Oh, And I Got a hair cut a couple weeks ago!

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Well we were supposed to start on this huge 45 foot long 14 foot high wall on Monday, got the supplies ordered, all ready to go… but Monday was a bank holiday. So none of the supplies got delivered until Tuesday… lame! So myself and a few others worked our butts off the last couple of days to get the wall almost done by Wednesday. We just have a little more mudding to do this weekend. The basement of the church has a few small rooms but is mostly one large room. This new wall separates it and gives us a place for the toddlers to have Sunday school and the other side will hopefully, soon become a place for a teen hang out night and things of that matter. It is always nice spending a few days in Glasgow at the church with all my friends there, even when most of it is spent working.
In the next two weeks three more people show up to live with us for the next two years and be part of the internship! YEAHHHH I’m going to soon start my Romanian language lessons as well! Yeah!!! Just working on how I am going to pay for them right now, but I know it will work out God always has a way. All kinds of good stuff going on. Like sleep… which is what I’m going to go do now

After taking 6 girls from our youth group “Survival” camping with the other Tim and Esther I’m back to the church to do some more remodeling! Camping was crazy! We made our own shelters and ate all our food cooked over the fire! Unfortunately Tim and I’s shelter was NOT water proof… and it rained the entire time! Oh and the small bitting bugs were out in force! The kids handled it and we all made it home alive. It did make for some crazy moments though! Now this week I will be working in the basement of the church building some MASSIVE walls and getting things ready for Sunday school to start back up as well as the future teen hang out area! WoooHoooo

I have been home for a few days now and had some time to think about all the things I wanted to share with you about this trip. Only to realize It is a whole lot of information! So this is just a very brief summary, no need to bore everyone to death! I will be putting together a more in depth explanation of this vision to share with everyone who wants to know more.

The 3 main goals of this trip were:
*Build relationships with the people already working there and hear what they are doing and what they hope to see in the future.
*See if the desire and vision Gods has given me actually fits there and how it would look practically.
*Find out specifically where in the country my next step should be towards.

Thankfully all three of these things were accomplished! It was an incredibly fast trip with only a day or two spent in most of the places we went, but I was amazed at how many people we met felt like old friends by the time we left! Romania really is an incredible place, amazing terraced landscapes, a few modern cities, horse and carts, Mercedes Benz cars, mud huts, giant western mega malls with Starbucks, small villages full of naked kids because they have no clothes, cardboard and pallet shacks where people live on a landfill… and all within a 25 minutes radius depending on traffic!

We were able to spend time with a family who lives in a three walled shelter put together with random stuff they found laying around… mom, dad, and five children! It is just big enough for them all to sleep on a queen size-ish bed and be under the roof.

In the village where I see myself ending up, we spent most of
an evening just hanging out and chatting with a gypsy family in there home. Later on in the night we got to go to the one room house of a man who had just had a stroke and was paralyzed. We spent time praying for he and his wife by the light of a cell phone because they have no electricity or running water.

It is in this small village just outside Sighisoara (the birthplace of Dracula!) that I see myself, in God’s timing, moving to. My desire is to see a community of Christians, the Body of Christ, move there and live the way we have been called to live. To take care of the orphaned and the widow, to train and teach, to heal the sick, but most of all to love unconditionally and share indiscriminate compassion with all. It is impossible to carry a lit candle into a dark room without causing the room to light up.

It is in this community that there would be a children’s home for up to ten kids from three to fourteen years old. The home would hopefully be just a few minutes walk outside the village on a small farm. With a school, chapel, housing and doctors office inside the village.

All that to say, one of the most amazing parts of this trip was after sharing this desire with the YWAM people there, they brought Tim and I to this village and showed us the school, chapel, doctors office and small apartment that they already own! It is all in one location, on the edge of this same village but it is empty! The only thing not there is the children’s home and farm. The next day after seeing this location we met another person who works with two orphanages and is trying to get all of the kids placed into these smaller foster homes… and her desire is to see one on a small farm! Both of these people and ministries are in YWAM and in the same area!

How amazing is it that the desire God has put on my heart is not only possible but is the combined desire of two other people and ministries in the same area and all within YWAM! Talk about answered prayers!

As amazing as this trip was it is still only the very beginning. I wanted to begin to share in the smallest way what my desire is, but it is all held with an open hand and left to God and his timing. I am planning on making as many trips as I can back there over the next year and a half and will continue to move towards moving there at the beginning of 2010. Lots has to be done and if it takes 2 years or 10 years for this to come to reality I will continue walking towards it as long as God will allow me to.

