Then in true builder style we cracked open the flask and had a coffee.

Then when the owner arrived we had a look around at all the tasks that needed to be done. As we walked into one of the stores there were a few animal medicines, drench gun and clippers. At this point, looking at the animal hand clippers, I tried them on Mathew’s hair, but they seemed to tear more than sheer to Matt’s screams of pain.

Fun over with, we had to get on with work. First store shed needed a lot of tidying but its amazing what four over excited and keen men can do especially with the mention of having a fire. With in minutes we had enough provisions to start our fire and it was roaring in seconds. As the fire was burning we emptied the store shed. The only problem we had was, the fire a couple of times, got a bit too intense and we had to wait till it died down before we could put more stuff on it. Once this was done we started on the next one. The only thing that broke our cycle of clearing was pasties, coffee and cake that was kindly supplied to us. 

This for us was a real therapeutic day as we got to have a big fire, smash glass in the skip and feel real satisfied from leaving the store sheds in a tidy state. 

I feel manly, no more watching chick flicks with the girls

Thats looking nice and clean

The barrows are queued and waiting

Trav practicing his Romeo and Julliet lines from the window

It is the second week into term. I thought that last week was a good way to start off the term, it was face your fears week .

On Thursday it was Allie’s birthday! To celebrate Allie’s birthday she wanted to have a themed evening,where we dress up as silly a possible, with a theme. Allie wanted a Greek night. Over our Greek evening we listened to greek music and some people danced. It made the night even funnier as for dinner we had lasagne  and garlic bread which isn’t your most traditional Greek meal!

 We did have oilves and humous with it.

On Saturday, we ran a day for the Church to learn a bit more about marketing, PR and communications. The day was spilt up into three. The first talk was done by Neil, it was about Communicating the Church’s Vision. Then Clare did a talk on Managing internal and external communications. Finally Ben did a talk on Branding and Effective Church websites. There were a few interactive discussion groups on how we could improve our church communications.

All of us SWEATies had a part in it too. Matt and I had to plan the days activites for the children. So the families who came along had some where for their children to go while they were in these talks. All the children had fun going to the park and being outside in the sunshine.  Taylor and Allie were in charge of making sure food and drinks were provided while Josh and Mark were incharge of the PA system.

Bye for now

Holly

xx

Term 3 has just started and we are all excited for whats to come.

To kickstart the term Face your Fears comes first.

Face your fears is a week of overcoming our fears, whatever they may be, it was different for each of us. The week included a variety of different things including Zip wire, snakes and spiders, Coasteering, Caving, Alton Towers, Bug Eating and a Bungie jump.

There is one scripture we all like to use, its 2 Timothy 1:7 NKJV “For God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind.” it has helped us all to stand on the word of truth to know what is irrational fear and what is rational fear. Rational fear is good because it gives us the sense to know when we are in danger this is God given fear. Irrational fear is not of God and this is usually when your scared of something even though your not even in danger like a bungee jump, which is perfectly safe although you might be scared of heights.

False 

Evidence

Appearing

Real

Everyone had to face a fear this week.  To overcome that fear, the best way is to know the truth and to trust God that he will protect us. I found a really good scripture that helped me a lot in Psalms 27:1 NLT “The Lord is my light and my salvation—so why should I be afraid? The Lord is my fortress, protecting me from danger, so why should I tremble?”.

From pushing ourselves by overcoming our fears we have stretched our lives further and each of us have a testimony to tell about how overcoming a fear has helped us to have breakthrough in other areas of our lives.

God does not want us to be held back in life because of fear but for us to live in freedom from it.

FACE YOUR FEAR, don’t let irrational fear hold you back.

thank you for reading this weeks blog.

Joshua Hine

 

 

 

Hello,

Illuminate was a great success but a lot of hard work went into making it happen. This week has been a chance to wind down from the event so we’ve spent most of the week relaxing and socialising.

Near the beginning of the week Mark and Josh decided to meet up to the challenge they set themselves of doing a handstand on a water tower in the quarry.

Another memorable day was Thursday when Neil and Lynn took us out for the day. They took us to Burgh Island which was absolutely beautiful.

The day we went there it looked like a Mediteranean island because the water was so clear!

Although it was a really sunny day, Mark and I discovered that the sea can still be too cold to swim in at this time of year!

We finished our trip out with a lovely carvery for lunch.

This week has been a really great way to end the term and we’re looking forward to next term (especially now that we know we’re going on mission to Germany!)

One of the wheel chairs was very light and fast and I was practising my wheelie skills. But managed to on a number of times to tip my self out of the back of the chair. No damage done though. A good morning, we all had a lot of fun, but very challenging in realising what people with disabilities like this, have to put up with. And why it takes them three times as long to do a simple task like walk or write.

It was then announced that this training was for a weekend away with the Calvert Trust, where we are going to assist disabled children. We will be blogging about this in due course.                          

Mathew practicing his support by holding my hand

Catalyst is a youth event run by Youth for Christ. Catalyst is a worship event for people ages 13-18 years old, its been running for over 10 years, and it is on once a month on a friday night.

Roots is a kids club for ages 8-12, they run a club every week on thursday.

This week we were given a project called UFO which stand for Understanding the Faiths of Others.

We were spilt into 2 teams  Boys verses the Girls. We had to use our initiative to find out different facts and information about the different faiths. We went out an about into the different parts of the community within Plymouth and studied different faiths.

The fatih’s we had to study were: Us girls had Jehovah Witnesses & Buddhism. The boys had Mormonism & Islam.

We had to show what we found out in a presentation at the end of the week.

I found the project very interesting and fun to go and about to learn about different faiths. I think I found out lots by looking at books and going to speak to people about their faiths.

On Friday we were given the opportunity to  go to  Sir John Hunt Community School which Erica  teaches at. We were given the chance to teach at the school.

We taught 3 lesson during the day, the lessons were all R.E lessons, the ages that we taught were years 7, 9 & 11.

Teaching at the school was very interesting and fun. We played games with them given on their topics within R.E that they are bering taught . We gave them a little talk about us and what we do at SWEAT.

After much planning we’ve spent the last week actually running Explorers Kids Club: Ocean Adventure.

I think we’ve had more fun than the children. I even got to dress up as Brown Beard (or pink beard as the children say) the Pirate.

Each day we started off by singing our theme song with the actions.

Then we performed a short drama based around a mini  theme like ‘helpfulness’. In one drama Olly the Octopus got stuck in the seaweed and his friends had to help him get free.

We also ran lots of games throughout the morning and some of the parachute games like ‘Sharks and Lifeguards’ proved very popular.

We had a slot in the morning for the children to make arts and crafts which they could take home at the end of the morning.

On Friday we had a special guest there to paint the childrens’ faces.

On Saturday we had our prize giving ceremony where we showed the parents what the children have been doing throughout the week and all the children got to choose a prize.

It has been a great week for the children, their parents and the SWEAT team.

I think next years Explorers Kids Club will be even better!

Matt

It’s been a busy week for theExplorer’s kids club Team, as we have been busy, busy, busy with drawing, painting, cutting and pasting animals that will be ready for the decoration preparation on Sunday.

This week has been a wonderful and creative experience. Early on in the week we went to Plymouth Music Zone and experienced a range of samba and unusual instruments. Plymouth Music zone is a community music organisation that provide opportunities for people of all ages and training for adults.

The instruments we used were known as penitone instruments, which basically use notes of the pentonic scale.