The Final Weeks Before The GOFest

A pond a few hundred metres from Herdershof

The GOFest starts in a little over two weeks. I can't believe how fast the last six months have flown past. I think this post is mostly going to be about the wedding of Bas and Maartje that took place last Friday (I didn't get any photos, but I'll get to the reasons why later on in the post) and the graduation of the Bible For Life that took place on Saturday evening. I'll try to write some more about the upcoming weeks as well.

The Wedding
I've known Bas since my Discipleship Training School DTS, and when I arrived here to do the School of Intercessory Prayer SOIP last September he was in a relationship with Maartje and had been for a few months. Maartje had just arrived on the base as staff. They were engaged over the Christmas holidays, when I was in Paris with my sister. They started planning their wedding almost straight away and had chosen to be married Friday, the 24th of June. I'd offered to help out on the big day so that's what I did. During the main service I was at the back of the room, helping with making the tea and the coffee, as well as whatever else needed doing. So I wasn't able to get any photos of the happy couple, I then went home for a few hours (and went into Epe to get something) before heading off to Heidebeek to help with the clean up. I had thought that cleaning up after the dinner would take a few hours and that we wouldn't be done until about 21:30 (9:30pm). However I was nicely surprised on arrival to find a lot had already be done. It only took about half an hour to clean everything up as the previous group had done a lot of cleaning already and I was home by about 20:30 (8:30pm).

Geeta, Peter, Martine, Edna, McKenzie, Joke, Daniel and Sijtje

The Graduation

The other event, the graduation, took place on Saturday night. This is the first Bible for Life ever run. Its a three month school for people who want to understand the bible on a deeper level. It looks at the story of the entire bible, in historical order. The students will read through the entire bible, out loud, in about ten or eleven weeks. Then during the lectures they'll have lessons on different books of the bible. I've written in a number of my previous blogs about McKenzie, who was one of the students (forth from the right in the picture). She invited me to go and I really enjoyed being able to attend. McKenzie's become a good friend of mine and I'm really happy for her. She's off traveling the world now and I'm really excited for the adventures she's going to have. Though I am going to really miss our conversations during the coffee breaks and lunch breaks (I'd always save her a seat in case class got out late) and the times we've spent watching Outlander (and our talks about the various episodes and what we think might end up happening over the course of the second season). We're very much alike in a number of different areas.

The Forest I Live On the Edge Of

The GOFest and The GOTeams Outreach

The flights for three of the four teams, have all been booked, well, the only team that doesn't have booked tickets is the Faith Experience. They won't know where they're going until the weekend of the GOFest. The Faith Experience will pray together as a team, asking God to showing them where He wants them to go and then they'll book the tickets and fly out. I'm really curious to see where they'll be going. I'm looking forwards to being able to volunteer with what's happening during the GOFest.

The teams will be on the mission field for about two and a half weeks, then will return during the second week of August, for a five day debrief... when the debrief week is done everyone will return to their homes, with many memories and stories of God's goodness. So over the last few weeks I've been working on completing the informational handbook, writing a devotional for the entire outreach and designing a team t-shirt that can be worn in all of the outreach locations without causing problems for the teams (some countries forbid people wearing Christian symbology as jewellery or on clothing, like crosses). We've had some drama with some documents disappearing (before I arrived). So I've had to design the informational handbook for the GOTeams Outreach from scratch, which has been quite a feat. We're also going to be supplying notebooks to the participants to document their journeys and their devotionals, Carl had the idea to stamp the team logo onto the book so I'm in charge of stamping about sixty six notebooks over the next week (a number have already been done). I've also written a devotional for the GOTeams outreach which I've done and has been translated.

I'll write more about some other stuff before the end of June. So until then, take care!