Weekend of Learning

To Sydney!
Janene and I travelled to Sydney on Wednesday and stayed at Adam & Jeanette's house for a couple of nights. On Thursday Janene did a course through Focus on the Family called "Starting Points". It was basically a training course to prepare Janene as a facilitator to teach the Starting Points course, which is a program to help parents of kids 0 to 5 years old with parenting strategies (Christian based).

Nene said it was a good course... and she has a whole stack of books and pamphlets to read now. I think she'll be a good facilitator, cos she always was a good studier... she'll know the course content really well. I hope God will use her new knowledge here in Dubbo!

With bro...
While Nene studied, I hang out with big bro. He took me to the city for some shopping, and showed me how to be angry at everyone and everything. I don't think the angry lesson sunk in (or at least I didn't let it), but the rest of the time I had fun with Adam.

I spent some money buying books (mostly Russian language tutors), some music stuff (trumpet book, violin stand) from Allan's Music, and we browsed a lot of other stuff.

One thing I decided for certain was that I hate spending too much time in the city. It really is so impersonal, dirty and "grey". I think if I was there much more than a week or so, I'd start developing the same kind of negative outlook Adam has. In fact, Adam said to me that the city sometimes makes him hate everyone, everything and has pretty much killed off any remaining faith he ever had. Sad :-( Count me out.

Bro's Winnings
Adam got an email while I was there on Thursday telling him he'd won the FlashForward award AGAIN! He gets a big fat rubber arrow, like the last two times. I watched him work on his new movie too... interesting to see how he does it.

Collaroy...
After our time in Ashfield, we headed to Collaroy for the "Children Matter" conference run by the Salvation Army. We turned up early and went for a strole together on the beach. It was lovely, and even romantic :-) We played with the sealife in the rockpools and basically enjoyed being alone together.

Once we booked in we realised we were in separate cabins, sharing with people we didn't know (i.e. men and women were separated). I tried to stow away in Janene's cabin, but some other ladies arrived and I realised it might be uncomfortable for everyone with one guy in a room of girls... so I moved to my cabin.

In my cabin were a few other guys, including Allan Brunton. We had a few long chats, and we were alike in a number of ways. He's from a small corps in Deniliquin where Lyn Cathcart (Twells) is captain.

Sarah and Jennifer attended the weekend too, and their plane was delayed so they arrived after dinner.

The weekend itself was inspiring and gave all of us some good ideas in our various areas of youth ministry. Our challenge now is to implement what we learnt, but also not to overcommit to too many programs and just burn out.

I pray God will bless the efforts we make, and we'll see fruit in future days, months and years.