Grace, Grace and more Grace

so much happened over the last 2-3 weeks where to start....

BIG NEWS (highlights not chronological)

• Our route have been as finalised as it can be at the moment, it will look as follows: Amazon Brazil -> Columbia via boat-> Venezuela -> Guyana -> Barbados -> Jamaica -> Cayman Islands -> Cuba -> Mexico -> Guatemala -> Panama  -> Ecuador -> Peru -> South Africa. I will give an update with the dates once we know a bit more. 
• We also know that training is finishing 28 Feb and that we will fly out of South Africa on 5 March!!
• The other interesting news is that I was asked to be a team leader of one of the 3 small team inside the Distant Worlds journey. So together with me I have 2 girls that make up the PINK TEAM. Jansie 18 from Bloemfontein and Luiza 26 from Brazil. Go PINK TEAM!!
• O and on that the GCEX web page the participants page have been updated so go have a look at http://www.gcex.org/participants/meet-the-participants.html

So what happened the last few weeks?? (now we do the chronological order)
Training went into focusing on the God story, your own story and the gospel. We went out into J-Bay in 2-4 man teams as practical to go and speak to people to share the God story and pray for them, had some interesting experiences, but for more detail you will need to read the experience part of the blog. After that we had a weekend of teaching from Piet-Frans on Grace vs Law, it was mind blowing stuff that made me think a lot. After that we did the Veritas Module 1 course for a week, it was intense focus on how to look at scripture and do exegesis (analysis) of the letters of Paul. It also goes into how to lead small groups and how to put a sermon/preach together and then we had to prepare a 10 min sermon that we had to deliver to our small teams. (yes I did a sermon you all better watch out when I am back from this year). After that we went into work mode, we were given the task to dig and lay the foundations of 3 log homes,each home had 15 1.5m long x 1.5m wide x 0.5m deep hols to be dug and filled, for the new location of Global Leadership Academy Eco Campus the only high school in J-Bay and one of 2 Eco campuses, started out of the Global family. We camped on the site outside J-Bay, no electricity or running water, just water pumped from a dam to wash and not drink. To make it more challenging (it is global CHALLENGE) we had 5 days and R0 budget. We went into PE to "blikskud" to at least get some spades and pick to start digging and get some money to go towards the concrete ect. started digging on Monday, half way through Tuesday found out the concrete trucks are coming the Wednesday 10am, this meant that on Wednesday we started at 4am with headlights to finish on time, but we did. I must admit that there is nothing like 6 years of work in front of a PC to prepare you for 2 days of hitting hard clay soil with a pick and a day of shovel work. And can I just say that in a team of 9 girls and 3 dudes I want to say WOW man (woman wow-man get it??) the girls can dig. The Thursday and Friday the brick layers came to build the brick piles on the concrete slabs and I ended up with a group mixing cement for the builders and 5 batches of concrete for the small holes, with a spade, nice and fun backbreaking work that. For more info on this very cool school and the project watch this cool video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbpUMPaGbG4 . It sounds hard, but it was an amazing time, it brought the team closer together and was really good prep for the year ahead. Now we are back in J-Bay and the next 2 weeks training will focus on the Holy Spirit. O and yes my wallet got stolen somewhere in here, but it is all good.

Experience:
So while out in J-Bay we were speaking with a dude and at a stage I felt that I need to ask him if he wants healing for anything, he seemed a bit confused and I wanted to give an example so the first thing out of my mouth was"is anything like your knee sore" and it turns out that he has and old knee injury that was bugging him. Was so awesome to see how the Holy Spirit can work through us. This is just one of so many amazing thing that happened to the groups that went out.
Grace Grace and more Grace, why do we want to complicate it with setting rules/laws for myself when it is all done (Gal 3:1-5). Why do anything out of our own power when the perfect power of God is within us. We were raised with Jesus from the dead and we live in Jesus and Jesus is in us, we should just surrender and "let go and let God". Grace is not about a changed life but an EXCHANGED life.
The other experience was when we heard about the school project, first reaction: go in plan mode, do the calcs, freak out a small bit ect, the normal Fred reaction. And then we had some time to pray about it and all I heard was "let it go and let it fail". Not what I was expecting and a very confusing word, but the next day I just heard God saying "sit back, watch Me do this" so I did, well tried to more like it, it was hard not to get involved and order people around to make the digging more effective, but in the end it got easier and easier. Hats of to the girls again. And just to see the team draw closer during the days, the amazing joy in the team while digging at 4am it was just so mind blowing. And God did make it happen, I can honestly say this did not happen out of our own power
And then through all this time more and more wounds from my past, things buried deep, kept popping up and healing and restoration is working in my life.
My excitement, joy and peace for what lies ahead is growing by the day. So hard putting it in words so I will just use the age old :-)

F :-D