Two lovely views at two lovely weekends

A few weeks ago I had the amazing privilege of waking up to 2 amazing views and these are my favourite photos from each. From countryside to seaside in a week (not forgetting I then went back to the valleys a week later!) sometimes I'm just reminded to step back and thank God for this crazy life he's given me!

Two residentials in as many weekends! First I took my Romania team to Carrowmena, just a short drive south of here. The team has come together amazingly, after lots of fuss and both gaining and losing members. Just that weekend we were welcoming yet another member into our team and the lovely Nicole fitted right in and completed our little puzzle. We now have 8 girls and 1 guy on the team and we're all really excited for what the next 4 months will bring! We took them away on residential to get to know each other better and spend some time hanging out and having fun. It was so great to just be in the middle of the countryside where there was a lovely sense of peace over the team, and we were really fortunate with the weather so got to go out on a walk. We had a great weekend full of banter, laughs, sunshine and God and it started to feel like we're a family :)
The following weekend I went to a conference for teenage girls in Whitepark Bay. It's called Beautiful weekend and is run by an organisation called The Big House who specialise in helping teenagers with self-esteem problems, eating disorders, depression, self-harm etc. I took 2 girls along (1 from youth club, 1 from church) as it seemed like a really good chance for them to really find out who they are in God, that He made them beautiful and loves them unconditionally. It was a fabulous weekend in an absolutely gorgeous spot right next to the beach! The views were perfect for admiring God's great creation and letting His presence move among us. The team were fantastic, openly sharing their testimonies with the girls and using practical things to help them release the negative thoughts and feelings. I was so grateful for the ways in which they poured into my girls and showed them so much love and I'm so happy to say they both got a lot out of it! One had been struggling a lot recently with feeling unworthy of God's love and had a great breakthrough where she let Him back in and accepted His mercy and grace, and the other made a decision to follow God for the first time and told me she felt like she'd been lost but was now found!

Weekends like these remind me of how lucky I am and how thankful I should be for the privilege of pouring into young people's lives. My prayer for the next few months is that God would continue to use me and I'd see more young people come to know God, to know who they really are to God and to deepen their relationship with him further. I pray that God would give me the words, boldness and love for the people I meet, and I ask that you would join with me in prayer :)

Here we go again... Who Loves You?

It's a long time since I wrote on here... so please accept my apologies! The craziness of February has also left the Pais: North Coast's facebook blog has also been neglected. In order to catch you up on all that's gone on I'll start by posting Tamara's blog about the 'Who Loves You?' mission week. She says everything I wanted to say, but writes it better than I do (how sad is that... a German writing better than me!). Enjoy! - Lauren x

Hey folks!

The Pais team is back with a blog after a truly exceptional week of “Who Loves You?“.
Not only did we visit four schools in the area, doing assemblies, lunch shows, lessons and prayer spaces, but also closed the week in two spectacular events with DJ Jarva Knight, a non-alcoholic cocktail bar and two poignant messages, communicating the gospel to the young people.
During the week we really learned again to appreciate and use the power of prayer and we want to thank all of you who supported us in their prayers. Every person who came to the prayer meetings in our churches during the week really encouraged us and we are sure that each prayer made a difference.
The overall topic was – surprisingly – God’s love and it was so great to have the opportunity to tell around 2000 young people of the unimaginably great love God has for them. When we asked the students in several RE lessons who loved them a great amount of them wrote down God and/or Jesus and we really pray that this knowledge might change their hearts and lives. During our “Love or Hate”- lunch show we learned that it is inevitable to not make decisions and that the most important decision of our lives might still lie ahead.
On the nights of the events 7 young people made a decision for living their lives with Jesus and many were interested in taking away more information. We are very excited about starting a follow-up study on what being a Christian really means on Wednesday afternoons in Exodus.
A really amazing and encouraging story reached us when we heard of a girl who was giving out ice-cream to people in Portstewart, following the motto of “Because You’re Loved”! And this is actually the perfect opportunity to get excited for the Dared to Love-mission in March – we are expecting great things to happen and lots of love to be shown.

Thanks for reading our team blog once more – watch out for more and be blessed!
Tamara