, as night was falling, we connected briefly again as a KKI leadership team to look at our schedule for the coming days. This morning, we'll be going on a little tour, visiting the places where KKI began and had their early experiences of children hearing God's voice, back in  1976. It's good to remember God's faithfulness to us in the past. Much of the coming three or four days, however, will be given to times of prayer and seeking God's heart for the future, and especially for the next few years that lie ahead.

From walking to sitting...

It's funny how sometimes you can read a Bible passage that you've read many times before, and something new suddenly stands out. I've been reading in the Psalms during my Hawaiian travels, and my attention was caught this week by the sequence of verbs in the very first psalm. Depending on your Bible translation, Psalm 1 says something like this:
Blessed is the person who does not walk in step with the wicked, or stand around with sinners, or sit in the company of mockers.

Walk, stand, sit. These verbs made me think that this is often the recipe for a person's sliding into compromise: first we kind of allow our steps to move in the wrong direction (walk), then we find that we don't pass on by but actually linger (stand) in the place of temptation or sin. And finally, we begin to settle (we sit) and the wrong attitude or behaviour becomes mores of a permanent way of life. As as example of that, I remember the testimony of a friend who told of his battle with pornography. He lived near the red light district of Amsterdam and his problem started when he allowed himself to walk past the sex shops and cast a furtive sideways glance. From there it became less subtle; he would occasionally stop/stand and look in the window. And before too many years had gone by, he found himself on the inside, sitting watching the X rated movies. It took a long struggle and much prayer before he could testify that God had freed him from that addiction.

His example is probably an obvious one, but the principle is true of any wrong thinking or behaviour - negativity, judgement, gossip and criticism, self pity, over-spending or over-eating, watching unhelpful stuff on TV…. If we begin to venture in that wrong direction, we might gradually find that we linger a while, and eventually realise with a shock that we've "settled" into a way of acting or a way of thinking that is not honouring to God. 

The Psalmist continues, in that well known first psalm, by reminding us that the Word of God will be our protection against such a slippery slide into compromise. Our meditating on the Bible will give us strong roots, like a healthy tree planted by fresh water,

Honus and hiking in Hilo, Hawaii

Rain was forecast for Hilo today, so I breathed a sigh of relief when I woke up this morning and saw the sun bravely trying to break through from behind the clouds. We are on the tropical side of the island, so rain was always a risk here, but my pre-bedtime prayer last night had been for a dry day if at all possible.

As I wandered into the kitchen at 7 am this morning, my hosts (a 73 year old grandmother who was obviously a hippie in her youth, and her son) arrived back from the fruit market with an enticing selection, including rambutan, longan (something like a litchi/lychee), papayas, avocados, chirimoya, local apple-bananas, oranges and other delicious fruit for breakfast.

"Let's go to the beach," they said, shortly after that. "There's a beautiful spot where we can swim with honus." (Honu is the Hawaiian word for the iconic sea turtle.) As I waded into the turquoise water, I looked around me, expecting to see little creatures about a foot long. Imagine my surprise when suddenly, next to my legs, was a large turtle of more than a metre in length. One of the turtles, whose distinct shell markings have caused the locals to nickname her Radar, is nearly four feet long. It was fun to swim among the rocks in the ocean and keep encounter-ing turtles who were also enjoying a swim. The water was slightly chilly, but there were warm volcanic currents that made it more bearable for swimming. And after we came out of the water, we could lie in the sunshine on the warm, black volcanic rocks to warm up again. We stopped at the farmers' market for a healthy lunch on the way home: a liquid lunch for me, as I had a smoothie of taro, banana and macadamia, followed an hour or so later by a fresh lilikoi (passion fruit/grenadilla) juice mixed with coconut milk.

My German friend was heading to the volcano park in the afternoon (a two hour bus trip, followed by a hike up to the rim of the volcano) but the potential of rain made me decide to stay in Hilo and walk just out of town  (about 40 minutes hike up a hill) to the famous Rainbow Falls. They're one of several falls in the Wailuku River. At 28 miles (45 km) long, it is Hawaii's longest river, which descends steeply from the volcanic mountains and joins the Pacific Ocean in Hilo. In the Hawaiian language, Wailuku means "waters of destruction," - partly because the sudden falls can be treacherous for swimmers, and partly because the currents could sweep bathers into underwater caves caused by the erosion of the volcanic lava rocks. So it's not a river for swimming, but it's very pretty if you like to admire waterfalls. I've long been a fan of falls; finding new ones to visit was one of the things I loved to do in South Africa and Zimbabwe.

