Liverpool

Well I'm back in America after an interesting Spring Break at home in England! Along with two other staff from Miami I took eight students to encourage the STINT team in Liverpool and reach out to students on campus for a week and we had a fun time together.

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Spring Break trips are good fun and although this one was fairly taxing in some areas it was still a great opportunity to meet people and share our faith. After arriving and getting acclimatised to Liverpool over the weekend (which included over half the students over sleeping on Sunday making us late for church!) we started in earnest on Monday morning. Each day we had a time of devotion and sharing in the morning and then spent the afternoons connecting with students and talking about Jesus.

That first afternoon on campus was great as we walked into the Union to find that it was Islamic awareness week and so a group of Muslim were running a stall all week giving out literature! This meant everyone got to have multiple conversations with Muslim students and to challenge them as to who Jesus really is and how we should relate to him. For a lot of our students this was the first time they had really engaged with Muslims about spiritual things so it was a good time for learning and challenging people of another faith with the truth of the gospel!

During the course of the week I had a number of good but challenging conversations with different students around the university. Often conversations were fairly surface level and it was hard to get students to open up about what they really thought but a couple of times I had great discussions, most notable with 2 girls who myself and Katie (an American student who went with us) were able to share the gospel with, sadly though they didn't want to trust Christ even though we challenged them. One person though did have a British student say he was going to go home and pray privately to put his faith in Jesus so that was one people's who's life was changed by our trip!

We also had a lot of fun with the students who went with us. We spent plenty of time walking round the city and seeing the sights and plenty of time hanging out together eating and chatting. One night we went to hang out at a pub which had karaoke night and all the students sang for a British crowd! This is a picture of the guys singing!

I really enjoyed getting to hang out with the students who went on the trip and it was exciting to see how the Lord grew them as the week went on and their boldness in sharing their faith. That boldness was never more evident than the very first night we were there, when Christian and I went to meet the students to go for dinner we rounded the corner to the meeting place to find the group sharing their faith with three drunk guys!

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On the Thursday afternoon I had my parents come and visit which was great! It was so nice to see them as I haven't seen them since September so it was good to have some downtime just to eat lunch with them, talk to them and catch up.

Here is a picture from the end of our trip, it is of our team along with the STINT team who are currently living in Liverpool, together we had a great time sharing the gospel in Liverpool!

The end of our trip was interesting to say the least! We got up at 4.30am on Saturday to head to Manchester airport to catch our flight back to America but on arriving at the airport we found our flight cancelled due to bad weather in New York!!! The airline were saying they could probably get us a flight on Tuesday! After a little chat we managed to get a flight on Sunday morning to get us directly back to Cincinnati, unfortunately though this flight was from Gatwick, the other end of the country! We trooped off back to the station to get a train to London and after a few phone calls we rigged up some staff to stay with in London and my good friend Geoff Shave to meet us at Euston to collect all the bags and let the students run wild in London for the day! They all seemed delighted at the opportunity and there were no complaints about not being able to get back until the next day! I made the most of the lay over getting half price tickets to a West End showing of the musical Wicked so spent the night sitting 12 or so rows from the front of the stalls at the Victoria Apollo! The show was awesome!

Thankfully the next morning we got out to Gatwick and got our flight to finally get back to America! I was totally worn out but relieved to be back even though the trip and the London detour had been a lot of fun!

I am now about to go back to the airport to collect my boss Martin Russell who is coming in to go with me to do some operatinos research at the Great Lakes Regional Office in Indianapolis! We go there tomorrow so although I'm back from England the fun doesn't stop!

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***Update on Auntie Jacky***

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I'd also like to thank you for praying for my aunt and just update you. She is still in hospital but is now awake and communicating, the doctors have got rid of the infection and she is slowly improving. It is such a relief that she is doing better and it's amazing considering the early prognosis of only a 20% chance of survival! Please continue to pray for her as she continues a slow recovery and pray that she does not have any complications. Thanks so much!

Important Prayer Request

I wanted to ask you to pray for my Auntie Jacky.

On Friday she cut her leg and didn't think anything of it. On Saturday morning she began to feel ill and her leg started to swell up very badly so she went to the hospital where they began treatment, at this point, from a small cut in her leg she is on life support in intensive care.

Apparently some of the natural bacteria which lives on our skin has infected her cut and poisoned her blood stream and muscle, this is a type of staff infection but a very rare condition that causes such severe life threatening complications.

In the hospital they have had to remove a large proportion of flesh from her leg to stop the poisoning and she is continuing treatment in intensive care. On Saturday the prognosis was that she had only a 20% chance of survival but this has now increased and her status is 50/50.

I would really appreciate your prayers for my family, for Auntie Jacky for healing and restoration, for Uncle Tony, Gav and Katie, Mel and Chris and Jeremy and Hayley as they deal with wife/mother/mother in law in hospital and for the rest of our family as we all pray for a recovery. Thanks.