Baby Zoe

For those of you who know Phil and Michelle Codrington, we caught up with them yesterday and had a lovely afternoon tea.

We saw Zoe (their new bub) at the hospital and now she's a month old! still with a crazy wad of hair!

Not sure if she was behaving especially well for us, but she's ultra-placid and can almost pull a smile!

Well deserved holidays

Still enjoying the student lifestyle - after 8 long, hard weeks Jodie and I have just had 2 weeks holiday. I don't know how we could have survived for much longer without them :-) ...actually Jodie had two weeks, because she got her essay done a week early. I spent the first week writing mine.

Anyway we managed to get away for a few nights in the Hunter Valley this week just gone - was really nice, aside from the torrential rain that persisted for the whole time! (hence no photos!). It certainly isn't as scenic as the Barossa, but still found some nice wines and enjoyed the large number of boutique businesses in the area. I reckon we'll visit again when they have one of their festival things on.

Also got a real taste of Sydney traffic heading up there - we headed over the bridge then were stuck in absolute gridlock for 40km (it took us 4 hours to cover them!! ugh!) apparently a truck had spilled diesel for 11km along the freeway we needed to get onto.

Prophecy: bargain to be had in 2009

Stumbled across this: 2008 God's Final Witness

haven't come across a good doomsday prophet for a while (maybe not been looking hard enough?!?) but this book would have to be my tip for best bargain in the post Christmas sales of 2009 :-)

Excuse me while I go and finish stocking our bomb shelter with baked beans...

Mission at Earlwood

Jodie and I have just finished up a week of mission at Earlwood Anglican Church. From what i can tell, it went really well...

The deal is that as part of study at Moore, each year you get placed in a team with people across the years and do mission with various churches. Most are around sydney, some in rural NSW, one in the NT and one in South Africa! Ours was 2 suburbs away...just down the road.

The church has been in steady decline for the last little while, recently a new rector has started there and has been working with the congregation to grow the church. I think the church was glad to have us there and I hope that we've given them a boost and encouragement to keep at evangelism and community engagement in the future.

There we're lots of events:

- "God on the ropes" - a panel answering people's questions at the local pub
- a high tea for the seniors
- school scripture
- kids club
- craft with mums
- pilates
- Greek coffee and dessert night
- carnival + jazz in the park
- kids club spectacular
- youth event with a live band and insane water games.
- Indoor soccer comp for the men

There were around 350 ppl at the jazz in the park event and over half of them were not from the church. It was a huge amount of work to put on, but seemed worth it for that. We also saw about 20 new people at church on the 2nd sunday who had come to the events through the week. A number of those indicated that they had "prayed the prayer" after an evangelistic talk.

Was great to have been a part of something that was clearly very significant for a local church and to have seen God at work through his people there. Also, it was great getting to know some of the people we're studying with better and in a different context, seeing them preach, do magic tricks, make coffee, paint faces, and so on.