Well, the summer has gone swiftly by and I sit typing this in amazement at the greatness of God and that he would choose to use me. In Psalm 105:1 the Psalmist commands us to:

Give thanks to the LORD! call upon his name! make known his deeds among the peoples!

So I just want to share some of the cool things that God has done this summer in my life. I go to FIRE school of ministry in North Carolina and it doesn’t finish until like July 24th or so. So I only had 5 weeks of summer holidays. For the first three weeks I went to a program in Saskatchewan called Street Invaders. This is it’s 20th year running. I formerly went there the summer before grade 12 and God just radically opened up my eyes to how much bigger he is than I ever could have imagined. One of my friends Aidan went with me to Street Invaders and he had injured his ankle about 8 months before in football I think. I had seen the brace on many times. But at Street Invaders God totally healed his ankle. Also I felt the presence of God in a more powerful way than I could ever remember in my life before then. He is so good and I realized that there is far more to christianity than I had even thought possible.

So this summer when I came to Street Invaders my expectations were pretty high. I got to be a assistant leader for a team of 12 of us young people from England Alberta and Saskatchewan. We spent one week at Eston College in Eston doing a boot camp. It was a time of pretty intense spiritual renewal and meeting with God each night. The nighttime services would start at 7:00 and go on sometimes until like 1 or 2 in the morning. They were very freeflowing and Spirit-led. I still remember the night at Street Invaders four years earlier when in worship I knelt down and closed my eyes and looked up to heaven and I felt that I saw Jesus with his arms wide open saying “I love you David”. I would never be the same.

Then my team got together and went to Kindersley Saskatchewan for two weeks. We were heavily involved with Kindersley Christian Fellowship church while we were there and they were some of the most hospitable and welcoming people I have ever met. The first week we started doing a VBS at the local park and usually between 6-8 kids would show up. Some of these kids came from really hurting homes and it was really cool just to be like fathers and mothers to them and show them the love of our heavenly father. Honestly even though nothing really extraordinary happened that alone made it one of my favourite parts of the trip.

That Sunday the church let our team almost take over the whole service and get to step out in ways that we never had before in leading worship and doing drama’s and dances and I was even invited to preach. It was pretty much my first time preaching in my life to a whole church. So needless to say I was a bit nervous but I really felt that I should share what God had been teaching me these last nine months about hunger for him. So that’s what I did. Although during worship before the message I felt like God wanted to heal some people, he said “there are people here with pain in their ears, eye infections and an infringement on their bones”. I thought it was also very likely that this wasn’t God’s voice at all and I just wanted to make something happen. But as I got up to preach after praying I just spoke those things out in faith, it was either God or it wasn’t and after all the pastor of the church had said to me “Don’t hold anything back today”. It turns out each one of those was right on and so the whole church prayed for those people. I haven’t heard any testimonies from those but one lady in the church did get healed that day. She couldn’t lift anything very heavy for two years and that day she was showing me how she was lifting this big pitchers of iced tea. Praise God!!!

The next week in the afternoons we went out and did street ministry. We actually got to do treasure hunts two or three times. One team went out and they had the clues “Tim, frozen food aisle, cancer” and at the frozen food aisle they met a guy named Tim who had cancer and they got to pray for him. So God was definitely sending us to be there for him. My friend Stephen had 7-eleven black hair, piercings and mohawk. And sure enough in the seven eleven we saw a guy with black hair mohawk and piercings. We introduced ourselves and I showed him the clues and that he was God’s treasure and I asked him if there was anything that we could pray for him for? He asked me if we would pray for him right there in the store or by ourselves outside and I said “Whatever you are most comfortable with” and he opened up right away the burden of his heart and he said “My son is in the intensive care unit of the Saskatoon Hospital right now, and it’s because of that I feel like I can’t really trust God right now. So I would appreciate all the prayer I can get but I just don’t want to be there.” With that we left and prayed for his son Dexter.

Another funny one I got while we were praying for clues was “Applebees”. That’s a restaurant where I live in states but as far as I know they don’t have any in Canada. So I felt like “Well, this definitely can’t be from God then” but I wrote it down anyways. As we are going out we are in the parking lot of A&W and somebody on my team says “Hey look at that license plate it says ‘APPLE B’”. I whip out my paper and look at the license plate and sure enough that’s what it says. So we whip out of the parking lot and start chasing down this car and following them. They park and then we do and some of the girls start talking to them and it turns out that their last name is applebee. They were just on their way to church and I get to pray for them. The wife is sick and they were visibly touched by our prayer and talking with them.

We also did the treasure hunt with houses and got to pray for a whole lot of people and talk with them about God. One lady we actually got to mow her whole lawn and pray for her, just sharing the love of God with no strings attached. One thing about Kindersley is that there is very little for the kids to do and so many of them have gotten into drugs. So we helped out with this brand new program called ikids. A really good way for kids to have fun and play games on these big tvs and also play games in the gym. By the last night we were there 47 kids showed up to it.

Just getting to know the team and caring about each other and having fun together changed a lot of the way that I see ministry. It’s such a healing thing just to have fun together and make crazy inside jokes and really make a safe place of belonging. I learned that it is ok to make mistakes, I realized that I had stopped giving myself permission to make mistakes. I wanted to do everything right and if I wasn’t confident I could do something well I often wouldn’t step out and try something crazy. But in an environment like Street Invaders where it’s such a place of love and acceptance I learned I could step out in totally new areas in safety. That was really powerful. Everybody on our team was so amazingly unique and beautiful in the way that they lived their life. I really miss them already.

After that I worked for a week at Dallas Valley ranch camp. I had been going to this camp ever since I was 9 years old and so this was like my 12th summer there or something. It was one of the best weeks of camp that I have had. I got a cabin that really just loved to have fun together, it was kind of tough to get them quiet to go to bed. But I loved the way they included everybody and just made jokes all the time. I really wanted to show them the reality of God and how near he is so I let them hear a 10 minute clip of a teaching from a pastor who had to leave the pastorate because he lost his voice. It became really strained and raspy but as he is talking about the greatness and soveriegnty of God who heals all our deseases (Psalm 103) you can actually listen as God totally heals his voice. It is so beautiful. Also I told them some testimonies and prayed for healing as often as I could. One of them had pain in his thighs that totally went away and another had pain in his feet that went away by morning.

The most powerful time of camp was the campfire on Saturday night. This is a time when campers share what they liked about the week, any decisions they made for Christ, and what they are going to do when they go home. One camper shared really powerfully and personally what had been going on in her life. And it just freed everyone else to release the pain in their hearts. People were crying all over and testifying how partying and drugs never satisfy compared to Jesus. It was unlike any other campfire I had ever been at. When I got back to the cabin one of my campers pulled me aside and said “David I need to recommit my life to Jesus tonight”. God is so good.