Day 21

Saturday, 14th Aug. 2009

We said goodbye to our very dear and loved ship Maloli today. We all happened to get extremely close to it. With that, we also prayed for the captain and the crew and thanked them for everything they did for us. Then we left and drove to the restaurant of Daniel Cherlin, a dear friend who always took care of and provided food for the Summer Mission team. Sadly Daniel Cherlin and his wife were not there because of illnesses so his son, Ari, took his place in hosting us. We ate, prayed and talked about the trip. We also took time to thank the 5 “Parakletos” people from Ambon who have been with us and helping us throughout the entire trip. After, we left to go to our hotel by the beach to get some rest or do last minute work. We couldn’t believe we were about to say goodbye to this family that we now formed and have gone through hardships and victories with, laughed and panicked with, and received new definitions of friendship and servanthood through the actions of the each other. A friend is someone who holds your hand and swims with you through shark filled waters. A friend is someone who brings you food or medicine even when they might need it more but put you first. A friend is someone who gives you a push when you can’t climb a certain rock. Or someone who lets you lean on their shoulder when you get sleepy. We’ve formed many unbreakable friendships and have lit a fire in our hearts with a burning passion with one goal that we all share: serve God  and make Him proud. Tonight we had our all nighter devotion and we talked about finding our purpose on this trip and our plan on how to serve God with it. It was a pretty emotional time and we all devoted ourselves completely to God. This has been a most life changing experience, and through whatever we face, then and in the future, we will always stay in Christ and will always be Unshakeable.

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Day 20

Friday, 13th Aug. 2009

We climb aboard our beautiful Maloli once again for our trip to Rote. We are all so attached to this boat now, our faithful, though sometimes a little smelly, boat that we had doubted and hated before. The crew on the boat was also incredibly nice to us since they sacrificed their rooms for us to use and slept on floors around the boat. Even the captain gave up his room for the pastoral team to use. We get a little delayed and the waves were a bit too choppy for us to sail upon so we were held up at the port until the waves died down. So we sailed again on the beautiful sea thinking of the memories we’ve made on this life changing trip. We sit and and take an imaginary stroll down Reminiscence Blvd. and share and laugh at what’s happened. Getting stranded, seeing the most astounding miracles, and random silly things that happened to each other. We’re running late since we were held up at the port and we finally figure that once we arrive in Rote, it will be about 1 and a half hours before the crusade starts. Stress and panic arouse but we believe in the name of Jesus that everything will go as planned and everything will work by the time we need to start. We are running and yelling and unloading as fast as we probably can once we get to the field because we only have so much time before we need to start. But, after doing this for the past 3 weeks, we are all trained professionals and we finish the job in the record breaking fastest time of only 1 hour. We then have dinner at the Bupati’s office and meet him and his workers. Then we immediately get back to our field and get ready to start our last crusade of Summer Mission and end with the biggest bang we can make! Tonight our crusade was great and everything was working but we never got a good response from the people. They seemed very closed even though we pushed them to open up and worship. But we did our job and many people were still blessed. Victor Larson, who also happens to be our only American, and Cynthia Taidy Ong from Toronto gave testimonies tonight. To sum up tonight’s crusade, we had 1,500 people attend 10 were healed from sickness, and 200 received Jesus. Crusades are now officially done. Back to the ship and off to Kupang!

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