There is a strong desire to go now and begin looking to purchase land and begin building the children’s home. As Romania has recently joined the EU at the end of 2009 all of the large social orphanages by EU law, have to be emptied with the children all in foster care. The problem is this deadline will not be met. We have been told by people working in and with the orphanages that the government has already started emptying some of the orphanages by “sending the kids home.” Which means putting them in a van, driving them to the nearest city and dropping them off.
The need is great but people who desire to live this way, teachers who want to teach, doctors who want to treat the sick, people who just want to love are needed. Finances are needed, languages have to be learned, relationships built and made strong, But most importantly it must be in God’s timing. So please continue to pray!

I had a conversation the other night with a good friend who’s brother I also knew, passed away recently. We talked a lot about giving things up, can God really be trusted, girls, girls being amazing, girls being the most complicated things on the planet, girls being amazing, and than we talked a about poo. No connection to girls at all
  We talked about all the crap that can happen during one lifetime. How God doesn’t “do mean things” to us but he uses what Satan would have meant for harm, and He turns it into something amazing. The next morning thinking about it all again I was struck with the thought of manure. Mostly great big trucks full of it. Some people pay to have them come dump it on their lawn or field and others would call the police if you did the same thing. But manure IS one of the best fertilizers you can get. Soil that has been cared for and “seasoned” with crap will always grow better crops or flowers than soil that is left to get hard and compacted over time, soil with no refreshing or fertilizing will often “run low” on nutrients and provide very small returns.
  So when the truck pulls up and drops a ton of manure on our lives we are left with two choices, we can just let it sit their, smell and rot, or we can let the gardener mix it in. We can let his fingers go deep into our wounds and let the brokenness saturate us, let the reality of our inability to do anything on our own soak deep within our souls. Let humility be fused to who we are, and our need for him become more real than our need for food. Because apart from him all this really is is a truck load of crap, but because of him, it’s holy fertilizer
  We often keep the gate to our garden locked because it feels like so much work to keep it tended. So it sits. The ground becomes hard, weeds start to take over and what used to be a fruitful garden slowly produces less and less. It happens slowly so we often don’t really notice, we just look back at our lives and think “Man, the apples used to be so much bigger! And the tomatoes just aren’t that juicy any more.” We think we must be getting old, “Our taste buds don’t work the same as they used to. Our hearing is bad so we don’t hear as many of the birds that used to live in our garden.” “Times have changed, the city is no place to have a garden anymore.” “There is no joy left in working in the garden, it’s just so much work now compared to the amount of fruit it produces. It’s just easier to go to the store and buy fruit.” And so the garden gets worse and worse.
  But then the gardener who owns the garden and lets us tend it shows up. He comes to check and sees that it needs some serious work, or maybe the guy who owns the store hates the gardener and all his gardens. He knows that the fruit from the gardens is way better than anything he sells. He also knows the gardener gives it away for free, and if you own a store where people have to pay… free is never good for business. The store owner sees that we don’t go out their much anymore, and he would prefer we stopped going all together. So he orders the smelliest, grossest thing he can find, a whole truck full of crap and dumps it in the garden. He does this because he knows it works. Most might go out for a day or two and try to shovel it out of the garden, already disheartened by the state of the garden but now even more repulsed by it’s smell. Angry because this whole seasons fruit now covered in manure is unsafe to eat. Who would do such a thing!? But after a few days, sweating and toiling caring one shovel at a time to the edge of the garden and hucking it off onto what ever is next door, we give up. It’s just to much for one person to move, there is no point, it’s so much easier to go to the store, especially when it’s so cheap. So they close up the garden and live with the smell. Knowing the fruit they buy never tastes quite as good and never seems to last as long. But when your hungry and the store is right their… who wants to go shovel manure in the heat? We eventually become desensitized to the smell and just get used to store food. And we never know who ordered the manure because we never even attempted to inquire… we just know it smells.
  In all reality it doesn’t matter who ordered it or why, as long as it just sits there it will always be just a huge pile of crap. If you toss it somewhere else, it’s just a huge pile of crap somewhere else. But the minute you mix it into the soil… it changes, and now it’s fertilizer. So when the crap shows up, regardless of who ordered it what matters is what we do with it. And when we call the gardener and tell him what showed up, he calmly responds with. “Ahh, well if you’ll just get the gate for me I’ll be right over and we’ll get this sorted.”
  So we let him in. He begins to shovel and spread the fertilizer around, it seems to be no work for him at all. He tells us where to spread it and where not to, but it appears he moves three or four shovels to our one. He seems to be loving this. He smiles at us and laughs, not at our disgust or situation but out of sheer Joy! He has been walking by our garden every day and watching it slowly get worse, seeing the fruit get smaller and the ground getting harder. He has been waiting, chomping at the bit for us to invite him in and let him work. He seems to almost love shoveling manure but it’s more that he loves spending the time with us. Anyone who has worked an un-enjoyable job for many hours but with an enjoyable friend would tell you there is something about it that brings the two closer together. As we grow tired the Gardner just encourages us to rest and let him work, and the less we do, it almost seems he gets all the more done. He begins to do many other things that we have neglected, sometimes even uprooting plants we planted. He thins the garden and tells us how less is often more. He breaks up the soil telling us the danger that hard dry soil poses to our plants. But most of all he turns up the soil, careful of all the plants that he is keeping, and mixes in the manure. As he does the smell becomes less and less of manure and more and more of rich black soil. Our hands are dirty together. The air seems fresher, the contrast of green leaves on the rich black moist soil is one we have not seen in years. The weeds are gone. But in all the work that has taken place one half of the garden now seems to be gone, just black soil is left, it’s there that while he worked he also planted new seeds. At the moments we were complaining of the smell he was planting superior plants. Ones with better fruit yields, heartier ones that last longer and some that are there just because they are beautiful.
  It is also at this moment we realize there is no way for us to possibly keep the garden looking like it does right now! It almost seems bigger now that it is cleaned up, when the new plants come up there will definitely be far more than there were before… and we were incapable of tending to those! But before the weight of all this new work can set in, he just says with a smile “Don’t worry, I’ll be back tomorrow and everyday after to help you out.” And in time the birds are back, we were not loosing our hearing there were just no birds anymore. The fruit is Amazing! Even better than we had remembered. There is so much fruit we have enough for our entire neighborhood. The garden is bigger and better than it had ever been, despite the store owner, the old smell, or any painful moments there might have been. But the best part truly is that the Gardner comes back, day after day, after day, after day.
  So let the “Crap” in your life be fertilizer, regardless of whether it was dropped there to harm you or delivered by the Gardner himself to nourish you. Either way offer it up to God and invite him in to do his work. He can be trusted. It is through our brokenness and willingness to submit to him that he is able to turn piles of crap into the most beautiful amazing fruit you will have ever tasted or experienced.

