Wednesday

During “listening prayer” this morning we went back to the cathedral with the really old graveyard. I sat under the prettiest tree while praying. The symbolism today was almost overly obvious. I am sitting there praying for a spiritually dead city in a cemetery. I put some music on and began to pray the words I was hearing.

The first song was “O the Deep Deep Love of Jesus”. I prayed that the people would see and feel the “currents of His love.” That they would know  that He is interceding for them and watching over them from His throne.

From “The Word of God Has Spoken” I thanked God that the same Word that created the world is the one who is drawing these people to Himself still. I prayed that they would “run to salvation and be delivered so their lives can be changed forever.”

From “Jesus Saves”, that they would see that He died for their burdens-even the heavy ones they continually carry. And of course the lyrics “freedom’s calling, chains are falling, hope is dawning bright and true, day is breaking, night is breaking, God is making all things new.”

I was then prompted to play for some of the kids we have met and gotten to know. First Daniel: he is such a sweetheart! He’s 16  and is the sweetest thing ever. Please pray with me that he would continue to soak up the love of Christ he has been feeling and continue to depend on Christ as most of the team leaves in a few weeks. I know he has been so encouraged by them and I pray he will continue to follow God after they leave. For Kim: she is also 17 and has just finished school. She thought God had been telling her one thing to do after school, but has felt recently that He was leading her in a different direction. Her parents are not happy about her being a Christ follower so please pray with me that she will continue to depend on God. That she will still be respectful of her parents so that they will see Christ in her. And again that when the team leaves she will remain strong without the extra encouragement.

This evening we went to what is called “Good News Club”. It’s a kids club run by a local Pentacostal church. It was super fun! They definitely handle kids differently around here, but the Gospel was presented in a wonderful way. At the end they asked if kids needed prayer for anything. One little boy asked for prayer for his family “because they didn’t have a lot of food or money.” It was heart-wrenching to hear. From what Kim told us later, no kid has ever asked for something like that before. The lesson had been on depending on God for what you needed.

The interesting part of this day was that it took us an hour to get to the church. Our leader for the day had never actually walked that way and we got a little lost. Actually, it was more than a little…more like it took us over an hour to get there and it should have only taken 15-20 minutes. My feet and legs were so unbelievably sore.

Came home, had “bangers and mash” and then wanted to take a shower because I felt so gross. Halfway through the shower-conditioner in my hair and shaving cream all over my legs the water completely shut off on me. Totally. 100% gone. I really didn’t know what I was going to do. After a few minutes I got some ice cold water and tried to get as much conditioner out of my hair as possible. Come to find out, our wonderful pastor had decided to take a bath and took ALL the water!!! I may have to take another shower later because I technically wasn’t able to “wash”.

Right now I’m sitting in a room full of people. I’ve been listening to Daniel talk with an American accent, Jake is playing piano, people are playing card games and I’m sitting here typing. It really is so relaxing. I love the atmosphere.

You can pray for us tomorrow. We are going to Penygroes and Talysarn. Apparently there are going to be some amazing views. I can’t wait, but it’s going to be the most walking we’ve done yet. Not sure how my legs are going to handle it. You can pray for safety for all of us because it’s going to be hiking and stuff.

This week I have been so “aware” of how old I am. I haven’t actually felt old until today, but it’s just funny to be with a bunch of teenagers and early 20 year olds.  It’s made me kind of “take stock” if you will. Realizing how much less time I have than I had before.

That’s about it for today…devotion times have been great. I think I’m gonna make a whole post about that later and put all the highlights together.

Nos Da!!

Tuesday's Pics

Today's team. 

Some yummy lemon meringue gelato

The "love" tree

Handing at the park

Fred, keeping Cameron down 

The castle at 10pm. Still weird how late it stays light. 

Sybolism

Today was a fantastic day. From beginning to end.

We started the morning Prayerwalking again. We will follow the same schedule most of the days we are here. This time the team was Harley, Will, Fred and myself.  Very quickly I found myself distracted by the beauty of what we were seeing and particularly the flowers! They are just so gorgeous!! I kept wanting to stop and take pictures of them. So I asked God to keep me focused. Instead, He turned my distraction into symbols of His attributes. As I would come upon a new flower I would think about things such as:

• He is the sustainer of all things. From the flowers to the people of this city and they don’t even realize it.
•   The rain He provides is what keeps these flowers alive. His “living water” is the only thing that is going to make these people “live”.
•    He is the “Lilly of the Valley”
•  The grass in the fields of Caenarfon may wither and the flowers that I saw might fall, but His Word will stand forever.
•   How creative God is. He made all these different kinds of flowers and He made so many different kinds of people, including the people of Caenarafon and they don’t even know it.

