Recent photos: Young Life events & Brendan and I around gorgeous Sydney, including a sculpture from Sculptures by the Sea at Bondi Beach

Brooke's Australia Adventure Update - Summer 2010, January 3, 2010

Brooke’s Australia Adventure Update – Summer 2010, January 3, 2010

Dear friends,

I hope this update finds you all a little more relaxed and full… full of love, family and memories as another Christmas has gone by and the New Year has begun; and I hope you’ve been able to reflect. Being quiet and reflecting is not a discipline common in our day and age. For those of us of faith, I do believe it is an essential one though. I have been challenged in the past two months or so just how fast life can run and how full I can make it on my own strength and of the fact I am not created to do that. One of the Ten Commandments that the Lord gave to his people the Israelites, through Moses was this:
Exodus 20:8-11
“Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the LORD your God. On it you shall not do any work, neither you, nor your son or daughter, nor your manservant or maidservant, nor your animals, nor the alien within your gates. For in six days the LORD made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but he rested on the seventh day. Therefore the LORD blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.”

William Wilberforce, the English politician and reformer said this about the Sabbath:
“The Sabbath is a season of rest, in which we may be allowed to unbend the mind, and give a complete loose to those emotions of gratitude and admiration, which a contemplation of the works, and a consideration of the goodness, of God cannot fail to execute in a mind of the smallest sensibility.
May every Sabbath be to me, and to those I love, a renewal of these feelings, of which the smallest tastes we have in this life should make us look forward to that eternal rest, which awaits the people of God; when the whole world will be a never-ending enjoyment of those feelings of love and joy and admiration and gratitude, which are, even in the limited degree we experience them, the truest sources of comfort…”
The Life of William Wilberforce (1838)

There is a sickness at work in our modern culture – busyness. November for me was chock full of events, many of them very good and important ones for Young Life. We had a Trivia Night fundraiser; a BBQ fundraiser at Bunnings, the local hardware store; a Barefoot Bowls event to thank donors and bring together friends; a City Connect breakfast to connect people who are committed to the vision of Young Life and who work in downtown Sydney; the All City Club where we bring together the three parts of the city where Young Life’s ministry extends for a larger scale time together to minister to kids… and the list goes on. In addition to these events for Young Life, I had a few also for Women’s Forum. We had our annual board retreat at the Hunter Valley for a weekend (more relaxed than busy, thank God!); our National Dinner in Canberra on the 25th of November, which is White Ribbon Day to remember violence against women; and quite a few speaking engagements around Faking It (www.fakingit.org) just to round out the month. It was also the month that the National Prayer Breakfast occurred down in Canberra, so Brendan and I had the honour of joining the event and I was able to help the organizational team for one small part of the event. All the things I am describing and remembering back on are amazing, unique opportunities and I felt there was favour in all of them from the Lord… yet at the end of the month, I was feeling a bit empty and honestly December brought even a bit of depression… why? I think in part because I so often believe the lie that to be busy is to be successful. I don’t really enter into the Sabbath rest that God gives his people. Why? Perhaps because I feel a pressure to excel that pushes me to work more and not take rest… perhaps I fill up my off-time with activity still that actually isn’t restful… perhaps I don’t believe that God has created me this way to need rest and I don’t trust him to fulfill what he says he will do in the 6 days he has given me to work so I still work the 7th day… perhaps a little bit of all of this. I share all of this with you, in some ways to ask for your prayers for me and to perhaps serve as a mirror into what you too might be facing. My prayer is that we would be willing to stop and trust even more in 2010 that there is a loving God alive and at work in our lives, who has good plans and he wants us to know him and be awakened to them and the blessings that come from obeying His word.

Lamentations 3:22-23
“Because of the LORD’s great love we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail. They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness.”

December thankfully was a bit calmer and I am beginning to feel more recharged. In Australia, December not only ends the calendar year, but since it is the beginning of summer, it ends the school year for the children. I have just completed my first ten months (basically the school year) in the role of Area Manager for Young Life and it is was interesting to see how things wound down at the end of the school year, and yet there’s a tension that camp is coming very soon after the holidays… this has meant that there has been a continuous logistical challenge to continue to plot and plan throughout this season. I’d love for you to pray with us for our annual Extreme Summer Camp, which will take place from the 17th-22nd of January. For the first time we will be at a new property, Copeton Waters State Park near Inverell in northern New South Wales. Please, lift up the following requests:
- Logistics: transport, hiring of equipment, finances, safety, etc
- Team: work crew, summer staff, assigned team, cabin leaders
- Kids who come: open hearts, ears that would hear…
- Specifically, the cabin of girls I am leading:
o Bree
o Mary
o Jess
o Jenny
o Rachelle
o Tasha

