We started at 6:30am at the local South Hedland Shopping Centre. The YIC (Youth in Crisis) Centre is making a community garden in one of the spaces in front of the shopping centre. Our job was to help these guys level a medium to large sized area of dirt. We worked at this for about 3-4hrs and unfortunately, it was not as level as we would have liked by the end of our time there. Much of our time was wasted due to not having enough tools for us all to work with!
However, despite the task of levelling the ground being basically a failure, the 3-4hrs were definitely a success. During that time we were able to connect with the people at the YIC Centre and scored ourselves an invite to go and play basketball at their drop-in centre tomorrow at 4:30pm. This has made me pretty excited because I was hoping to get to do some sort of Youth Ministry while I was up here, so I'm hoping that this goes well. Matt and Vaughan were also able to have some good conversations with some locals who wondered who we were and what we had done to end up working in the heat shovelling dirt.
After levelling the ground, we headed over to Macca's for a drink with the YIC people and further good conversations were had. Although sadly their Thickshake machine was broken! :(
After this we headed on back to the Port Hedland church for another fantastic lunch, this time it was spaghetti and meatballs. Sooo tasty! This was followed by a team meeting where it was decided Ellisa and I would head out to another dialogue dinner (like the one I went to on Tuesday night) with some of the locals. Needless to say, after Tuesday's dinner, I was pretty excited about this!
The afternoon involved relaxing and plumbing... a toilet got blocked and it somehow became my job to unblock it. Thankfully after getting some bushmans advice, I was successful in this task!
Before our dialogue dinner, we headed over to the Seafarers Centre for a couple of hours. Needless to say Port Hedland is a busy port! This Mission to Seafarers runs these centres in a number of ports world wide which provide a place for the guys sailing on the ships to get on the Internet, call their families back home (which was Russia for one guy I spoke to, I don't think I'd ever met a Russian person before so it felt like something out of James Bond!) The Centre also provides a place for the sailors to have a beer, buy some Australian souvenirs, including kangaroo scrotum key rings and bottle openers (I was tempted), and to relax with a game of pool or air hockey. They also have Bibles there in many different languages and tracts in many different languages. This looked like a great ministry not only of meeting a need, but of being able to share the Gospel with people who can take it back with them around the world. I was converted to the worthwhileness of the Mission to Seafarers while here. My job while I was here was to sell stuff. This involved selling things in Australian Dollars but being paid in American dollars and then working out the exchange rate from a piece of paper! That was hard, but fun!
Ellisa and I left the Seafarers at about 7:20 for our 7:30pm dinner down the road. This was a good night getting to know some of the Christians in the town a little better. There were no non-believers at this dinner until about 9pm when a friend of one of the guests arrived. Eventually he figured out that Ellisa and I were young and getting married which proceeded to a great conversation about marriage. Unfortunately we didn't get to the Gospel before we had to leave, but I'm sure has become the spark for many follow up conversations between that guy and his friend.
And that was day 6 on mission. Nothing was really as successful as it could have been, but it was still a good day. Seeds were sown and relationships were grown between the local Anglican Church and the community.
Things to pray for:
- Pray for the guy at our dialogue dinner who was not a Christian
- Pray that his friend will be able to talk more with him about Jesus
- Pray for the Mission to Seafarers. They are looking to appoint a new chaplain next year, so pray that they will find a gospel man for that job. Pray also that the mission would be able to cope with the expanding Port of Port Hedland (going from 4 berths to over 20 in the next year or two!!)
- Thank God for the relationships built with the YIC centre, pray that the church will continue to be able to use them
- Thank God for our continued safety while on Mission.
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