lessons from alpha and some unexpected ministry costs....

as time moves on here, we're getting steadily busier, and as a result I'm finding less and less time to get online and blog about what we've been doing...

So the last you heard we were preparing for the first alpha session... which was a bit of a learning experience... we invited over 40 students and had strong hopes for a few of them... we prayed a lot, asking God to do something big and we waited for responses to come in... of the 40 or so that we sent messages to, we got replies from somewhere between 5 and 10 of them, all of them apologising and saying that they couldn't come... this made for a nervous and uncertain wait... thinking thoughts like... "what would happen if no-one came?" and "does this mean that we're failing in our purposes here?" or "will Keng Yin be ashamed and feel let down if, after so much prayer and effort getting us over here, we can't get a small group of students to an alpha course?" Obviously these thoughts weren't demonstrating great amounts of faith, so we continued to pray, and ask God to help us stay faithful regardless of what happened...

As it turned out, we had a group of four students arrive, and two ladies who are friends with the people from the old navigators group (the one we're aiming to get up and running again). The students had to leave before the start of the video, which whilst it was a shame, meant that we were able to get to know them better and share and enjoyable meal with them... hopefully they'll come for the whole thing next week... The two ladies stayed and seemed to enjoy it, but they chatted more to Keng Yin and the other ladies there so i can't be certain (they did both fill in the cards saying they had not yet decided if they'll return so please pray for them)...

I think the experience is helping us realise that things aren't always going to be really easy here, and that we need to involve God in it more and more, we can't expect people to want to come to alpha just because we stand out here and invited them along... we need to be constantly seeking God, and also seeing people as individuals, and getting to know them....

A rather odd and expensive mistake happened before the alpha evening. That afternoon we were playing with todd's baseball and baseball gloves out in the front garden... we were all getting pretty good, and it was my turn to play with Cheun hoe, after a few throws I was getting more and more confident, and threw the ball really pretty hard... which he caught well... I figured I should maybe slow it down a bit... to be on the safe side... so i threw the next one a little softer and as he reached to catch it, it bounced off his glove, then bounced off the top of the garden wall... and finally bounced off a car windscreen as it drove past, the car kept going so we figured it was ok and that the ball had slowed enough not to do any damage... so we set about hunting for the ball which had made its way, rowling down the road... a few minutes later, just as we found the ball and were heading triumphantly back to the house the car reappeared, sporting a rather large crack running across the windscreen, we apologised profusely to the young girl driving and offered to pay for the damage we had caused... unfortunately the car was a brand new import (possibly from Japan) and so its not going to be particularly cheap to replace the broken window, although Cheun hoe did a bit of research and found a place that will put a new one on for considerably cheaper than the price she had originally suggested... as much as its a dissapointment to incur such a cost, we do thank God that noone was hurt as the situation could have been a lot worse...

We're also hoping that the girls who were in the car are students so that maybe, when they come to collect some money for us we can perhaps invite them to something or tell them why we're here... as I'm sure you've been told before, God works in mysterious ways...

please pray:

thank God for the guys we're living with, for their continued hospitality and kindness
thank God for the students we've met so far
for continued good health
for the building of relationships with those we have met
for the Bible study times with Kelvin, Chuen Hoe and Bik Yih (B. E.)
for good personal time with God for myself and Todd

thank you