Shake and Bake!

Back home from the YWAM South East Conference in Talladega (which spell check tells me should be spelled 'Gallbladder'). It was nice having a week with little responsibility. I could go where I wanted, when I wanted. It was a nice break from the craziness of day to day life here in Charlotte. I got to sit in on all the sessions spoken by Paul Hawkins. The week was about the Nature and Character of God. It's kind of the backbone of the idea of Youth With A Mission, "Know God, and Make Him Known". YWAM's schools aren't theology schools. The main school isn't about a download of knowledge, it's about getting to know our creator more intimately. One's theology should come from the knowledge of our Creator, not our knowledge of our Creator coming from our theology.
So Paul Hawkins has been in YWAM for years. He's pioneered a few things in his time. He spends all his time now going about and speaking about God's character. He calls himself a loose cannon inside YWAM, and he really is. I have mountains of notes to go through. Most people don't really trust God's character, so Paul exists to fix that.
The election was a thing. There was some cheering, there was some jeering. Most people I've talked to aren't big fans of either. The important thing is to pray for the leader, no matter your opinion of him or them (like the Fiberals in Ontario). So someone woke me up at 9am last Saturday asking me to vote for Obama. Waking someone up on their day to sleep in is counter-productive to securing a vote, just if you find yourself in that position ever.
One thing that stuck with me last week is that our God is the only god of any religion who is both infinite and personal! Hindu God's aren't infinite. Allah isn't personal. Just an interesting thought.
On Thursday I went for a walk in the woods. It's beautiful there at the conference centre, and the first thing I learned on my walk is that I'm out of shape. The second thing I learned is that if I go a half-mile in any direction I get cell service, but at the conference centre itself I have no service. So I had no phone last week. Kara and Aaron were gracious enough to text-bomb me with over 100 text messages that I received as we were leaving Friday morning. I think my phone used most of it's battery power vibrating. So the walk was beautiful. I got a little confused at one point because the trails weren't well marked. I prayed for help and God told me quite clearly that I had a map, a GPS and the sun to show me direction. I was just like "oh, yeah. I actually know how to do this". So I noticed an hour and a half into my walk that the sun was rather low. I check the weather. Sunset was at 4:45. I looked at the time, 4:45. Oops. So heading back it was a little dark. I made it to a road at 5:15, and got back at 5:30 and it was pitch black, but I had a fun adventure. The alone time was nice when I'm usually constantly surrounded by people.
This past Saturday we had our food drive for Lord of the Harvest. Our outreach to give the less fortunate families in the county here a Thanksgiving meal. The idea behind it is that every family should have one day where they have no shame for not being able to put food on the table. So over the day we made $1500 and got 72 turkeys (they were on sale. A normal year we only get about 20). We figure we need $4000 to get all the turkeys we need, and we're pretty much there. I spent the morning counting cans of food we have in the back of a semi trailer sitting in our parking lot. There is nearly a 1000 cans of corn. We'll rent a truck on the weekend, a forklift at Walmart will put pallets of frozen Turkeys in the truck. It was a blast last year, especially to see the gratefulness of most of the families.
This week we're also loading shoe boxes onto trucks for Operation Christmas Child.
'Tis going to be a crazy week, but I'm excited.

God Bless,
Christopher