Weekend synopsis

I'm struggling to get time for this...the weekend was busy and I wanted to write a bit about it, but I've come back to the reality of several important things (including a magazine to finish) to do before we go away for holidays/visiting family.

So this will be a quick one. On Friday afternoon we drove just over an hour to a place we've been to many times before: Tamborine Mountain. It's a little plateau that Wikipedia tells me is eight kilometres long, five kilometres wide and 525 m high. Not really a mountain by the standards of most of the world, but we're talking Australia here, the flattest continent! 

It's a place that, for more than 60 years, has hosted Christian conferences and camps. Mount Tamborine Convention Centre is a familiar place to us, though we've rarely been there in the last 20 years when we were in our young adult years we often went to camps up there. The weekend was nostaligic in many ways, not only did the place bring back many memories, the event did too. In 1998 we attended a missions conference there, International Outlook, as newly weds. It was that weekend in March that we began the long journey to becoming missionaries with OMF, we started filling out application forms.

Over the weekend we also met a number of people who we have known for many years. The furthest back was a man I knew as a child, he left to go to uni when I was around 12, but I saw him one further time when I was around 19. It's been a long time! 

The property is beautiful and well cared for. Eucalyptus trees everywhere. When you've never left Australia you don't really notice them so much as we do. In Japan we rarely see these trees, but they are everywhere in Australia. I can't stop taking photos of them! The weather over the weekend was gorgeous too.

Times have changed in 20 years. A barista at a missions conference!

More packed bags and in the backgroudn is
an exhausted boy asleep (he arrived
back from a school camp just before we left
for the weekend)

It was different being there with teenagers. They would have preferred to stay home, though our youngest soon found a couple of other missionary teens to hang out with. There were actually few teenagers around. I can understand why parents of teenagers don't bring them to events like this, though. We had to be there for work and had no other option but to bring our guys.

We spent a lot of time talking with people. I'm not sure how much good we did. The journey towards mission is long and involves lots of conversations, so who knows what part we played. This lady in the photo browsed our OMF stand and picked up our prayer card. She then sat down and read it. I was intrigued. I'm pretty sure I had a conversation with her the next day about Japan and students.

This is a former WW2 aircraft hanger, the main meeting room, about which we also have many memories, including that first step of getting application papers for OMF (not dreaming we'd be back there 20 years later as "seasoned" OMF missionaries).

It was a good weekend, in that we were reminded by the main speakers of the great need for the gospel in this world. Many still have not heard and have no opportunity to hear the gospel. It's the message that booted us into missions in the first place, it is good to be refocused on that need again, especially while living in Australia where it's relatively easy to forget the needs of the rest of the world.