These, and so many more prayers are on my heart as I’ve been helping administratively to prepare for camp this year. One of the greatest blessings I’ve had in this is being able to receive applications from folks that want to serve as Work Crew or Summer Staff for us. In Young Life people volunteer to help run the different elements of camp, and not only do they do it for free, they even pay their way to be there for the week! Why? Well, I was reminded that many of these folks, some of them still teenagers themselves, or now uni (university) aged, have met Jesus for the first time at a Young Life camp! Now, the love of Christ compels them to give back and serve so that the camp experience of another teenager can be just as excellent a caliber as they had and so that Jesus can be glorified. It is an amazing honour to be able to see Jesus affect change in people’s lives and camp is the culmination of a whole year of ministry in the lives of those who come that have been hearing all year about Jesus. May many new births happen this year at camp! Please also friends pray for the finances for the ministry of Young Life, as a national organization, and the continued sustainability in my local area. As part of a faith mission, we believe God to provide for our needs according to His riches and glory. If God lays it on your heart to become a supporter of this mission financially, please sign up online at: www.younglife.org.au. (For more about Young Life, please also read the latest Ryde and Northern Sydney update attached).

Philippians 2: 3 & 4 (all the way to verse 11 is Work Crew memorization)
“Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit, but in humility consider others better than yourselves. Each of you should look not only to your own interests, but also to the interest of others.”

With Women’s Forum Australia work, in December my coworker Tahlia and I created modules to be used in our pilot program for a project entitled, the School Ambassadors Program. The idea behind the program is to recruit a few ambassadors, girls in years 10-12 that would present these modules that flesh out the research presented in Faking It for their peers. These modules cover topics such as: body image, healthy eating, healthy relationships, objectification of women, early sexualisation of girls, etc. It is a very exciting and engaging project and one that is allowing many of the volunteers I’ve been getting to know this past year in Sydney an opportunity to help with a concrete program, and that too is gratifying. This project starts first term of this year (February 2010), so your prayers for that also would be appreciated. Also, if you live in Sydney and know of any girls in a local school that would be interested in the program, or know of a school that may want it run, please let me know.

One of the great joys of the past few months for Brendan and I is choosing to join a local church. It seems for me that although I have actively attended church in Australia since my arrival almost 3 years ago, I still hadn’t found a place to call home. Brendan and I had been praying that once we married and moved into the city the Lord would bring us to a place that was local, cared for our neighborhood and that we would feel at home in. We found it the first Sunday back from our honeymoon, but committed to membership in November. We’ve joined God in the City, located only a few blocks from our house in the neighbourhood of Darlinghurst. It is the city campus of Christian City Church, which is a church that the main campus is located in a northern beach community of Sydney called Oxford Falls (www.myc3church.net). One of the greatest blessings about the church is the worship. They love to praise God and have a creative arts ministry that writes a lot of their own music. Check out our favourite song of the past year from the church, “Send Down Your Love” at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-YU_Mvm668. We look forward in this New Year to becoming more a part of the ministry and we hope together to be able to join a small group to know other believers in the church and grow as a couple more.

Speaking of Brendan, we’ve been very much enjoying the beginnings of our marriage and had a great time of celebration with the festive season in Sydney at Christmas parties, having Kris Kringle’s, seeing the Nights of Lights (the very fun Christmas lights lighting up many of the historic sandstone buildings in the CBD), and eating lots of chocolate with friends and family. Brendan has been an incredible gift to me and I am so grateful at God’s wisdom in choosing the right spouse to complement and support my life and calling. We are embarking on a very fun journey together right after I finish camp… we’ll be coming to the US and Canada for almost three weeks from the 24th of January until the 11th of February. So, friends if you live in New York City, Punta Gorda, Orlando, Jacksonville, Washington, DC, Montreal, Kingston or Toronto – if we can, we’d love to see you! It will be a whirlwind tour undoubtedly, but we wanted to come and show the wedding photos to our friends and family who couldn’t make the wedding Down Under. Plus, the airfares were affordable enough to do it now and allow us to be with family and friends to celebrate my 30th birthday. We will also be in Washington for the week of the National Prayer Breakfast, gratefully staying with my family there at the Southeast White House. We hope to catch up with many of you if we can then. More and more of you are also coming to Sydney, and I promise I am getting to be quite a good tour guide – just ask Zoe from DC, or Geke and Christy from Bermuda who have all visited in the last month. It is such a pleasure to show off the beauty that is Down Under, but I have to admit I am looking so forward to being back on “home turf” for a little while.

Philippians 3:12-14
“Not that I have already obtained all this, or have already been made perfect, but I press on to take hold of that which Christ Jesus took hold of me. Brothers, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus.”

As we reflect on what is behind, let us not stay there, but let us look with joy and boldness as to what this year holds for us all- individually and corporately.

Thank you for your friendship and love,

Brooke