(Almost) Robbed & Flooded
Hallöchen ihr Lieben! Unglaublich, aber wahr, es ist Halbzeit.
大家好，很難想像，但時間已經不知不覺過了一半
Hello everybody! It’s unbelievable but it’s already halftime. We can’t wait to share with y’all (you all) what happened in this intense week.
After Church on Sunday morning (see our last blog), we met a girl who became a Christian recently. We invited her and her friend to join us for a worship night. In the afternoon, we kept asking ourselves if they really would come. While we were parking the OTG van outside the church, we were very excited to see them entering the building. We were so happy that they really came and popped out of the van immediately.
Meanwhile on the way to the church, some of us were also trying to guess how many people will be at the worship night. But when we got there, all of us were so indulged in the beautiful songs and forgot to count. In the end, we could not figure out who won but indeed we all had a very good night. The only thing we knew was there were lots of people. It was cool to hear the girl and her friend enjoyed the evening and felt the Holy Spirit.
This week, we tramped in Abel Tasman National Park, one of the most famous national Parks in New Zealand. We enjoyed some beautiful golden beaches and water. The first day we walked about eight hours and camped on the beach. There, we finally met the (in)famous weka. We heard different “funny” stories about them before and learned how cunning they are, for example they steal glasses and socks. So we knew that we needed to be careful with our stuff. But there we fully witnessed the things they are capable of when one weka jumped on the table and opened the zipper of one of our backpacks and tried to grab the food inside!
While we were still being amazed by the weka, we suddenly met another interesting bird: kaka. They are very beautiful and very rare to meet in New Zealand. They are not afraid of humans. We all took a lot pictures of them. This is certainly one of several highlights of this week.
We have been focussing on how the old and new testaments tie together perfectly in the Bible. People no longer offer sacrifices to atone for their sin, because Christ Jesus came to earth, died and rose again to pay for all sin once and for all. Do we accept this gift He has given us? How does it change our lives today? These are important truths that we want to understand more fully as we continue to study God’s Word together.
On the second day we walked about five hours and had a lot of good and deep conversations. Even though there’s no bad weather in New Zealand but only different kind of good weather, Norm still decided to change our plans for our last day because of the rain.
Instead of the originally planned two-hour walk, we walked back for a hour to cross the river during low tide to get to a meeting point where we can get on a water taxi. We felt like we were the Israelites crossing Red Sea :)
We really enjoyed the scenery on the boat and the fact that we do not need to walk in the rain anymore (“Best tramp ever.” - Ye Jin). Anyway, everything is soaking wet :( We had pools in our boots not only because of the rain but also because we had to do the wet landing to the water taxi.
After about an hour, we suddenly found our water taxi is swimming on the land. Then we realised while we all are still sitting on the water taxi, they got a trailer to pull it back to its base. So in the end, we got the weirdest and funniest experience of riding on a boat on land through a village. It’s so unique that we had to take pictures to capture this moment.
After the warmest van trip back to OTG Basecamp, we enjoyed Mexican foooooood~~~, hot shower and dry clothes. How ‘bout that huh?
Prayer Requests:
Please pray that God prepares us and our loved ones in our home. So that when we continue our relationships with them, we can have wisdom and right words.
Please pray that we can find out our intentions and our driving force in God
Please pray for next week’s kayaking that we can have a prepared body and mind and God protects us.
Thank you for praying for our team!
Written by Andy (Hong Kong) & Leonie (Germany) on behalf of the entire OTG Team