Far Side of the World

It’s been a busy month. At the beginning of august we arrived in Catania, Italy. While we were there we picked up a team of French kids. They were doing a program called King’s Kids. King’s Kids is a program kind of in-between a Daily Vacation Bible School and a YWAM Discipleship Training School and summer camp. The team came with a lot of leaders, many of whom where their parents. And even two entire families came! It was really fun having them here. They were blown away by the sailing! Couldn’t stop asking questions and they had huge smiles on their faces! I think that the cutest moment was when we were raising the mainmast and there were four or so guys tailing the line and at the very end was Mateo, the little 7-year-old, standing knee high in a tangle of line holding onto the end of the rope with a massive grin on his face! The team was awesome. I think that it is a real blessing to have children on board. they spent a lot of time praying for Next Wave’s ministry and us as a crew and for the upcoming DTS as well. We then sailed to Gozo Island and spent a night at an amazing harbour that looked like something out of Pirates of the Caribbean. Then we sailed to Malta and stayed at St. Paul’s Bay for a couple days. They were on board for three weeks. On their last night we were going to throw a Love Feast for them (Love Feasts are something that we do as YWAMers to honour people and thank them for coming and to serve them.) Well we asked their leaders and the leaders turned to us and said that actually they were going to give us one! This has never happened to us before! They made an amazing dinner with orderves before hand that they served to us and desert as well. They also had a whole program planned of games during dinner and while we were waiting to be served! It was such a blessing and we felt very honoured! They blew us away! We miss them all very much…and miss their fabulous French accents as well. Some of the kids came and told me how much this impacted them and one girl even told me that her family will never be the same again. It really cool to watch God moving in people’s lives. After they left we had 10 days to get ready for the Discipleship Training School that we ar running. That’s not a lot of time. We were actually expacting more time—but then we found out about the French people coming. So we have been really crazy busy with preparing and getting ready. We have been having staff training for the past few days, I have learned a lot of stuff through that. I am really looking forward to the students coming. There are hopefully going to be 14 of them. 7 girls, 7 guys. We also just got two new crew members (from the Netherlands), Chris and Huibertjan. And a DTS Staff, Matt (from BC). It’s nice to have a little bit of a bigger crew on board. For a little while we were down to 7. It is very hard to run a ship with 7 people. Please continue to pray for the students that are on their way to meet us. They are going to start a journey and I pray that God will challenge them to go as deep as they can with God. Please also keep us in your prayers. We have a lot of decisions to make (like matching up room mates and small groups and outreach, etc). One more thing to pray for, that more crew come to the ship. We are still very short handed. And there is a lot to be done. We are actually hoping to build up a crew of about 20, God willing.