Outreach and Slop

To catch up with everybody, because I have not been on here in a long time. A lot of coool stuff has happened but the main purpose of this post is cause I want to talk about outreach. To give everyone an idea of what the outreach is, it's the actual trip we are going on for 3 months after the first part of the trip. There were 3 potential places (technically 5 but 4 are combined in groups of 2). These places were tahiti/vanuatu, papua new guinea/indonesia, and mexico city. So we were supposed to pray about where God wanted us to go. Well, initially when I heard about tahiti, thats where I wanted to go. The day they announced the outreach locations officially though, I kept praying and getting papua new guinea and to just obey God. Well after a big struggle, I finally obeyed and put PNG down as my first preference for outreach locations. Well, I started to get prepared for it and was actually pretty excited about it...we were essentially going to be backpacking through PNG and ending up in indonesia...visiting a bunch of villages on the way and just spending time with different people groups...Tony felt a call to there as well...well after getting used to it about a week ago i started to play with the idea of Tahiti again...and 2 of the leaders came up to me and asked me to repray for my location...and I was like eh ok...did not think much would change...well I prayed about it and tahiti started to come up...i initially thought it was just me because I really wanted to go there at the beginning....but God kept showing it to me and to the leaders...and I know that I am supposed to go to there and Vanuatu now after a lot of prayer and different things happening...I really believe God wanted me to obey at the beginning just to show Him I would and then after the obedience He gave me the location I initially wanted...He wanted me to submit above anything...so Tony and I will not be on the same outreach...but I think that is gonna help us keep ourselves focused on exactly what we need to be focused on during outreach... In case anyone cares I just woke up from a nap at 830 at night...bad idea but I fell asleep watching a movie...I just ate an entire box of mike and ikes too...if anyone wants to send me candy, send mike and ikes of all flavors....everyone freakin has eaten the ones my mom sent me....the islanders have this mentality of 'whats mine is yours and whats yours is mine'...well thats awesome and everything but they never flippin have anything so its really just 'what is the american's is the islander's as well'...as far as our outreach goes...I do not know much about what we are doing in Tahiti, but we are going to be hanging out with indigenous tribes in vanuatu...so that part will be similar to what we are doing in PNG...I will write about what we are doing in Tahiti as soon as I get all of the details....Outreach is NOT cheap though and I am trying to see if there is some way to get things cheaper on the trip...David Mcdonald and Joe Stratton are well missed and when I kill a kangaroo I will definitely name it after you both? I dunno...sounds good right? Fengel (dunno if thats the right spelling) is in a week and a half...we are going about 12 hours north to an aboriginal community and spending 2 weeks there and camping out on the beach up there and such...should be exciting hanging out with all the kids and spear fishing and such...God has been working on me dramatically here and lately it has been flexibility...I am constantly pulled in so many directions and I am learning to be content in every circumstance as Paul says....its difficult when you have such little sleep...but I know it will pay off in the end....Praise the Lord for everyone here...my bday was a smash hit...even though there was not much celebrating...would have been nice to go somewhere for it...but its ok the food was good and I got a couple of awesome packages...would have gone longboarding for a while but my foot has been hurt for a week...getting better though....so we have been going to this skate park for a while now and just getting to know the kids there...its been awesome because we are building relationships with these kids that seem to have such messed up stuff going on...I was there for 2 days and every kid in the park wants to show me a trick on their (lame) scooters...but the skate park we go to is nearby and we live in a very run down area...really cool park though...but the older kids that go are jerks and treat all the younger kids like crap so its a huge deal that we pay attention to them and get excited when they land some sort of lame tailwhip...although some of the best kids can do backflip tailwhips...which is actually pretty decent as far as scooters go...and tony got on one of those scooters and was riding the quarter pipe on it...i would not stoop to that level...eh ok I did a little...they make fun of me though...btw...if you eat it on a scooter or skateboard here they call it 'stacking it'...haha and my friend Josh is a pro at it...hahahaha he went down a half pipe twice on a scooter and 'stacked it' both times.. and then he tried to ride this mini bowl on a skateboard and he stacked it really bad...ANYWAYS....on the other side of things...on our day off the past couple weeks we have taken the train to the beach and gone surfing...the best beach to surf so far is manly but the best looking beach is bondi...surfing is decent everywhere here...but we alwayyys check the surf report before we go on our days off cause most of the beaches have like 8-10 foot waves and we always have to find the beach with the smallest waves or else there would be a risk of gettting crushedddd...I can handle it of course...but I roll with a weak crew...I am going to surf a 40 footer soon I just dont know when I will have the time ya know? ANYWAYS thats whats up with me! keep me in prayers for outreach money and such and I hope everyone is doing awesome.
In Christ

Joe

Indian food is darn good

Well its been a few days since I wrote and a lot has happened. Last thursday we did our first outreach, the outreach was with a church who set up a tea and coffee station outside a local mall and would give it out and just talk to people. It rained so we did not get to do that. But something awesome still happened. We decided to just walk around the mall and talk to people and I felt God leading me to this coffee shop. I ended up getting to talk to this indian guy named money(hhahah) who was part of the sikh religion. If you dont know what that religion is, look it up. It is pretty difficult because they believe that multiple religions lead to a god. Anyways, we sat there for a while and he talked to us about the religion. He was surprised to see christians listening to him because he had a very big bias against christians. He thanked us for listening to him and was just very interested in the fact that we sat down just to talk to him. It was a pretty cool experience.  PRAY FOR HIM. We had a a good weekend after that. Youth street started on saturday, which is where we worked with a bunch of skaters and hung out. Like i said they all were using scooters, which is really lame. To me its the equivalent to fruit booting (that is rollerblading for those that are not well versed in street terms). They were all an interesting bunch of kids and they thought we were super awesome because we were doing tricks and stuff on our longboards and they did not know anyone with longboards. I have been very excited to getting into the outreach and ministry part of this trip and the kids were really cool. On sunday,we finally had our first day off. We went to Bondi beach, which was amazingggg. I have never seen anything like that in my life. The water was unspeakably cold though, so I need a wetsuit for when we get to go surfing If i still want to be a man. I mean I probably could handle it pretty well because I am tough, but certain parts of me might not like me for it. If you want to know what the beach looked like, there should be photos posted on either mine or tonys facebook sometime soon. Guess my song of the week To Mike, Jeremy, and EJ :
"What happens when I turn and run again? And again, and again?
"I will forgive you."
And what happens when I lie to your face?
"I will forgive you."
Oh my God, I can be so defiant to some one who's arms stretch to me.
"I will forgive."


THATS IT FOR NOW! DINNER IS A RINGIN!


In Christ,

Joe