With Thanksgiving and Black Friday eating up two of our days this week our speaker, Danny Lehmann, packed a lot into just 3 days. Danny Lehmann lives here on the Big Island, and travels extensively, preaching the gospel and teaching on evangelism, missions, and the disciplined life. He is the Dean of the College of Christian Ministries, YWAM International’s teaching arm. Teaching us from his latest book “Beautiful Feet: Steps to a Lifestyle of Evangelism” and the Acts of the Apostles. Danny shared that in evangelism there is always a messenger, a message, a motive and a method, he unpacked each of these in great depth revealing five levels under each. We talked a lot about the importance of seed planting, watering and reaping, and the need to develop relationship and walk alongside. For the Cursillistas reading this, he built on both our Action statement to “make a friend be a friend and bring your friend to Christ”, and our talk about the Study and Evangelization of our Environment, but with great enthusiasm coming from his experiences in world-wide missions and he has us pumped up and ready for sharing our faith with a greater boldness.
Our study of Acts 17 saw Paul using 5 examples of how to share the gospel in 5 different places. Paul reasoned, explained, proved, proclaimed, persuaded and they joined, in Thessalonika, in Berea and 3 locations in Athens; the synagogue, the marketplace and the Areopagus (Mars Hill).

Some takeaways from the teaching:
* You don’t have to become a Christian to be saved, you just have to believe on the Lord Jesus Christ.
* In their extremes Calvinists become lazy & Armenians become neurotic.
* Quantity causes quality to be diluted.
* Do your best, pray that it is blessed and let God do the rest.
* Good disciples make good disciples.
* Too many Christians live in Romans 7 we need to launch them into Romans 8.

On Thursday we took part in the campus Thanksgiving Celebration.

It was a great expression of gratitude that began with a time of worship and praise followed by Darlene Cunningham sharing about many of the great things God has done through the first 54 years of YWAM, especially here in Kona. She related one story from the early days where there was nothing to serve for Thanksgiving Dinner and after praying for a solution to the problem, some ladies from the local Episcopal Church showed up and invited the 150+ YWAMers to Thanksgiving Dinner for free. Loren Cunningham shared the BIG plan for future development of the undeveloped portion of the University of the Nations campus. The area inside the gold box on the map is in existence today the other 3/4 of the land has yet to be developed and will include a 3,500 seat, sound-proofed theatre (noise complaints are common), with IMAX, the Lokahi multi-media studio, K-12 school, classrooms, student and staff housing, workshops and storage, an athletic park with tennis and basketball courts, football field & swimming pool.

So, we all set off on a prayer walk around the outside of the property, stopping to pray for all the expansion plans, for funding to be released, for students to come and for the world to be changed. Walking the 1.5 miles cemented the “bigness” of the vision and the need for God to continue supplying miracles reinforcing the simple fact that this organization is founded on supernatural principles and cannot exist without God.
 

Then on Thursday evening we picked up a rental car with plans to head around the northern coast road over to the east side with Jon & Joyce, two of our suite mates. The Big Island has 11 of the 13 climate zones that occur on the Earth, we were about to travel through 8 of them. Along the way we visited some historic sites, some scenic points, the towns of Waimea and Hilo,along the coast some were very windy, some very wet. Near Hilo we went to the Hawaii Tropical Botanical Gardens, we walked down through the spectacularly colourful and lush tropical rain forest which was in stark contrast to the very black and white scene that was waiting for us when Onomea Bay came into view. It was hard to believe as we looked out to sea that behind was such greenery and colour.

We stayed overnight at the Hilo Seaside Hotel, then enjoyed a relaxing morning, well, I was out walking with my camera early, then breakfast at Ken’s House of Pancakes

followed by a drive over the Saddle Road back to Kona. Sunday morning we took Andy & Beth to Living Stones Church then down the coast to Kealakekua Bay & Captain Cook, Ho’Okena Beach Park and back up to Mauka Meadows coffee estate. A busy weekend but fun to relax and get away a bit further away from the base for a while.

Wildlife this week:

Black-crowned Night Heron

Rooster

Bird of Paradise

That’s all for this week, take care, be blessed and be a blessing, A&G.