It looked as if it would be more like "rain falls" than rainbow falls, as a slight drizzle began, and there no rays of sunshine to cause the famous rainbows above the water. But it didn't come to much, and I managed to walk home again safe and dry. The torrential rain only began once I was indoors again. My hosts tell me that typical weather for this side of the island would be rain in the morning and evening, and sun mainly in the afternoon; these two completely dry days were kind of unusual, they say, so I feel blessed to have escaped the usual tropical rain.

This brings my two days in Hilo to an end, and tomorrow morning I'll be catching the bus back to Kona again. Watch this space for news of our leadership meetings over the coming weeks. And thanks for your prayers.

Happy in Hilo...

Well, with the lost luggage saga now behind me, it is time at last to enjoy a couple of days holiday. I left the house bright and early this morning (dark and early, to be more exact) and walked down to Kona pier to catch the bus to the other side of the island. My cultural experience of the day was sitting on the seawall at 6 am, eating a taro pie and drinking my morning coffee while watching the fishermen bringing in their catch, seeing the sun rise, and chatting with a Hawaiian rancher who was waiting for his daily commute to Waimea. The bus arrived at 6.30, and daylight was just breaking as we set out on our trip.

It was a three hour bus ride to the other side of the island. For the first half of the trip, the road was bordered by dry fields of black volcanic lava, yellow grass and the occasional cactus. After we passed the ranch country of Waimea and had a toilet break in the historic old town of Honoka'a, we started our descent to the rainy side of the island, and the scenery changed completely, becoming lush green with lots more trees and tropical vegetation: coconut palms, giant ferns, elephant grass, mango, banana and papaya trees.

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The bus trip gave me my first experience of being "too young." The three hour journey from Kona to Hilo cost the princely sum of two dollars, but if I had been 60 or over, it would have cost me only one dollar!! Most of the public transport here seems to be for the same price of $2 - whether you ride the bus or trolley for twenty minutes or for two hours.

Soon we were in Hilo, which is also a quaint looking old town. I was met at the bus by my hosts and taken to my accommodation. A German lady had also just arrived to stay for a couple of days, so we've been walking around town a bit this morning, and now in the afternoon we're going to jump on one of the local buses that drives all around the Hilo area for an hour or so. I'm beginning to feel as if I'm on holiday.

An eventful few days...

Well, I'm in Hawaii at the time of writing this, but my trip here was not without adventure. The drama began when I arrived at Edinburgh airport at 4 am on Friday morning. When I got to the check-in desk, I discovered that I didn't have the right visa for entry to the U.S. Then began a race against the clock to get the visa in time to be allowed to board the flight. I did get the visa in the end (but not before being diverted by one of those scam websites that takes money from your credit card and acts as an intermediary in the visa process. They sent me a second visa after I had already arrived in the United States.) In the end, I missed my flight to Amsterdam, and the airline re-routed me via Paris, where I had rather a long wait, and had to phone back to the UK to cancel my credit card.

The flights themselves were pleasant and uneventful, but the re-routing meant that I had less than an hour's transfer time in Seattle - barely enough time to go through immigration and customs, and re-check my suitcase for the onward flight to Hawaii. I arrived in Kona late that evening, only to discover that my suitcase hadn't made it, and would only arrive the next day. Two days later, I was still waiting for the airline to deliver my suitcase. Despite the fact that they told me it had arrived on Sunday morning, it seemed unusually difficult for them to work out the delivery. I got rather tired of spending my evenings indoors, sitting up beyond midnight and waiting for the suitcase to arrive. And I had to make my way to Walmart to buy pyjamas, underwear, toothbrush and other essential items in the meantime.

After numerous phone calls with the airline, my case was finally delivered to me just a couple of hours ago!! Just in time for me to drop it off with friends, before I head across to spend two days on the other side of the island.

Although a lot of my time in Kona was wasted shopping for clothing and waiting around for the case to be delivered, I still managed to find time to take a pleasant walk along the beach and ride all around the town in the (one and only) trolley bus - the only public transport in the town. It gave me a good idea of what the place is like, and I'll be coming back here again for our KKI leadership meetings that begin on Thursday.

Over the next two days, however,  I'll be heading right across to the other side of the island to visit the town of Hilo. If you look at the map above, you'll see Kailua Kona on the west side of the island, and Hilo on the east. It's a long and meandering bus journey between the two. I'll catch the bus at 6.30  tomorrow morning, and only arrive in Hilo around 10 o'clock. But they say it's a cultural experience to take the commuter bus :-) and a good way to see the inland areas of the island. I'll sleep two nights in Hilo, and then make the same bus journey back to Kona again on Thursday morning. I'm trusting that my days in Hilo will be relaxing and less eventful than the past four days have been.

That's all from me for now. I'll post more news when I can.