Happy Australia Day!

"Oi Oi Oi, Aussie, Aussie, Aussie!"

Australia Day, the biggest national holiday of the year, celebrates Captain Cook's arrival in Botany Bay. It's essentially a celebration of Australia and sort of like 4th of July without the Independence Day subtext. Aborigines often refer to it as "Invasion Day." Earlier this week after class, we walked down to the Swan River to see one of the most spectacular firework displays ever! Aussies know how to put on some fireworks!

We have been in Perth, Western Australia now since January 2nd and the YWAM DTS training started January 4th so we are already in our 4th week of the program. It's a very time consuming program with events day and night and sometimes into the weekends so we don't have much in the way of free time these days. (I think I've watched about 2 hours of TV since we got here!) What we do have is a lot of really practical instruction on knowing God better, hearing his voice more clearly and moving in obedience to his scriptures. Overall, it's been absolutely fantastic, and God has been really healing us and helping us grow closer to him! Good preparation for entering the mission field. We are still so excited, grateful and glad to be here.

We have very limited access to the Internet and have yet to find a good international rate for calling the states. Sadly, our brand new laptop died over three weeks ago so our access to the Internet has been even more poor than it was before. However, once it's repaired we'll be sending out a newsletter again. We've been a bit delayed on that without our own computer to create it on. Hopefully all of our data can be recovered, too. Sounds like we have a bad hard drive, and we are hoping not to lose everything since our last back-up which was about a week before we left. The computer was brand new too. With it went all of our email addresses and other important contact information, which we may or may not be able to recover once the laptop hard drive is restored. Consequently, the best way to stay in touch with us right now is through our blog.

The campus base where we intend school had a campus-wide event a few weeks back where they bussed everyone to the beach for dinner. We had our first chance to jump into the Indian Ocean! After the days of being in these hot city suburbs, being out near the breezy ocean was quite splendid. The waves were intense! I'm not sure we'll get a chance to go back to the beach anytime soon, but I was really grateful to get the chance to see the Indian Ocean up close after coming so far! And frankly, in this heat, the cool dip in the ocean was refreshing.


I think we underestimated how hard it would be to come here. It has been both logistically and emotionally difficult. Nevertheless, it has been a growing experience, and overall a positive one despite the harder bits you'd expect from such a big transition. We have often referred to this time as "The Crucible" where God burns out the bits he doesn't want in us anymore so that we can be better fashioned for his purposes. Amen.

An upcoming challenge for you to pray about is that our children will all be starting school in the local Australian public school system on Monday, February 2nd. Some of them are more excited about this than others. Let's all pray that this transition into a brand new school system goes well socially, academically, and spiritually.

As for Allyson and Steve, we are praying that we can get every benefit out of this training experience. We want to make the most of this awesome opportunity. We keep imagining it as a sponge from which we want to wring every drop. We trust nothing will prevail against our ability to take the full advantage of this time of training. Please pray this for us.

Lastly, during our time of computer woes, the best way to stay in touch with us is to visit our blog. If you haven't already done so, please enter your email address in the Subscribe Box in the upper left corner of our blog. Then when we make a new entry it just gets emailed to you rather than your having to remember where our blog is. Pretty handy, huh?

Okay, good on ya, mates. Thanks for reading and praying. We'll catch you later.