Camp was Amazing!

Thank-you for all your prayers this week. Camp was absolutely amazing. I preached 7 sermons in 7 days. At 50 minutes a talk I was wondering if the campers would get bored but they kept engaged the whole time. The Spirit of God was obvious in that place and at several times tears came to my eyes as I watched the spiritual enthusiasm and commitment of these young people.

On Tuesday night a whole group of the older campers huddled together, prayed and sang for an hour after chapel. On Wednesday night all the older campers were gone on a missions trip and I spoke just to the younger grades (6 through ??) We did the Gospel presentation where I set up a plank that spans the gap between the life lived by ourself and the one given to God (where Jesus carries us over by faith). Three campers gave their life to Christ and another seven or so rededicated their lives. And that was only half way through the week.

I was blown away by the campers. What a bunch of great youth people! At several points I was getting ready for chapel and they would just walk up to me and start praying for me. Talk about a blessing.

I will be putting the sermon notes online later this week once we get our stuff all packed up for Belize. You can see them at http://www.authenticwalk.com/sermons/camp2005/

I would love to have some of you campers from last week leave a note saying what God did in your life at camp.

Chris

Prayer needed for Awana Camp

Cory and I are at AWANA camp this week. I am doing the camp speaking every night. Imagine 7 sermons in seven days. Last night the topic was "Life is a journey". Cory and I had read Gen 12:1 yesterday morning where Abraham left his homeland and headed off in response to God's call. In many ways I feel like that. Leaving our home and family and going to a place with so many unknowns. "Life is a journey", I told the campers, "Full of bends and twists. The important part is to be heading towards God and everything else will work out."

This will be the theme for the week, "Authentic Walk". Tonight we are looking at what it means to be "Authentic" and Monday on "Which path will you walk on" Please pray that God will continue to give me words to say, and the campers hearts will be open and everyone will grow and be kept safe.

Sharing at Summit Drive Church

I am in the Church foyer of Summit Drive today and found a wireless signal and thought I'd drop a note. I love this Church. I spent 1999-2003 as a youth director and then youth pastor here.

As we came in it was such a joy to see all our old friends and how warmly we were greeted. We shared a bit about our adventure to Belize coming up next week. Next week! Wow, it sure is coming fast.

Jim Holm preached on Acts 14 and perserving through persecution and suffering in order to bring the Gospel. It was really cool to hear a sermon about missions right when we are packing up and getting ready to go.

Well I should go, but it has been great to be here again. Blessings to you all.

Chris

Praise God, we have Renters!

I want to make this blog into a sort of prayer journal of how God has answered our prayers. I tell you it is so cool to be involved in the work of God! So here is our latest story...

In order to go to Belize my wife and I needed to do something with the condo. It is really unwise to sell at this time because the prices are going up and we would be both without a place to live when we get back next year and "out of the market". So we needed to rent but our strata only allows about 5% of the units to be rented and they currently have about 10% being rented. It was not likely they would approve us. But our care group prayed and God gave the strata committee grace and they gave us the 10 months temperary renting status we needed.

Now we needed a renter. So for months Cory and I prayed and advertised but nothing. Finally we called a few realtors and started thinking about selling. The next day we received three phone calls of people who wanted to rent. Two of which came over the following day and then we had to make a decision. Which one God?

So we prayed. And we wanted to go with this one person because she would let us keep most of our stuff here and we would not have to move it all out and find storage space. That morning I prayed that if she was not the one that it just wouldn't work out today. So I called three days and no answer. Finally at 8pm I called the other fellow (also a great choice) and he had just been at Church praying about which place to take. He walked out, checked his cell phone messages and there we were offering him the place.

So what happened to the other lady? Well I bumped into her at Church at she said she had been out of town all day and had forgotten her cell phone. We both agreed that perhaps God has something else in store for her and we left in spirits full of hope.

God is so good to us. I love being in His hands!

Comissioned to Go!

Welcome to everyone on our prayer team. Here is a short update. This weekend we were being commissioned at our home church "Northview". The response was really amazing. We had so many people wanting our prayer card and wanting to learn about the adventure God is taking us on. Watch our commissioning service online.

What was really neat is we were commissioned in all three services - now that is a marathon! In each service the songs got deeper and deeper in my heart and I got a little bit more out of the sermon each time. What God said to me was that I need to love more and forgive deeper (especially myself and my little mistakes).

Here are some specific prayer requests out of this time:

1. Pray that 2 more people will sign up to be teachers (one for grade 8 and one for high-school electives)
2. Pray that Noelle (she is from our care group and we are going with her) and ours support will come in. Praise God the Missions Board at Northview said they would support us. We are just waiting for the Church in Belize to approve our budget so we can get a project number with the EMMC mission agency.

Where on Earth is Belize???

Whenever we say we are going to Belize people tend to look at us funny, "Where on Earth is that?" So I downloaded a program called "Google Earth" and made some images for you.

Wisdom removed

So I did the most horrible thing to my face last week...I go the Dentist to remove all 4 of my wisdom teeth! I will never do that again.

I took lost of pain medication and slept really well during the day. So well, that come that evening, I could not sleep. I thought Chris couldn't sleep either (turns out that I was wrong and he was just talking in his sleep), but I tickled him until he gave in...then we went to Tim Hortons for a 1:30am snack.

Now, I must go and rinse my mouth with salt water.

Download our Prayer Card

Our visit to Harrison Gospel Church

Cory grew up in Harrison Gospel Church as her family used to minister there. Last weekend we had the wonderful opportunity of being able to visit that congregation and share with them about our trip to Belize. The people were very friendly and we had a great pot-luck afterwards.

In the afternoon we tried to find this waterfall that Cory and I found back when we were dating. We made it 13km up this old dirt road but then had to turn back because we ran out of time (and the road was way too rough).

Following this Cory's work threw an amazing farewell party. I was deeply impressed by how much her collegues loved her at work.

Is it is procrastination when you start 22 days early?

I am working on my hermeneutics paper today. It is not due for another 22 days but I know that these next few weeks are going to be killer. After this I have 6 sermons to write for Awana camp plus all the preperations for Belize.

So here I am working on my computer and I keep finding myself loathing the idea of writing another paragraph. It is July 1st and I'm inside on my computer.

So here are a few tricks I have for procrastination.

- Convert all our CD's to MP3. At least it gives me a break as I change the CD even if the rest of the process is all automatic. I'm stuck here anyway.

- Check my email

- Write a blog entry (I'm actually sending this one by email to blogger and then RSS reading it into myTWU just for kicks)

- Make sure the server is still running

- Go into the living room and wonder why I am there

- Make tea

- Call friends

What do you do?