Salut!

With the new school year under way, the youth group has kicked back into action again.  I proposed to the group that we read a book together and discuss it once a week.  I was surprized that they agreed, and even more surprized that they wanted to meet on Saturday mornings!  So we have have met 3 times so far and it is going surprizingly well!!  The book is called ‘The Man on the Road to Emmaus’.  It explains the Gospel from Genesis until the resurection.

Today we looked at creation and it sparked quite a debate!  I don’t want to tell them what to believe.  I want them to wrestle with the Bible and their own throughts and come to convictions of their own.  I praying that they will own their faith in a more direct way, rather than being ‘products’ of a church Sunday school.  

After the short study which included the France/England rugby match, croissants and hot chocolate, we went for a walk to look at creation with our own eyes.  I asked them all to bring cameras and to take pictures of the things they thought were the most beautiful.  One of the girls is compiling the pictures into a reflective powerpoint display for church.   

Then my Saturday afternoon is spent hoovering up croissant crumbs, much to the disgust of my croissant loving, over-weight, cat!   

I’ve just had one of those evenings where you are glad to be alive.  I biked down to the Loire with a friend from church and her 4yr old daughter in the evening sun.  We had a lovely picnic complete with table cloth and wine.  Friends joined us later on.  We snuggled together to keep warm while watching the most amazing Bastille day fireworks.  And then biked back up the hill home.  Lovely lovely lovely.  Thank you God for friends, fireworks and the 14th of July!!  

It was the youth group day out yesterday.  We went to an ‘interesting’ activity centre half an hour outside Tours.  I’m sure that it would fail health and safety in the UK on numerous points!!  But the kids had a great time.  There were chickens and goats running aboud free and bikes to ride which towed bath tubs!  It was 32°, so quite hot.  By the end of the day they were getting irritable!  But all in all we had a good time together and I hope it wa a day that they will remember.  

you might find this video interesting.  The guy talking is Raf, my collegue who works in the Loches church plant.

http://vimeo.com/24615711

I became an aunty to Charlie Samuel on the 14th June 2011!!  :-)  He is the cutest little thing ever and I can’t wait to meet him in just over 2 weeks!!!

My sister has is having a sloooooooow labour, so I may or may not be an aunty by the end of the day!!  I’m quite excited and glad it’s a bank holiday because it means I have nothing else to do but potter around and stay close to the phone!! 

I was invited to eat with a family tonight and I promised to bring an English dessert.  I made little individual trifles in glasses.  As I explained what it was called, the mother said, ‘Ah Trifle because it has 3 layers’.  !!!  I had never thought of that before, but I have just looked up the history of the word and she is right!!  Have you ever thought of that?? 

My first nephew is due to be born in the next few weeks.  We are all very excited!!  I’m planning on going to see my sister for 10 days at the begninng of July and meet the little fellow.  Until then I’ve been getting creative and trying to make things!  This is a pocket thingy to put on the end of his changing table to hold cotton wool and stuff.

So this is a really great short video of the town where I live and work:  http://vimeo.com/23588877

It shows you the beauty and the calmness that you find here.  But it made me think about all the people that we see, over 95% of whom will have absolutly no contact whatsoever with an evangelical church.  No chance to hear the Good News.  (I know God isn’t limited to us, don’t get me wrong…)

The French equivilant of the Evangelical Alliance have said that for a churches to have an impact in their communities there needs to be 1 church for every 10 000 inhabitants.  In Tours we have about 250 000 inhabitants and about 5 main stream churches.  20 more churches for this city alone.  (Just to compare, I recently heard that Gloucester, UK with a popilation of 130 000 has 96 churches!!!)

Pray for God’s Spirit to move in this country and that people would come and join in the harvest. 

On Sunday 8 people were baptized in a lake just outside Loches!  It was a great celebration of what’s Jesus’ transforming love does to a life when He is allowed to do his stuff!

The group was made up of a husband and wife in their 70s who ‘just never got round to getting baptized’!  A young couple who have come to know Jesus and will be getting married in a few weeks.  A mother and her 17yr old daughter.  A 27yr old ‘high flyer’ with a phD in some technical science thing.  And a little 12yr old who is busy telling all his friends how amazing Jesus is!  A mixed group that just shows that God’s message in the Bible is still relavent today to EVERYONE!