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| The dish washing bowls |
If you look at the time stamp... you'll see that its almost midnight. I'm not sure what I'm feeling about the fact that The GOTeams Outreaches of 2016 are over and done for another year. Its hard to believe that more than nine months of work have been put into three weeks worth of outreach... and now its done. Everyone's gone home to their own beds, with loads of exiting stories of adventures they had when on outreach (and dirty washing).
We're all ready for some rest (even though I've just been away; in my case, it'll be packing to leave). Many of the participants are in school (be it high school or university) and start again in less than two weeks time. So they're all looking forwards to rest and process what God has done through them. They were able to reach out in the countries they went to and were a great blessing wherever they went. Three of the four teams that we put together arrived on Monday night, many after traveling long stints. One thing we do is debrief each team, so we encourage them to share their experiences of how they think the outreach went. It gives them a chance to sort things out that need sorting out. Most of these talks were done in under two hours. Then the Brazil team arrived late last night and were debriefed after lunch today. We made sure that all the teams had the chance to rest during the mornings.
This evening we closed off the entire outreach with a report back service. We had over a hundred people (including the teams) present and were able to hear their stories. I didn't hear everything (thus the reason why there's no stories present) as I'd made tea and coffee beforehand and needed to clear up. From what I heard was that God had really used them. People had been saved, children had been loved, healing had taken place and above all, the participants had taken a deeper revelation of God's love for them. They've all gone home with a new revelation of God's heart and for me, that's really important.
The next few weeks are going to be interesting. As an office/department we're going to do a quick check of the base and then go out for a meal. Then I'll start packing for my move to Den Haag. That starts in three weeks time and I'm really looking forwards to this move. I'm not sure what the future holds but I'm expecting some great things to happen.