Then I thought of the scripture in Matthew 6 where Jesus tells the people to look at the lilies of the field and tells them that if God loves this field so much, how much more does He love them!! Again, these people don’t know this. They don’t understand it. They are totally blinded to it.

I then asked God to open their hearts and their minds the way He causes the petals of a flower to open.

I also came across a yard that was really unkept and wild, so I took a picture of that one too. It was a picture that this is what this city is right now spiritually. It’s a mess, and until Christ comes in and does a renovation on the hearts of these people, that’s how it’s going to stay. Then I took a picture of a beautifully manicured yard with beautiful flowers and thought, this is how it could be…if only they wouldn’t be so turned off to the Gospel of Christ.

It felt like such a personal time with God this morning, and I love when I get to experience that. I could more often if I would just take the time to pray such intentional prayers. I’m really excited to be able to prayer walk when we get home.

When it was time for “listening prayer” we went to the top of “Twthill”, which is pronounced ‘too-till’. It’s just a very large hill and from it you can see the entire city, the strait, Anglesey, Snowden and many other outlying areas. Words really can’t describe how beautiful it was.

Since we were technically looking “down” at the city, the Spirit prompted me to pray that God would life them up out of the “miry clay” of their rebellion, that He would rescue them and that He would make their feet like the feet of a deer so that they can walk along the high places. I love when God gives me scripture to pray back to Him.

I find it difficult trying to concentrate so hard on praying for one specific people group, but God gave me another thought. Yeah, the Welsh people are different from us…very different. They have dealt with things that we as Americans living now, have never dealt with – at least on such a grand scale. But, while we are different, at the root of it – we are exactly the same. We are all sinners. We are all broken. And without Jesus, none of us will be anything more than that.

Then another great “symbol” came to my mind. To our left and near to us was a Catholic church. To our right and in the distance was the castle. From my perspective it looked like the church was larger than the castle. Now it isn’t, but that wasn’t the point. What I began to pray was that these people would see that God is bigger and greater and way more powerful than the oppression they have had to stare at all their lives.

I could have literally say/laid up there all day. It was so indescribable. If it wasn’t such a hard climb, I would totally do it again during free time. I wish I could take everyone up there.

Then there was lunch and during a conversation with David, God revealed some hurts that I didn’t even realize I had. I even cried a little bit. But I think it was a bit of a breakthrough for me. We then did narrative mapping but nothing major to talk about there. When free time came Harley and I got some gelato (which was amazing) and hung out in the square for a while. Then, Nik, Jeannette and I went and did some shopping. We met Shirley and Andrew!! They are the sweetest couple and own a chocolate shop. She is Welsh and he is English and they live here now. We thought that was an interesting dynamic. And they definitely seem to joke with each other about this fact. We talked to them for a long time, about all sorts of things. I was ready to go home at that point so we went back for dinner. Rebecca made Sloppy Joes but they were nothing like the ones we have at home. They were ridiculous! I had 2 of them.

I got to skype with my loves at home for a little while and then we went to the park to look for some kids to engage with. Some people played basketball and I tried playing soccer with a couple girls, one being half my age! Yeah, that didn’t go so great. I did kick better than I thought I would, but I was worn out way quicker. Some younger boys had come over with their scooters so I tried riding it on the half pipes. I looked absolutely stupid, but the video is pretty funny J David kept saying the wrong word to one of the kids and we have been joking about it all night. Over here “pants” are actually underwear and the word “trousers” is meant for “pants”. So when you say pants to someone, they are going to think you are talking about underwear. Well he kept trying to tell this one kid that his “pants” were going to fall off. One of our leaders kept looking at him and whispering “trousers”, but David wasn’t hearing it so he just kept on saying pants. Once he realized what he had said-he was kinda embarrassed, but it just became something to laugh about.

We left there about 10pm. It’s so crazy how these young kids stay out so late and it’s just no big deal.  And still so crazy that it’s light until past 11pm.

Tried to take a nice shower tonight, but the showers here are interesting. It was going to scalding to freezing and there wasn’t much in between so it became a much shorter shower than I had planned.

Just sat here and had a great conversation with Jeannette and after I finish this I am hoping to fall asleep easily J

Ready for another day…

Nos Da!!

Pics from today :)

This is the chapel that started the mission village in Patagonia 

The "haunted" cathedral :)

There are 25 people buried right in this spot. 

