Leap of Faith

What are the chances you're reading this again? Pretty good if you just read that I guess. What to talk about? Let's see, oh right, here it is.

This past Saturday we had a fund raising banquet take place at the base and so our weekend moved to Sunday/Monday (we raised $2500, praise the Lord). Sunday was kind of lazy, as Sunday's should be. Sunday evening we went down into the city to pick up some pizza, incidentally from Claude's Pizza, one of the brothers who happened to own the orchard that we picked cherries at. Laura knows him and his family well and gives riding lessons to a few of his children. Let's just say Claude is an extremely nice person, he ended up giving us an entire meal along with drinks and some delicious gelati. That would more or less sum up Sunday, now on to Monday. Mondays are usually sorta bum days, as I'm sure most of you can attest to. This past Monday was by no means an ordinary Monday, ok, so maybe I'm exaggerating, but it was lot's of fun. So much fun I think I'll start a new paragraph for it.

Monday afternoon we left the base and Laura, Caitlin, Graham, Leah, Darby (Matt's Great Dane), and myself all packed into a YWAM van and headed down into the city. After picking up Matt we then proceeded to find his oh so secret cliff jumping location. In fact, the location is so secret he couldn't even remember where it was. His GPS stayed at home and the last time he had been there was ten years ago. I have to say, I had my doubts we would find it at all. After just under an extra hour of driving around the hills of Onkaparinga we finally stumbled upon a small entrance to the park. We hiked down hill and through the bush for about 15 minutes. Caitlin and I kept mumbling to each other about how there probably wasn't any water left because of the drought, but nonetheless we kept on walking. I guess I should give some credit to Matt because we did eventually find it. The location is actually this random cliff right next to a small pond that looks like it is nowhere deep enough to even swim in. Ok, enough about our boring arrival, on to the cliff jumping. We first checked the depth of the water (you can breathe now mother) and than climbed up to the lowest point to test it out. I was really surprised that nobody ever came close to the bottom of the pond, it was definitely much deeper than it looked. The lower jump was about 15 feet off the water, and looked every bit as intimidating the first time we looked over the edge. After jumping off that one twice I decided to make my way up to the higher one. We only did two different jumps because we had our doubts about the ones above it. So the highest jump we ended up doing was about 25 feet, give or take a few. I guess it probably doesn't sound that high, and if we went again I'd try and go higher, but it was worth the drive.

The other leap of faith I meant to talk about is mine and Graham's potential transportation for the next three months. I'll be talking to Pablo about it in the next few days but organizing it should be no problem. The base has an old car that was previously used by some staffers and is no longer registered. The beauty about South Australia is that you don't have to have a car safetied before you register it. More about why this car is such a leap of faith though. It's 1984 Mazda 323 with over 350 000 km's on it. It currently has no working battery but does start when it's boosted. The kicker about this car is that the brakes do not work at the moment, praise the Lord for hand brakes. The fix should be simple though (again, mom, quit worrying). Our test run with this car will be the shortest of our potential road trip, an 8 hour drive from Adelaide to Cobden. I know there will be people at the base praying for our car :) but we're going in faith that things will work out alright.

As far as prayer requests go I'm feeling a little under the weather today. The cold has been going through the base and I woke up fairly stuffed with a huge headache this morning. The main reason I'd like it to go away is because schoolies is coming on this weekend. Schoolies is a huge event that we volunteer at and we'll be doing long days and short nights. Thanks so much for your prayers and I'd love to hear from some of you. Blessings and Prayers.