VCCM-Member Blogs

Blog Name	Title	Blogger	Last Update
Aussie in Thailand	March Newsletter	helen	2008/3/17 9:41
Hi Everyone, It is hard to believe that Easter is upon us. This year has been very exciting with lots of visitors and new family members and exciting new ventures for our Vineyard community. It is also time for my yearly Visa trip and I will be coming back to Australia arriving Brisbane 17th April and flying out on 29th May. I will spend two weeks in Sydney from Beginning of May I think. We have rented a big house at the front of my moobahn (village) just off the main road south as a base for Church, Vineyard School, a Coffee shop and rooms for rent during those months when school is not in progress. We were able to rent it for a very low price, and we are also now negotiating to be able to take over the owner's monthly payments and buy it. At the moment he has suggested a away over the top value so please pray for our lawyer and the negotiations. At the same time we were waiting for applications to be finalized with overseas students for the Vineyard School to commence in Feb, so we were running around trying to set up everything needed for church, for the classroom, and going to garage/yard sales buying furniture for all the bedrooms. Then the water pump didn't work, there were no hot water heaters for the showers and no fly screens downstairs. Getting all this done in a matter of weeks has probably given us a few more grey hairs but it has been worth it. Shan and Melissa have started a coffee shop downstairs and also the big room for church is on ground level as well as kitchen. Upstairs is a very big classroom and four bedrooms and numerous bathrooms. We have called the whole facility the Vineyard Cafe. We are now at the end of week three of our first Vineyard School and it has so far been a wonderful experience with lots of worship, ministry and great teaching. It was great to have Don Sciortino with us from California to bless us and teach for the first few days. We have students from Denmark, Indonesia and Korea. The two Indian students who so wanted to come were denied visas which is really sad but now they are looking at setting up a school themselves in India because of the difficulties in travel and visas. We do three weeks in the classroom and then one week practical. This next week the students will spend a week at the Vineyard in Rayong in the south where they have been really encouraged by some wonderful physical healing over past months. Next month they will head up north to the border and help renovate and paint a new Children's home and see something of what is happening with work with the Burmese in the border crossing town, and then to finish off in the third month they will spend time with Vineyard in Bangkok living and ministering in the slums. I feel so privileged to be part of all this. Worshipping and praying together and ministering and seeing the Lord bring freedom to his children is such fun Kingdom living. We have had a young Thai Uni student join us for the teaching this week and to see her gain more understanding of the Father's love which is so lacking in the Thai culture and the freedom she is beginning to walk in is just wonderful. Melissa and I are taking the students prayer walking on Wed afternoons and teaching them something of the history and nature of religion and spirit worship in Thailand. This is something of an eye opener and a new experience for some of our students. Two afternoons they have Thai language lessons and they seem to be catching on fast. They have younger brains than me! The last time I did my three month Visa run to Mae Sai I spent several days with the Burmese Pastors from the School where my Aussie friend Cherry has been teaching. It is great hearing all their stories of how they were saved and how God protects them in Burma. One of those pastors, Nai Thang was not able to have his family with him while he was studying in Mae Sai so they decided they would make their way to the Refugee Camp in Mae Sot which is the most well known border areas between Thailand and Burma.(go see the new Rambo movie and you will see it) Nai Thang felt God was calling him to go to the camp and evangelize in the camp. He can be with his family there and they are safe and can go to school there. He asked Cherry if she could take his few belonging down there for him(mostly books), He traveled down there by public buses and was not stopped once (which was just as well as he did not have the papers to do it) and once he arrived Cherry and I set off with his possessions. He would not let us drive him in case we got arrested for taking him! It is hard to see so many people penned up in such a small area with so little hope of a change in their circumstances. The camp runs for a couple of kms along a road in the lee of a huge rock mountain to protect them on the back side from Burmese attack and there are guards and road block at either end. It is beautiful scenery but to have 50,000 people in such a small area is dreadful. They have a school and several Karen churches. Nai Thang has chosen to live in the Moslem section!! He has a beautiful wife ,four boys and a daughter. Please pray for him. We are waiting for him to contact Cherry to let us know their needs and how we can best help him. We hated walking away and leaving them there! The news on Patricia is not the best. The public hospital system is dreadful and she had been admitted three times for the surgery and had to be sent home because of another emergency. Last time the doctor actually took her into the room and showed her the woman with the broken neck he had to operate on instead of her. This has really affected her and the next week she refused to go back into OPD and spend the whole day with all the smells and hundreds of sick people to start the booking process all over again. I can't say I blame her but there is no other option. So for the last two weeks she has been drinking again and avoiding seeing me as she is feeling like God doesn't care and she is probably feeling guilty about drinking too. Please pray as we cannot afford to have the surgery in a private hospital. Pray for Domino too so that he can stay sane through all of this!!! Could you pray for my health. I have been sick for over three weeks with a horrible throat, ear, chest infection for which I took a really strong antibiotic (and yes I have had lots of prayer) but I am still not really well and I have a nagging cough. I guess some rest would have been helpful but that has not been possible. Opposition also continues in the form of my car boiling over on Wed and now I have a warped head (but some of you already knew that) and my mechanic is going to try a new head gasket but he thinks the head will need grinding so I have no car for a few days and I hate to think what it will cost! This week summer has arrived with a vengeance but can't complain as we have had a longer than usual winter and soon I will be complaining about being cold in Australia! I think that is all the main news and my newsletters are always too long so I will stop now. Thank you all for your love and support and prayers and all you Aussies, I will see you soon. Much love and God bless, Helen

