I think that maybe 2 weeks have gone by without any rain so we’ll call the wet season done! Normally Cairns can handle a LOT of rain but this year cyclone Jasper decided to just hang around and dump hundreds of millimetres for days on end. Suburbs became flood plains and like many other places around Australia this year, we will still be seeing the impact of that for quite a while. We were unaffected though, apart from having to change our travel plans to see family.
Busy start to the year
Lot’s has happened so far. Our Kick off camp is done and dusted. It’s always an encouraging time spent joining in with the Townsville group and diving into God’s word together for a weekend. We had about 10 of our Cairns students come along, and it has been really great to see how camp spurs people along to serve courageously and creatively back on campus.
In our weekly Bible talks we’ve been working through the gospel of John, and inviting people to meet Jesus as we explore this part of the Bible together.
We’ve also been trying to be a bit more visible on campus. We had a hot-cross bun give away at a few different spots on campus, and asked people to vote on which topic they thought was most challenging to Christianity (we’ll shape our second semester mission around the results). The general consensus was “How can God allow suffering”.
Thank God for the good start diving into God’s word as a group together.
Pray that we will be able to connect well with new students, and boldly invite them to consider Christ.
Mark Drama
One of the big things that we have been working towards was the Mark Drama. This year it was able to happen mainly because it was hosted by Cairns Presbyterian Church. Praise God for the opportunity to do this on the Wed/Thu just before Easter Friday. Our uni group is just too small to have enough cast to make it happen, so we were very glad to be able to jump on board with Cairns Pres. It was so great to invite the JCU students to come along and see some of us acting in the gospel presentation. Quite a lot of non-Christian friends came along and heard the whole message of Jesus in one evening.
Pray that God will stir up many conversations in the wake of the Mark Drama, and that many will want to explore Jesus even more.
Second half hopes
The second half of semester drops back into a (more or less) normal rhythm of things. Our hopes, though, are that we will keep putting effort into faithfully pointing people to Jesus. We hope also to serve the church in Atherton one Sunday in April, by partnering with them in their regular service. We hope to encourage them and be built up by their faithful witness to Christ.
We also hope to have a bigger focus next semester on the “Meet Jesus” mission. So far we’re in the planning stage, but excited to work together as a group to invite people to think more about who Jesus is.
Pray that we will rejoice in, and jump at the opportunities to point people to Jesus.
We finally updated our supporter cards!
They should appear in some of our local churches for you to take. But if you’d like one posted, I’d love to send them off to you. Just email me your postal address and I’ll mail it to you. I can even graffiti some squiggly moustaches on the kids for you.