Wow! I can’t believe May is just 7 days from being gone! This is just a quick post to try and get this video up from when we remodeled the church. I hope it works! I will be back up and writing soon

Well I’m back from the Hike and actually have been for a few days nows, but just haven’t had a chance to get on here and post an update. Right after we Got back I got sick with the flu and then started doing some serious remodeling at the church, so Its been a busy last week!
 
We set out to go just under 100 miles in 4 1/2 days but had to call it quits a day and a half short we made it right around 60 miles in three days, right on schedule, but Chris came down with the flu and Tim Robson’s feet developed some serious issues! The 3 days we were out there were absolutely amazing though! I think it has been the best three days in a row we have had yet.
When we got back… I got the flu that Chris had had out on the trail. Thankfully it turned out to be just a 48 hour kinda bug, so 2 days of misery and throwing up, then all better
 
The first day of not throwing up I was at church in Glasgow all day. We have just begun some serious remodeling at the church… of which I am in charge of AHHHHHHHHHH! Haha Everything is going well though. In the last 50 years our church was used as a school and some sort of theater, so there was a HUGE theatrical stage built inside of it and that is what we are tearing out. There are 2 sections to the stage, one 50 year old part built of wood and another newer section built of metal, the older section is what we removed this last weekend. Once we have removed all of it we are going to rebuild a smaller stage using the wood beams from the old section and the actual stage floor from the newer section…. whew…
 
All that to say, in tearing out the old part of the stage we rediscovered the original church floor from the early 1800’s and man is it gorgeous!! That was day one of the project done this last Saturday. And now the second week of May I will be in Glasgow all week doing the big part of the Job which will be tearing out the MUCH larger newer part of the stage and rebuilding a much nicer smaller one… all in a week! Again… AHHHHHHHHHH well the Church just has to be usable at the end of the week, most of the big stuff should be done but there will be Lots of little stuff to finish up for at least a month or so of Saturdays I am sure. If you want to know more about my church you can check it out here www.rehope.co.uk/
 
It is also an amazing place to be involved in right now. Less than 1% of 18 to 30yr olds in Glasgow’s west end (where the church is) are “Churched” or in other words, do not goto or have never been to church. But, on this last Sunday there were at least 60 to 70 people at our evening service, of which close to half it was there first time ever coming and out of those who are left, half of them have been coming for less than 4 months! AND all but one couple in the entire church were in the 18 to mid 30’s age range! Whats even crazier is that some of these folks are not even “Christian!” They just came in one Sunday and they keep coming back! None of this is to boast about “our Church,” but all this to say in what seems like a place where there is not much hope… God is moving. What a blessing it is for me to be able to be a part of this and be given the chance to become friends with all these people!
 
