Entries about events

Aqua water, beautiful beaches, largest cruise ship terminal in the world, a 5 star resort that takes up an entire island, American tourists, coffee shops, trinket shops everywhere!!!! Welcome to Nassau, capital of the Bahamas!!!
So we arrived in the Bahamas a week ago and the difference from Jamiaca is pretty radical. 90% of the Bahamas income comes from tourism and you can certainly tell. The place is crawling with American tourists who come here to do nothing except lay in the sun, snorkel, party and drink!
The Logos Hope is nowhere near as busy here because the bookship isn't such a unique or rare thing here but it's much easier to really connect with the people on deck 4 when it's less crowded. It's also been really nice as it's not as dangerous here so we're allowded to go out by ourselves during the day. I guess that doesn't mean so much to you but that simple freedom means a LOT when you don't have it. It's also nice that I don't get stared at quite so much because people are used to seeing blonde tourists all the time (even if they are bottle blondes =D).
I had a really fun E-day last Friday. I was put on a team with 5 other people to do a evangelical program with a local church. Our host church was quite small and it's numbers where dwindling so they decided to put on an outdoor evangelical program for the local community, or at least that's what we prepared for. At about 7:30 we arrived at the church all prepared with a casual, interactive 1 hour program only to find that we were going to be inside the church and it wasn't an evangelical outreach but the 33rd annual general assembly of the First Holiness Church of God! Oh! We did our program as planned and I really feel that it went well, especially as half of the 40-50 people there were youth and kids but as time passed it became pretty clear that we were pretty different from what they were used to in church. I don't think they've ever had someone unicycle or paint a caricature in church before and certainly not while they were wearing shorts! The pastor even apologised for the fact that we weren't properly dressed 'because we thought it would be an outdoor program' oops. But wait!, the best is still to come. Once our program was over half a dozen neighboring bishops, bishopesses and superintendents came up to give greetings and finally the home bishop announced that the offering would be taken up. So the music starts playing and the basket is handed around and then taken up the front. Then the music stops and a lady comes onto the the stage and announces that she needs another $60 to top up the offering before everyone goes home! I'm serious!! She stood up there for 15mins telling everybody that she knew they had the money and would they please hurry up and give it to her so that we could all go home. Our whole team was just sitting there going WHAT THE HECK???!!! We couldn't believe what was happening! I'm not really surprised that there church members are dwindling anymore. It was certainly a different and unique church experience! So not all E-days are quite that exciting but everynow and then you get a special story. Sometimes it's sad and touching, sometimes it's funny and entertaining but the most important thing is that people are touched with God's love. I still think that, even though our program was very different for this church, it was what they needed to hear and just maybe we encouraged some to get real with their relationship with God!