Outreach Is Over

Hello!
Sorry I haven’t updated my blog in a while. I have been in small farming communities with out Internet. But It has been amazing! 3 weeks ago I was in Charters Towers, staying in a place called the “Yak Shack” It was a Youth Center. We did school programs all over town sharing the story of Jesus and what he has done in our lives. Playing games and spending time with the kids. Then we did a big event on Friday night. Lots of Kids decided to make a choice to follow Jesus. The best part was they are in a drought and it rained that night.
The next town was Ayr, We stayed with families in the community. I stayed with a amazing family, they had a little girl that was my side kick for the better part of the week. It is a beautiful place, with Sugar Cain everywhere. I thing the best night we had there was at a trade school. We shared our stories about how we encountered Jesus and then hung out with them afterwards. I was able to really talk to two girls and pray with them. I believe they made a genuine commitment to follow Jesus that night.
Then off to another town, with a population of maybe 3000. We got to go into schools that had normally had their doors shut to Christians! Are last night there we hung out at a youth center with a lot of the rough crowd: 12-15y drop out kids from broken homes. It was so much fun. We played some games and talked, one of the girls on my team shared her storey and sang a song. That softened the hardest of hearts.
We will never fully know how much God moved in the lives of the Kids we spoke to but I know that a lot of them received a message of hope, love and freedom that Jesus Christ wants to bring.
Shoolies was on an Island called Magnet Island for Australia’s version of MTV”S Spring Break. But instead of 25y olds making fools of them selves it is 17y olds and about 900 of them! So we went in as damage control (the sober friend) We were called the Red Frogs a team of Chaplins, Youth Pastors, and us. It was a hard week, I really got to see how much we abuse our free will by hurting ourselves and how much insecurity can take over our lives. There were a few students that I really got to speak to about the hope and Love Jesus wants to show them. But I also had a few situations were the ambulance was called or I had to keep a potential rape situation from happening. I went to bed almost in tears every night. Because God showed me his heart and how much it breaks for us when we do not know Him and what happens because we try to find other ways to fill that hole inside of all of us, with sex, drugs and alcohol that just devalues are self worth.
Society has made it ok for these kids to let loose for one week after graduation and make, under- the- influence decisions that can have an affect on the rest of their lives. I a so grateful I was there I don’t even want to think of what could have happened if I wasn’t.

The biggest scripter that has impacted me during shoolise week:
Galatians 5
Freedom in Christ
“ 1It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery.”

I was once in the bondage of the world: drinking, partying and loneliness and emptiness being ruined by my emotions and trying to survive in this world. But Christ opens the eyes of those who do not see the emptiness the world can bring and the destruction of our own decisions when we do not know the love that can free us and restore us to what God intend us to be. Free to walk in purity and in light, never in darkness and shame. Just Free.