It’s my intention this year, 2023, to keep up with writing more updates and to encourage our team to do so…. Please forgive the silence on here from our part of the world!
This year has begun with an intensity to it! After short times away for a lot of our team, visiting family and the Australian coast, we have all arrived back to Alice Springs and to the news that crime in our town has escalated by 53% in the last few months.
The media has been covering a lot of stories on our part of the world, so here is a short update I wrote recently, letting everyone know how we are:
“Thanks to everyone for your enquires this week, following media coverage of challenges in Alice Springs…
So you know, mercifully, we are all personally okay- our buildings, homes, church, cars, busses, our team, at this point… Thank You Jesus…
Our Aboriginal team have been struggling as the drinking in the camps has got worse and with more violence, kids are fleeing the camps. That’s some of why they’re on the streets and causing some trouble… but these displaced kids are also showing up at our leader’s homes. We’ve been discipling and supporting Aboriginal leaders and they are becoming the light houses of our community. They’re some of the safe adults, the ones who aren’t drunk. A place there’s food… but please pray, as even their children are getting pulled into it. There are evil spirits here with strong pulls on our kids. The kids and all of us with kids here, Indigenous and non Indigenous, need a lot of protection, a lot prayer.
We are looking to keep working closely with these families, these beacons of light and to support them however we can….
Some things our Aboriginal brothers and sisters are saying:
“Alice Springs is getting worse” “people have gone mad for drink”…. They’re their realities…. almost daily we hear of requests for prayer. Someone has been stabbed in the chest, another one in ICU, I heard a rumour someone bled to death after their arms were chopped off…. Things go around here….
Either way, going out at night is done very carefully and we now need to always prepare to stop on the way home and pick up a drunk person sitting in the middle of the road who could get hit by a car at any moment…
Honestly, these things have always been a part of life here as long as we’ve been here, however the increase - in the severity of behaviour as well as the numbers of incidences, is what has captured people’s attention now.
We have more team on the way to come and help serve with us. People might say “it’s a bad time to move to Alice Springs”… but from our point of view, it’s the best time…
Our church meetings have been full to over flowing the last few weeks. There are so many testimonies of what God is doing, revelations of scripture and new songs and sounds of worship, that our meetings could go a whole day and night…
The light keeps shining -and even brighter in the darkness…. all authority in Heaven and on earth is in the hands of just One- our Jesus… Matt 28:18. We have no where else to go but deeper into His heart and to trust Him like never before…
Our greatest joy is to give our love to God by our obedience to Him and, live by the example of the apostle Paul, to count whatever we go through on this earth as joy…
Here is a fun photo from a few days ago…. The waterholes around our town are beautifully full, and many of us are enjoying the refreshment!
Thank you for your love and prayers!”
There are kids here everywhere needing love and discipling. They are crying out! Hands and feet and people with the right heart and calling to ‘go’ are what’s most needed in this ripe harvest field.
Today I met a young woman of 25 who has a young daughter. The woman has recently got back from a large hospital after having an 8 hour surgery on her broken skull after being beaten on her head by her husband who is now in jail. As I sat on the dirt with her and heard her story, her Aunty was painting a large piece our local church commissioned her to paint…. It feels like the most perfect and prophetic time to birth a piece of art like it is…
The woman who painted it has become a true sister to me these last years and she spoke of God creating everything “even storms”. The childlike simplicity of the message ministers deeply in this environment where so much pain is- God is still beautifully all powerful and in control. There is hope in every dark thing we go through -because of Jesus.