Settling in at the Townsville base

We arrived in Townsville on Tuesday (remember the US is a 17 hour difference, so generally we are a day ahead of those of you in the US). We were shown to a brand new apartment that had just been finished, we are the first guests to stay there and it’s just lovely!! We have a nice living room area and a fully stocked kitchen, as well as a small bedroom and nice bath! We are beyond blessed!!

We just dropped our luggage in the room and were immediately shown to a meeting room where the base leadership was in a meeting. We were added to the circle, introduced and met everyone around the room. Ken and Robyn (the base leaders) spent a bit of time explaining about who we were and how excited they were to have us and then we were released to go settle in.

We’ll spend about 10 days here altogether, learning about how this ministry runs and meeting the key leaders here. That evening we were invited to the Mulligan’s flat, which is located right on the property

 and spent a couple of relaxing hours just listening again to all the Lord is doing here. It’s a most fantastic thing, hard to comprehend, but it’s certainly the favor of the Lord in action. I’ve seen the favor of the Lord before in my own life and at ywam Denver, but not at this scale.

The following morning, first thing, we were invited back to Ken’s office to meet with him and some of his key leaders. Mostly Ken just talked about his hopes for the ship ministries and for the meetings he’d been having with high government officials about ministry in PNG. But he did give us a key insight to why it was so important that we were here. Ken is convinced that senior leaders of ministries need to come and invest personal time in the ministry to accomplish what he felt God was saying. He said he felt like our coming was the tip of the spear for other senior leaders to come. I hope so, I’m not sure if we’ll come back for a couple of years or not yet, but I hope that other leaders will come and join the work here!!

After the meeting with Ken, we spent the balance of the morning getting a introduction to the ministry by some of their leaders, who also helped set us up to teach in the DTS and to staff at different times that week, as well as to sit in on other classes. We were keen to be involved, and in fact, our high involvement and engaging the community led to pretty much no jet lag at all!! I would fall into bed each night around 9pm and sleep until around 5am!! It’s a miracle and I’ll take it.

Over the next couple of days we taught several sessions to the DTS. We also engaged in meals, community night and other activities. I have a gift for learning names and for some reason, I seemed to have a supernatural ability in these few days for remembering names and faces! I worked to learn as many staff names as I could and then the students. I don’t have every name down, but enough for us to feel more part of the community.

Everyone has asked the same question of us, “Why are you here?” We arrived with the red carpet rolled out and were given special privileges. It was a little overwhelming actually! But people kept asking, “why?” In some ways we can answer that, we know a little more from listening to Ken talk about it, but we ourselves can only respond, we’ve come based on a Word of the Lord and very little more! Our base was gracious to release us, but we are still watching, learning, waiting and hoping the Lord gives us more clarity!! In the mean time, we are having a blast!!

Mark