We're coming to the end of our first weekend of mini-outreach at YWAM The King's Lodge. It's really great being here and being able to be a part of the base's 30th anniversary celebrations. The schedule has been a bit busy, but on the whole it's been good being able to celebrate with the community. For those of you who don't know about The King's Lodge, it was a school for boys (a boarding school, if I remember correctly, but don't quote me on that). The school's most famous student went on to become the Archbishop of Canterbury, who crowned Queen Elizabeth II in 1953. YWAM England bought the building in 1984, paying a deposit of £1 (and later on paid the full amount). The King's Lodge run a number of DTS's a year and they also run the nine month long SBS (School of Biblical Studies), which was started at this base, and the BCC (Bible Core Course). The SBS was run at Heidebeek, where I did my DTS back in September 2012 (almost two years ago).
Backing up a few days, we had some schedule changes preceding our coming to The King's Lodge (the lesson on government was changed to Thursday, so we didn't go to Wembley). We left on Friday morning, early, and arrived at The King's Lodge at around one o'clock in the afternoon (click here my blipfoto for Friday). We spent a good part of the afternoon working towards the weekend's activities. Yesterday (click here for yesterday's blipfoto), we were involved in different activities, there was three of us who were working with the Wildfire team (the name of King's Kids in England), in the Family Zone. It did rain an awful lot yesterday, so we had to move locations. I think it must have rained through most of the morning and into the afternoon. There were some inflatables that couldn't be used for most of yesterday because of the danger caused by the rain (click here for today's blipfoto and an image of what one of the inflatables look like). Today, thankfully, we had a light drizzle this morning and that's been about it. Yesterday was very long, but worth it. Today's been quieter. I worked in the kitchens, helping with the dishes and whatever else needed doing, like peeling carrots and taking the skins of onions. I also ran back and forth, making coffee for the kitchen staff. It was fun.
Tomorrow's more or less free. We're gonna do some stuff as a team. At the base in London, we've been praying for the UK, so we're gonna continue that here. We're also gonna watch two films together (one in the morning and one after dinner). We brought these films with us because we are currently looking at their messages in different aspects of our lessons.
The photo captions: photo one is the view from the room I'm in, photo number two needs a little explaining: we made name tags before those in the local area came. As you can see in the picture, I wrote my name "Raquel" because if I wrote "Rachel" on it then people would call me "Raytchel," which isn't my name. Then the photo on the left is of Notting Hill Community Church, where we have the community meetings on Thursday nights. This photo was taken the night before we left for The King's Lodge. I've been too busy to take an awful lot of photographs of this beautiful building, but I'll try to do that tomorrow afternoon, so I should be able to add them in my next post.