Samoans

2 more days have gone by and plenty of interesting stuff has happened. We still had a day before school started yesterday so we took a train to the dock and saw the beautiful sydney harbor.
The opera house is incredible looking and we ate some Sydney food. The food they have around here is interesting because they have a lot of british influenced foods such as fish and chips, but
they also have everything else you can imagine with a high emphasis on asian food. Everything is really expensive out here.Really interesting city too. I have never seen anything like it before now. It was huge and the train system was really
confusing. We opted not to ask anyone for directions and it took maybe a tiny tiny bit longer to get places, ok fine we spent most of the day at the train station trying to figure out what trains to get on
but that was part of the experience. ANYWAYS, boring stuff is over now onto the interesting part. There are people from practically every part of the world here, koreans and taiwanese, germans and scottish,
canadians and dutch, it is realllly interesting to get to know all these people and their lesser cultures. They do everything wrong so I am working on teaching them all on how to do things right. We had our
first session tonight, and we kinda got an idea of what everything is going to be like. SUPER busy. The Lord was really speaking to me tonight during the first worship session. They had a few tribal dances which
was so awesome seeing how other people around the world worship the Lord. We were all supposed to wear cultural things and dress nice. I wore short shorts and a pistons jersey. Needless to say
I was the best dressed.The best part of the night was at the end. They called all of us men up to be leaders and warriors for Christ. This is really exciting to me. They are calling us men to be MEN and not
girly girls. This is something I have long stressed to be lacking in the world these days. The most interesting part was at the very end. All of us guys were standing near the stage and they said for us to
stand back a little or we were gonna get hit, we had no idea what they meant. Imagine a huge Samoan jumping at you and yelling at you extremely loud in another language and is so close that his spit from yelling is landing on your face. This happened to me.
He was doing a tribal ritual calling us men to be warriors, but for some reason he was focused on me. I stood my ground though and didnt flinch, though my buddy bryce jumped 10 feet in the air. That was quite the experience and I wish everyone
could have seen that. I was not scurred though. I really feel like that is something that God is calling all men to be, leaders and warriors for his name. Watch that be the ongoing theme during these entries and I really hope that I see growth in that area.
So I really need prayer in that area (hint hint) and just prayer that as we are just starting, we continue to keep our focus and learn to praise the Lord in everything we do. G'day mates.

In Christ,

Joe