Reorientation

Well we're back! We will plan on a presentation of our trip tonight for those who come to prayer and devotion time. Then the Wednesday before we kick off Discipleship Training for the fall, we hope to have a Wednesday night when you can hear how your church reached others with the presence and power of Christ all summer through mission trips and camps for all ages. We hope to have a great DVD to link to the front page of the website. Our trip was successful in several veins: 1. Prayer. We prayed and were prayed over. Prayer was a deep part of the experience in this trip! Thank you for your prayers! 2. Witness. We witnessed to the theme of God helping us with our sense of identity. In God we become OK with who we are, where we are and what we are. We then tied those to the fruit of the Spirit (Love, joy and peace -- who we are; patience, kindness and charity -- being OK with where we are; and finally faithfulness, gentleness and self-control = being OK with what we are). The message caught on overall and several people are deeping their faith or coming to faith for the first time. 3. Refreshment. We worked hard and experienced great images of God through the people, Westray Baptist Church, CE Camp and their leaders, and through the beauty of the landscape in the Orkney Islands. We were refreshed by this experience of God's mighty power! In any trip there is time for orientation: what to expect and plan for before going. Then there is disorientation when you run at a breakneck pace to catch planes, taxis and ferry's in order to reach your destination. After arriving in a strange and different place and tempo... and experiencing disorientation, there comes the return home and the requirement for reorientation. We need to reorient ourselves into our common homeplace but with new insights learned from our trip. We're working on the latter part of this experience. Thanks to all who made this trip and make this sister church relationship possible with the wonderful congregation of Westray Baptist Kirk! God bless, Steve