We ran through the brush to get to this gravesite because its from the 1400's 

Jake and Nik overcoming their fear :)

Our team 

We thought this was cool because these men died in WWI and WWII

I just hear Arwen saying this word :)

Nik and I heading out on our mission to find the Foxwist Coat of Arms

Here it is!

My first fish n' chips!!

Yummy donuts!!

Segontium: 286AD

My money :)

In the Black Boy :)

Day 3 (Teamed with Jake and Nik)

Today was seriously amazing. I cannot even begin to describe how full this day has been. I wish I could have a hidden video camera that just followed us around all day so that I could experience it again whenever I wanted.

We started the day with Prayerwalking. Even though this had been described to me, I had no idea what it was going to be like. This is one of the most intense disciplines you can imagine. You are literally walking through the town and praying for people you encounter or people in buildings you pass. Whatever the Spirit leads you to pray for. It is very hard to stay focused. I think this is going to revolutionize my prayer life when I get home. Then there is a time of “listening prayer” where you just sit and pray for whatever God brings to your mind. This may sound weird, but the leadership team told us a story about how they prayed over a building, specifically for the people in the building and not even a week later they happened to meet those exact people at a pub. What seemed to be completely random was actually something orchestrated by God. They told us how excited they were when they found out where these people lived because they had just prayed over that house.

We spent the morning doing that. Each team does different zones of Caenarfon. Tomorrow we will be in different teams doing the same thing.

For lunch Jake, Nik and I had Fish N’ Chips from Ainsworth’s, which is supposed to be the best in town. I’ve never had it before, but it was definitely amazing. Well first, we had some donuts that were also ridiculous. They were very different from donuts at home, but still really good. We sat in the square and ate and talked about our testimonies and what God has done in our lives. It was very cool.

After lunch we did our “Narrative Mapping”. Basically this is where we just started conversations with people. Jake had 3 questions he wanted us to answer, by asking locals the questions. We had to find out 1. Who were the first people here? 2. Who built the castle? 3. When was the castle built? We had a great conversation with the owners of “Gray Thomas”, which is a shop right across from the castle. They answered all our questions; actually they gave us the answer to #1 without us even asking. After that Jake had another adventure for us. It was kind of like a scavenger hunt. He wanted us to find out what “Foxwist Coat of Arms” was. We had 30 minutes to find out and then meet him at Café Roc. We immediately went into a bookstore and asked about a book on coats of arms. She didn’t, but told us about a building that had the “Foxwist Coat of Arms” on it. It was literally around the corner. We walked over, took a picture, went to the information center, got some details on it and had the information to Jake within 15 minutes. We were so excited that we had figured it out so fast. He bought us some hot drinks as a reward.  Jake had been giving us some great information throughout the day so we asked him to take us to a place he had mentioned earlier.

We took a walk to Segontium. This was a fortress that was actually built by the Romans in 286AD. PURE CRAZINESS!!!! It was so awesome to be somewhere that has been around that long. The Romans came here to eliminate the Druids that lived in Anglesey. Druidism actually began in Anglesey. We can see that island from our rooftop terrace. It’s right across the Menai Strait.

After that we took a walk to an old cathedral that is supposedly haunted by a banshee. J There was also a graveyard that had crypts and graves from the 1400’s. We took a little trip through the brush to get to some of the old ones. Jake and Nik were being pansies and were afraid of the spiders, but after I ran right in, they followed me. (I don’t think they wanted to be shown up by a girl ;) )We took some more paths, but eventually turned around because it got so thick.

The whole walk back we got more information than we could have ever hoped for. Jake is seriously a wealth of knowledge. We learned more about the Caenarfon Castle. Edward I built 5 castles, but he built this castle last. The first 4 were all built in very much the same form, much like the Conwy Castle. But then Edward took a trip to France and really liked one of the castles he saw. So he got a Frenchman to design it, French masons to build it and had French rock imported.

We also found out that at one point the Welsh actually overtook the castle from the English for about 6 months. They actually tore down one of the walls. When the English rebuilt it, they did it with holes in the walls so that more archers could protect the castle. They also built a large lookout on top of one of the hills because that is where they were overtaken from.

We came across a chapel called “Gwladfa Patagonia”. This very chapel was mission minded way back in 1856 and sent a missionary colony to South America. That is how the country of Patagonia was started. Seriously!! How cool is that?

I wish I could remember everything that was said. It is just so fascinating to think about everything that has happened in such a small area of the world.

We had an amazing dinner of chicken carbonera. We went out for “missional encounters”, but apparently Monday nights are pretty dead around here. We went to the Black Boy Pub and I had some “lemonade”. However, it’s not exactly like lemonade at home. It’s carbonated and super yummy!!