LJs in New Zealand	Back In Auckland	kiwimobro	2007/2/14 13:06
Here's us at Parachute with Third Day After an AWESOME time at the Parachute festival where I worked REALLY hard and had tons of fun, we spent a very relaxing week at the beach with Sharon's mum and aunt. We went swimming, played board games and mini-golf, read books and enjoyed a very slow pace of life. This week we are back in west Auckland staying on a friend's property - living in a camper van and tent and sharing the house also. It's fun. The property is large (10 acres) and peaceful ... and has internet access! Yesterday we went to one of our supporting churches who had invited us to a baptism of one of their members down at the beach. The church is Owairaka Vineyard. It felt so welcoming and friendly - very much the same feel as VCCM I thought! Later we shared about our work during their regular Sunday service and then we had dinner with the pastor and his family who are long time friends of ours. During the day we talked with Sorawit, a young Thai man we'd met two years ago when we visited their church. At that time he was not a believer, but had become a believer after hearing my testimony last time. I was great to see him again and encourage him.
Cwpdbyad:	Hi!, <a href="http://bestsx.gigazu.com/lusiya-seks.html">ëþñèÿ ñåêñ</a>, [url="http://bestsx.gigazu.com/lusiya-seks.html"]ëþñèÿ ñåêñ[/url], http://bestsx.gigazu.com/lusiya-seks.html ëþñèÿ ñåêñ, :),
When a man builds a house...	Breakthrough	Norbert	2006/11/17 17:38
I actually thought that I was done with this blog, with the house being finished and all - but I was wrong! Those of you that own houses know, that you are never done. There is either some maintenance, or some improvement that needs to be done. Well, in my case, I had this dream of a water garden with a small fishpond in the front of the house, and so I decided to go for it. It just so happens, that the place I had picked for the pond was the exact same place, where the cement mixer had stood during construction. For months, every evening the workers rinsed out the machine and dumped the cement water on the ground. I guess by now you can guess what happened when I started digging... that's right... once I got through the grass and the first few inches of dirt, there was this layer of cement that I had to work my way through! It took me weeks just to excavate the hole for the pond (and it turned out a bit more shallow than I had planned...). Now every time I wanted to plant anything around the pond I had to use a pick-ax, or sometimes even hammer and chisel just to make a small hole for a plant. In some places the layer of cement was quite thin, but one time it took me 2 hours just for one small hole. More than once I just wanted to quit, and kept grumbling and complaining. And then it came - the Lord started speaking, and I realized the lessons were not over. He reminded me that every time a new soul is planted in the Kingdom, there is some hard ground to break up, and planting a church will never be easy (not that I did not know that...). In the end I finished the project, and do you know what kept me going? Well, I did not know how thick the layer of cement would be for each hole, but I did know one thing: Eventually, there would be a breakthrough - and there always was!

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