On the move again...

These two weeks back in Spain have flown by very fast. The first week was full of coaching appointments and online planning meetings for an upcoming youth leaders' forum. Then a respiratory infection struck and I've spent the past week indoors, fighting off a bad bout of bronchitis and tracheitis. The antibiotics finally seem to be doing their job, and I'm starting to feel a bit better now, but I have to confess I still feel a bit weak at the prospect of my long journey to Belarus tomorrow. (Click on the picture to enlarge the map.) I'll leave home fairly early in the morning, but will only arrive in Minsk at 1 am on Monday morning Fortunately, some KKI friends in Minsk will meet me at the airport and take me to their home for the rest of the night, before we move on to our conference accommodation the next day.

Conference probably isn't the right word, as this year is our smaller KKI regional gathering. For the first few days there will be just half a dozen of us - the KKI European leadership team. Then we'll be joined on Thursday by 35 others - the national leaders of KKI ministries in all the different countries of Europe. We'll be together for three days of prayer, fellowship, and seeking the Lord together. We'll also run some training tracks to equip those men and women for their national leadership task.

I'll be teaching two of the training tracks - one on leadership mentoring and the other on youth mentoring - as well as facilitating some of the plenary sessions. 

When the week is up, I'll fly back to Spain again, with an even more complicated itinerary than on the outbound trip. I need to be at Minsk airport at 3 am, and will take three flights, criss-crossing Northern Europe before arriving back in Malaga. Thanks for your prayers.

Back in Spain...

I'm back in Spain, after two weeks in the chill of Northern Europe. We even had snow one weekend while I was in Sweden, as you can perhaps see in these twilight photos taken as the snow was beginning to melt.
The writers' workshop was interesting and I enjoyed it a lot, even though it was quite a busy schedule with lots of homework to be done every night. The first week's topic was about creative non-fiction; that's when you take a true story and write it in an interesting way, like you'd read in a book, rather than in a simple journalistic style.  Our homework assignment was to interview a class mate and then write their story, just like writing a chapter in a book.

The second week's topic was about thematic writing - like when someone writes a book to communicate teaching or ideas, rather than to tell a story. Our homework that week included the writing of an article. My topic was to consider the question of whether missionaries should  urge native tribespeople to wear clothing!

Our class was a fun group of people. Four of us were there only for the seminar weeks and the remaining dozen will be completing the course and writing their books over the coming six months.

Travelling north

What a month it has been since I got home from Thailand! We've had hot sunny weather in southern Spain (I even took the dogs one more time to swim in the lake) and we've also had autumn storms with torrential rains that caused flooding and even a dozen deaths. One day last week, as I was taking the dogs out for their morning walk, the skies looked fairly promising to my left, but ominously grey to my right. (See photo above.) The past two weeks have been a mixture of warmer sunny days and colder rainy days. Today, I think, I'll dig my duvet out of storage, as it's starting to get a bit too cool to sleep without it.

I haven't been in Malaga for all of the past few weeks, though. At the beginning of October, I headed north - to Hainichen in former East Germany, where I was teaching in a discipleship training school for people who have a heart to work with children and youth. Midweek, there was a public holiday, celebrating 28 years of German Reunification after the fall of the Berlin Wall.  The entire YWAM Hainichen community hosted a "family encouragement day" which was attended by 28 families, around 220 people, for a day of teaching and family team activities. Despite the cold wind and threatening rain, the day was a great success. I thoroughly enjoyed working with the group of DTS students, speaking in a local youth group, and being able to participate a little in the family encouragement day. These certainly made it worth having to pack all my winter clothing for the trip to Germany :-)

After two weeks back in Spain, where I've been  busy with  coaching appointments and conference prep,  I'm now packing my suitcase full of winter clothing again, and preparing for another trip to the chilly north. This time I'm heading to Sweden, where I'll participate for two weeks in a writers' workshop - my turn to be a student, for a change. I'll return to Spain at the beginning of November. Thanks for your prayers.

Time in Thailand

I'm writing this post in Bangkok airport. We've had a wonderful couple of weeks in Pattaya, and in just ten hours' time, I'll be flying back to Europe again.

During the first week here, we had an LDC leadership summit, a gathering of more than 50 people who lead and staff the leadership development course around the world. We heard encouraging reports from across the globe and we took time to pray about the future international development of LDC and B2b. We also commissioned an international core team from the different regions; I'm part of that team as the representative from Western Europe.

During the second week, our numbers increased to a huge group of nearly 4000 missionaries from104 nations, speaking 77 languages. This was for a gathering that we called "YWAM Together." We heard encouraging testimonies of what God is doing across the nations of Asia and the Middle East. As well as the four thousand people in attendance, several thousand more followed the sessions through live streaming over the internet. Some parts could not be filmed , however, in order to protect our people in restricted access or so called "closed" nations.

The conference was translated (from the stage) into eleven different languages. It was great to hear the MCs leading the sessions in languages such as Thai, Cambodian, Vietnamese, Chinese, Korean, Nepali, etc... and even in Spanish one night. The times of worship were also in multiple languages, and it was kind of like a foretaste of heaven, as thousands of us joined together in the worship of the nations. We also saw amazing cultural presentations of music and dance from the different tribal and ethnic groupings in our midst.

One afternoon, we held a meeting of KKI staff from around the world, and were encouraged when nearly 150 people turned up for that. Some of them hadn't been attending the conference itself, but had been serving sacrificially to run a parallel track for the 420 children and teenagers who were there with their parents.