Now we are back at Isfryn and I’m wrapping up for the night. However for some reason I’m not tired at all!! Hope I can sleep tonight J

Day 2

I got a pretty good night’s sleep last night. It eventually got so cool that I needed a blanket. We got up this morning and had morning devotions. We did devotions in the “storytelling” form that David had taught the church last summer. I loved it then and I still do!  Then we walked to Caersalem chapel.  There is this beautiful auditorium, but they meet in the basement instead. There aren’t very many people, but there are quite a few young people and that is very encouraging. It was very interesting to be in a service where they speak a different language. We had the little headsets so we could understand the praying and sermon. We sang “In Christ Alone” in Welsh. Very cool to be able to hear a song you know and love sung in a different language…and to kind of sing along J I really wish we weren’t all so tired though, I know I would have enjoyed it even more. But it was very hard just to keep my eyes open.

We got home and had lunch. I tend to eat a lot on trips and I had 2 ham/cheese/chip sandwiches and then an extra bag of chips. However, this did make me even sleepier. We were given strict instructions that we were not allowed to nap or go to bed before 9pm tonight. Doing that would just make the jet lag worse. We had a few hours of orientation and training in regards to what we are going to be doing here. One of the girls on the leadership team is named Harley and I think one sentence she said kind of summed it all up. “Our ministry is eliminating the lenses so that people can see the Gospel more clearly.” Their (our) target audience is the Cymru Cymraeg people. These are the native born, native speaking Welsh people. We believe that ministering to/fellowshipping with/ building friendships with (and hopefully at some point sharing the gospel with) someone in their heart language is going to be much more effective than trying to “Americanize” them and then try to reach them. I think that my work at the ILC has really driven this whole “language barrier” thing home for me. Their language is “them” and to go to their level and learn about them is going to open up a lot more doors than pretty much anything else.

This was kind of how she broke it down: (to make it easier to understand the “us” refers to the missionaries who live here full time)

Us                                                                           Them
1. We speak English primarily                      1. They speak Welsh primarily
2. We speak Welsh secondarily                  2. They speak English secondarily

***When we speak Welsh to them, we are automatically putting ourselves in an inferior role to them. We are giving them the higher position, which is exactly what Christ did for us. I don’t think it gets much clearer than that.

There are people who live and engage these people full time. Teams come in for weeks or months at a time to help and give new perspective to this mission. I am very excited to really “get to work” tomorrow although I have to admit I’m a bit nervous. Yes I can talk to people no problem, but it’s the initial “meeting” someone that I’m kinda scared of. The other stuff will be interesting too, but I’ll explain more of that later…gotta keep you hooked J

After orientation was done we went walking and shopping. Again, just trying to stay busy so we would stay awake. We got some souvenirs and then walked some more places to kind of figure out where we can go for our “Missional Encounters”. Again, that is something I’ll explain more about later J

Came back home to Isfryn and I went up to the roof deck to do some more sketching and painting. Not sure if I will ever show anyone these sketches, but it is fun and relaxing. Half of our view is the Island of Anglesy, but the other half is just rooftops. It reminds me so much of Mary Poppins when she is dancing with the Chimney Sweepers. And then of course you can see the castle over the rooftops. I could smell them cooking chicken and hotdogs below on a charcoal grill and my tummy was growling! On Sunday nights the leadership team who lives in this house invites locals over for dinner and a movie. Tonight was “American food” night. It worked for me J

It is almost 9pm here and I came up before the movie was over to get ready so I could be in bed ready to go to sleep right at 9. Gotta use my mask though because it isn’t going to get dark until 11:30ish. I don’t think I’m going to have any problem sleeping tonight either. 

The Wi-Fi here is funny. You can only get it on the 1^st floor and only a few people at a time. So most of my posts will be typed the night before, but not posted until the next day. And my email is taking forever so I’m just uploading pics to the blog straight from my phone.

Actually everything is funny. The showers have to be turned on before they can be turned on. The recycling rules are ridiculously strict. The no AC thing is just so weird to me, but again I do see why they don’t waste their money on it since they generally don’t need it and all the doors are fire doors so they are very heavy and tend to slam shut.

Thank you all for praying for us, please keep it up because tomorrow (Monday) is when the work really begins!!

Nos Da!! (But that would be “Prynhawn da” to everyone back home since it’s only 4ish there

Some more pics

Our house :)

The view from our terrace 

Caenarfon Castle

Just a pretty house

Our street name 

We called this the "Disneyworld" street :)