On top of all that the first Intern out of 5 maybe 6, arrives on Thursday and the next DTS starts on Sat! So I am also working on teachings and helping put together a list of ministry/service possibilities for them to get involved with in the community once they get here! It’s starting to get exciting around here I am really excited to see what new ministry’s God will develop and connect us to in this new and upcoming season here at Stanely House! It’s about to get Crazy

Just a note to let everyone know I am out of the realm of technology! YEAHHHHH Haha I will be back on Tue of next week. So if you send me emails or try and call you will have no luck reaching me, but when I get back I will surely respond Cheers!

My friend Lauren who lives here in the house and works full time with the youth group called kings kids in Ferguslie Park, could sure use all the extra prayer we can send her! Ferguslie Park is one of the most broken and violent neighborhoods in the UK. They had a fist fight during church yesterday and have had one during youth group about once or twice a week these last few weeks. She is hard core but this is not an easy season. So pray for strength to keep going, peace to rest when she needs it, wisdom on how to handle these kids with such broken lives, and a soft heart to continue to love them. She needs all we can give her!

I got a random Email from a couple of old high school friends on Friday saying they were in Edinburgh but leaving on Sunday, so of course I went over on Saturday! Turns out Erik and Evan Holt had been running around this part of the world for a few weeks now and remembered I was close by. So we wondered around, ate fish and chips, drank IrnBru, much to both of their disgust (Scotland’s very own soda is a taste that must be acquired drank coffee, and did a lot of chatting. Topped the day off with a trip to the Scottish Whisky Heritage Museum where you ride a whisky barrel through history, watch lots of little movies, meet a ghost and learn how to enjoy all the characteristics of whiskey by having a free sample at the start of the tour! You even get to keep the Glass! What a Deal I then spent the night in Glasgow with a close friend and learned that he and his wife are going to have their first kid! WOOOOOOHOOOOO THEN on Sunday in between church services myself and another friend from church went to check out the Glasgow Tigers. The Tigers are a American Football team that plays in the British American Football League, or BAFL for short. It’s kinda like the NFL over here, there are 3 divisions 2,1 and Premier, the Tigers are a division 2… best thing is the team is walk on, so no try outs and they always need people… especially Americans that actually know how to play! All that to say we then checked out the East Kilbride Pirates, they are a Premier team…which also mean they are about as “Pro” as American football gets over here, of course they don’t get payed, it’s a club and done mostly for fun but they would play in the BritBowl or the UK’s version of the Super Bowl if they made it through the season. Again, they always need people… hehe. I spoke to their head coach today on the phone and he said he would pick me up for practice if I needed a ride! Hahaha I haven’t played real football in ages but they will let me walk onto a Premier league team just because I’m American and I have played before! I think thats great! So, a few of us from church are thinking about joining the team as away to get involved with and become friends with a bunch of these guys. I really believe that to speak into someones life and have it mean anything, in the normal everyday world you have to become real friends first. You have to be invited to speak, other wise your just one more person telling them what to do and how to live, and thats not the point. The point is to see people come to know this God I know, this Jesus who rescued me. And to do that we have to meet people where they are at… so if that means we get to play a little tackle football while we’re at it… well WOOOOOHOOOOOO Haha It’s not a for sure but we are definitely looking seriously at it The other Tim Played in a double header baseball game in the same kind of league but for baseball this week… he also was randomly invited and just participated in his first practice with the team last Thursday. They won They all only practice one evening a week… how great is that. But its not over! I spent Sunday night in Glasgow with another friend (from Northern Ireland) who had 4 other friends over from his high school back in Northern Ireland who all go to Uni somewhere here in Scotland. We played darts on the best magnetic dartboard ever till the wee hours of the morning, It was a grand ol’ time. Then today was back to work, I built the first of our mini green houses and raised beds for all the vegetables we are growing this year. We will have 5, 5×5ft plots this year with more next year. We also had some budget meeting stuff, planned a week of solitude/reflective retreat for when the new folk get here, at a real live monastery, How sweet is that! Oh and I got a “Learn Romanian” language kit to start learning the VERY Basics! Haha but hey, gotta start some where right? Well its time for me to sleep, Goodnight!