XLR8

I realized the other day that we haven't told you too much about the children's program that we have at the church! It is called XLR8 and it is every Friday afternoon from 3:30-5:00. The children range anywhere from preschool to 6th grade. It is run by a lady in the church and I help her out. XLR8 averages about 20-30 kids. Quite a few of the kids do not go to our church, so it's a really neat opportunity to get kids into the church and learn about the Lord!

This term the students learned the books of the Bible, the 12 disciples, the Beatitudes and 5 Bible verses! All term they work really hard to learn their information, because at the end of the term they are quizzed in order to earn badges. Last Sunday we had an XLR8 awards ceremony where the students were presented with the badges that they had learned from the term. Here are a few pictures from the event!

At the start of the awards ceremony, the kids sang and did the motions for their favorite song! Jesus is My Superhero :)

The student's names were called one-by-one and they came up to the front where they were pinned with their badges!

Friday Night!!

Yesterday was so much fun! It is the end of the school term and schools are going on break for the next 2 weeks. The church ministries are in recess for the next 2 weeks because a lot of people go out of town during this time. For the last youth group of the term we decided to go roller skating. It was so much fun! For a lot of the kids, it was the first time they had been. It was so fun to watch them progress throughout the night. At first they were hanging on to the wall, then they gained a little confidence and let go. By the end of the night they were skating like old pros! They were very sad to leave because they were finally starting to get the hang of it. Needless to say, we will be going back again! It was such a great night to celebrate the end of the term and have fellowship together! Below is a pictures of our awesome youth leaders!

I'm (Sam) enjoying getting to know the women in our church. Yesterday, I was blessed to be able to join in the Friday morning women's Bible study. Before we got started, I was so surprised because they presented me with my very own Aussie cookbook!!! I've been asking for some new Aussie recipes and now I have my very own book!! Our Pastor's wife contacted the women in the church and they sent all of their favorite recipes. I'm looking forward to trying them out. I felt so blessed by this!! I loved the note in the beginning because it has a lot of fun Aussie words, so I thought I'd let you read it to :) Below it is a picture of my new cookbook!

This cooking book is from a few of your mates to help you become closer to a true blue Aussie. I am sure you will get heaps more recipes during your stay with us. I am not sure if there is such a thing as dinkum Aussie tucker. Check out how many come from other countries! But them are all YUM AS! Many blessings as you enjoy whipping up a storm in Oz.

Much Love,

Your Friends

Yeppoon Wesleyan Methodist Church.

Finally, this is just a picture of the sunset as we were leaving work the other night. So beautiful!!

Baby Night

This week's theme for youth group was Baby Night. We started off the night with devotions, where we focused on the passage in Hebrews 5 that says, "Anyone who lives on milk, being still an infant, is not acquainted with the teaching about righteousness. But solid food is for the mature, who by constant use have trained themselves to distinguish good from evil." We challenged the students to look where they are at in their walk with the Lord. Are they in the beginning where they need to be drinking the milk and focusing on the elementary teachings in the Bible? Or have they been a Christian for a while and it's now time for them to move onto more solid food and take the initiative to be in God's word and grow past the elementary teachings. Even in the 2 1/2 short months that we've been here, we've already seen a lot of growth among the youth. They are asking so many good questions and they are hungry to learn more about God's word.

All of the games revolved around things that babies do. We had a great time coming up with all of the games! Here are a few pictures from the night.

For the first game, there was one student who was picked to be the "baby." The baby then had to go to the mums (that's how they say mom here) to get taken care of. One mom had to put on a Nappy (diaper), the next mom had to put the bib on the baby, next the mum had to feed the baby. The bottles each had coke in them. Then the baby had to be burped and finally the bib had to be taken off. Once all of this was complete, the baby had to crawl back to the starting line. The first team to finish won. Unfortunately, there was a lot of rug burn!!

The next game was called Nappy clean up. The students had to eat crunchy peanut butter out of a nappy. Gross....

This game was called Messy Nappy. Earlier in the day, Sean and I melted 4 different kinds of chocolate bars and placed them in the nappies. The students had to guess what chocolate bars they were. Afterwards, some of them wanted to eat the chocolate out of the nappies.

The last game was an obstacle course. At the beginning of the race, the students had to put on a nappy and hop with a potato sack. Some other things they had to do throughout the race were putting on a bib, drinking a bottle, eating baby food and spitting a dummy (pacifier) through a hoop. It was a great night!!

Day Off

Our day off is Tuesday. We do our best to keep Tuesday's very relaxing and carefree. We also try to use this day to do some exploring! This week we decided to have a date day and we went to Rockhampton (a larger town about 30 minutes away) to see a movie. We went and saw the movie The Help which was so good! Probably one of the best movies we've seen in a while. After, we found this beautiful park called Kershaw Gardens and we walked around for a bit. I thought I'd take some pictures for you because we thought it was so pretty.

Yes, Sean is growing a beard!

There were really nice paths all around the park. We wished we had bikes or roller blades!!

Pretty waterfalls!

Just a short post today, but we just wanted to share the beautiful place that we found :) Take care!