Midweek, all 4000 of us went out for a special day of outreach in Pattaya. You can imagine the organisation involved in sending 325 teams to 208 locations around the city. Mercy ministry, evangelism, concerts, Bible distribution, sports ministry, schools ministry, etc.

I was with one of the schools ministry teams; we had 20 teams working in 20 different schools. Our particular group spent the day doing a variety of different activities with 360 ten to sixteen year olds. I hadn't done much schools ministry since leaving South Africa ten years ago, and so I thoroughly enjoyed being involved in that again.

There's lots more I could tell you about these past two weeks, but I'll stop there for now, and will write more in my next newsletter. Thank you so much for standing with me in prayer during this busy and fulfilling time.

Travelling to south east Asia...

After spending the first eight months of the year right here in Spain, tomorrow I leave for two weeks in Thailand. You can read more about that, including prayer pointers, in my August newsletter.

I don't know how much internet access I'll have over the coming fortnight, but I will post photos and news if I get the opportunity. Thanks for your prayers.

All's well that ends well...

The day has finally come: our very last day in Villa Rehoboth. Six of us were there to scrub and clean the house from top to bottom, and to eat the very last meal in the leadership retreat centre. (Eaten sitting on the kitchen floor, because there are no chairs left in the house!) We had our very last swim in the pool, gave away  a new fridge to our elderly Spanish neighbour, and took the last bits and pieces up to the rubbish dump... 
The end of an era; tomorrow we hand back the keys to the owner of the house.

Right up to the end, a main concern of mine was the fate of little Tommy, the retreat centre tabby cat. Despite all our efforts, we simply weren't managing to find a new home for him. I hated the thought of having to give him to an animal shelter, where he'd be subjected to a couple of horrible weeks in a cage with other cats, and then put to sleep anyway. Last Thursday, I created a couple of posters - in English and Spanish - and set out to drive to nearby towns where there are charity shops in aid of animal welfare. I hoped that putting up an announcement in that kind of place might catch the attention of the people who were most likely to want to adopt an adult cat.

Sure enough, at the eleventh hour, an English family phoned and came to see Tommy. It wasn't without some crying and scratching, but in the end, dear Tommy was packed into the car and taken off to his new home: a little"finca" - like a farmhouse on two acres of land, just about a kilometre away from Rehoboth.

The story of how it happened is quite interesting. The lady of the family had driven to a nearby town to visit a charity shop there in the hope of finding an exercise bike at a good price. It's an unusual item, so she didn't in fact find one, but she did spot the poster about Tommy. (This was probably the day after I had put the posters up.) Her attention was caught by the fact that I'd mentioned he was a good mouser, because they realised they had some rodents on the farm, and neither their small cat nor their several dogs seemed to have any success in dealing with the mouse problem. I'd also written that Tommy grew up with a dog, so that gave her confidence that he would hopefully fit in fine with their menagerie.

So they came to Rehoboth yesterday to get the cat and when they arrived, there, sitting right in front of the house was an exercise bike!! The bike is Andrew's, but he told them he wasn't planning to take it back to Scotland with him, and that they could have it for free in just another ten days time. What an interesting turn of events: to go looking for a bike and end up with a cat... and to go looking for the cat and end up with an exercise bike too.

I have to confess that, as time was running out, I'd been praying for a new home for Tommy. That prayer has been answered, and now I can only trust that he will settle in well to his new place and family.

Summer at home - and daring to live my own adventure

It's been many years - probably almost four decades since I last had a summer that didn't involve going on outreach with young people and families. It feels very strange to be spending summer at home this year. However, the closing of the leadership retreat centre, and all that this involves, together with the fact that we're not having our usual Planting Together trip to Africa this year, has meant that I've found myself at home for most of the summer.

Of course, I realise that "at home" for me is not too far from locations that other people head to for their summer holidays. As mentioned in a previous post, because my parents are not coming to Spain for holiday this year, I've decided instead to take a free day now and then to do something fun or to visit somewhere new.  Two weeks ago, for example, I took a drive to the pretty little mountain village of Istán, from where I also took a short hike to a local beauty spot where the Río Verde (Green River) forms multiple levels of waterfalls and pools that are ideal for swimming.

Towards the end of last year, I noticed this slogan on a journal when I was browsing in a shop. It means, Dare to live your own Adventure. As this was just a few days after we'd made the decision to close the retreat centre, I thought how appropriate this motto would be for me in 2018. It would be true at ministry level, because once we reached the second half of the year and the LDC was behind us, there would be fewer ministry projects happening at local level and more projects that involved travelling alone to other places. But I realised that it would also be true at a more personal level: there simply wouldn't be other team mates around who might be motivated to do fun stuff together or go off for a trip somewhere. Yes, there are my dog walking friends, some of whom will happily join me on a short hike or a "wild swimming" adventure, but I knew there wouldn't be a steady supply of companions to travel further afield and to explore the beauty of Spain with me. Most of my Christian friends do such travels or holidays with their whole family. I realised that if I wanted to get out and about, and see more of this country I call home, I'd need to dare to live my own adventure, even if that sometimes meant travelling and exploring alone.

Read on in the posts below for an account of my most recent adventures. (And I'm pleased to report that, since I've returned home again, a couple of people have said, "Oh, let me know if you're exploring again. I'd love to go with you.")