Sealed

I know I really shouldn't get as excited as I do about kitchen gadgets and equipment, but I do. Hence my eagerness to attend Amy from our bible study group's tupperware party today. Tupperware can be really rather exciting, you know. All those containers that are just the right size for whatever you need them for. Yes, I know, sad.

Last night Joanne and I had dinner with Cam and Jo from church. Ryan was there too, which was nice. Cam and Jo are the couple who head up the Christianity Explored course at St John's which we're going to be helping with come February. Ryan works at St John's, will be starting on the St John's ministry training programme from January and plays 5-a-side with me on a Thursday. It really is lovely to be able to spend time with people getting to know them better. We were discussing the church parish camp last weekend and how we'd all found listening to the testimonies, listening to how people became a Christian, such a great thing. So we shared our own testimonies after dinner last night. It's amazing how much better you feel you know a person once you hear how God has been working in their life to bring them to know him.

Tomorrow we're going to have a busier day than we had expected. To explain, when we were back in the UK and back at St Helen's we were part of prayer group called KFC that met to prayer for New Zealand. In that group was an English girl called Claire who really felt a call to prayer for NZ and to one day come out here to tell people about Jesus. When we left St Helen's we kind of kept in touch with Claire occasionally and just before we left the UK we heard from her that she was planning on finally getting over here. Actually I think that it was Facebook was caused our paths to cross again. She had signed up for TEA, a ten week discipleship and evangelism training course for young people run by Operation Mobilisation in New Zealand. (TEA - training, evangelism, adventure.) So in October she arrived over here and met up with the other six people on her programme and after much travelling they all arrived in Christchurch today. I'd told Claire to get in touch when she was here as it'd be great to meet up and I got a text last night. The outcome of the texting back and forth was that she's coming to St John's with us tomorrow and then back here for lunch. The other six on the team are joining us. So tomorrow we get to meet Bellanie, Lisanne, Arne-Joost, Koen, Janine and Edgar, along with Claire again, and get to open our home to them and get to hear all about the last couple of months of what God's been doing with them in NZ. I'm quite excited.