Ciao!

Well, this is it. My last post.
No! Not ever! Just until we've been on our jolly holiday with my parents! Yay! Can't wait!
Tomorrow we sort and pack and clean and sort and pack (some of this hopefully involves a new swimming costume purchase...) and then on Friday we take the Overlander all the way to Auckland. That's twelve hours on a train. Oh my! Quite excited about it though, should be amazing. I'm just not so sure about 12 hours...
We then have Saturday to ourselves in Auckland before acquiring The Parents on Sunday morning. So much YAY!
So...since I last wrote...
Well, the sermon went pretty well. Lots of people said lots of nice things to me afterwards (including that they were very challenged. Which is cool. I also told them that I had written about it all on here and about ruthie g's and simon h's advice which also went down well :).).
On Monday, Husbink didn't start work until 4pm. We had lots of jobs to do so this was good. One of the first jobs required a trip to a garden centre to sort out our non-working lawn mower. While there, I spied a very reduced gas BBQ and was sorely tempted. But we decided to apply the "few hour rule" (no time for the 24 hour rule) and left it while we went and had lunch and a paddle in the sea (yes, I know I said there were *lots* of jobs...we did also purchase things required for the bit where The Parents stay here...). Having mostly decided to buy the BBQ, we went back to the garden centre. While investigating the costs other than the actual BBQ (like gas and covers and stuff), we bumped into a couple from church that we don't know very well but are very faithful people and pray every week for the service I coordinate. We mentioned that we were considering this BBQ and then all went our separate ways. As we got the BBQ into a trolley, they reappeared. And after a few preliminaries said "We'd like to buy you this. Call it a late Christmas present or a combined birthday present." I did an admirable impression of a goldfish. To which they said, "The Lord has told us to buy you this. You can't argue with that." And indeed, we found we couldn't. So, in possesion of a shiny new BBQ we made our way home.
And on Tuesday, a public holiday here, we had half our small group* round for a BBQ. Followed by some more time at the beach (poor Husbink had to go to work again and missed that bit). And in the evening we had a small group session which was just storming.
Aren't BBQs and people of such generosity just fab?!
See you in a few weeks. Ciao!


*For those needing an explanation of a small group - we meet together once a week as a smaller chunk of the church (in our case there are about 15 of us) and chill, do a bible study of some sort and pray together.