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the webpage may or may not be working properly for thhe next day or so, im changing the design, it will all be amazing when i am done, trust me...

here is a test

We have arrived! And 30 minutes early as well. We are all safe and
healthy, had a wonderful time and did dome great ministry work for the
Kingdom. See you tomorrow!

As a reminder we come home tomorrow!!!! If you want to track our flight American Airlines 137 click here.

So the most serendipitous and wonderful thing happened. I am a fan of really old Christian books. So going to Scotland allowed me to find some treasures. I got a very early (possibly even first edition) of Lectures to my Students, a famous book by Charles Spurgeon. I got a wonderful book from the 1800's of "Coventants of the Covenators" which is just steeped in Scotish and Church History. But today April found what might be one of the best discoveries. In Edinburgh I bought a really old and giant bible. The book is seriously 1 foot by 2 feet, and it's extremely heavy. But I always wanted a really Old Family Bible that families would pass down for generations. This one was dated pre-1808 so I bought it. Well today, April opened the Bible to glance it over and noticed a small inscription that said details at the end of Maccabees. (Apparently this Bible has the Apocrypha in it). Written on a page here was all the birthdates of the family. IT WAS A LOGAN FAMILY BIBLE. April's maiden name is Logan and she is a desendents of the Highland Logans from Scotland. This was their family Bible, that had all their history in it. I had told April that I wanted to pass this Bible down to our children, and their children, who would have known that this Bible was from their forefathers, dated in the mid 1700's? That is God at work there my friends

Today was a fanciful day exploring the city. Walking up and down many streets, finding rare treasures in shops. It was a great day. Sure it rained the entire time, and we are all exhausted, but we had a blast. But having a blast takes a toll on you, I am exhausted. So for now, I am going to go to sleep. Tomorrow resumes our ministry days with Wednesday at Airdire and Thursday at Shotts. Friday is the free day at Loch Ness where the team will search for the elusive "Nessie". I feel like I have already found Nessie, because at every shop today there was some cheap souvenir of a sea monster. Those traveling to the Paris extension leave early tomorrow morning, so please keep them in prayers. Also we will be arriving at LAX on Saturday at 2:50pm. We will be at the Tom Bradley Terminal. I am looking for people who are able to drive. So if you have previously confirmed to drive, or wanting to join the driving crew, please send me an email at evan@oceanhillschurch.com

I want to give a shout out to someone we have been working with on this trip. Through nothing short of a Divine appointment by God, the first day we were here we meet a man named Will. A young man who liked to skate. he has joined us every day and has been driving Dakota and his father to all the different skateparks. Well tonight Will topped that, he got Dakota into the Tattoo Festival. Not let me clarify 1 point, the Tattoo festival has nothing to do with get a tattoo on your body. The Scotland Military Tattoo is a huge festival that goes on for 2 weeks. To explain how significant it is, lets say this, you can purchase tickets now for the 2011 festival, thats how early you have to reserve tickets. 100 Million people watch this thing. Will introduced us to a Christian Skate Park that is doing a skate demonstration at this festival. So right now Dakota, Gary, Will, and Pastor Billy Morin are at the festival. Dakota did such a great job today, he was invited to come back tomorrow. And the best part is that the festival is in Edinburgh, where we are going tomorrow! So we will cheer him on. But I wanted to publically that Will for taking off 2 weeks to hang out with us and do things that we would never have been able to do.

Ahhh, some beautiful rest and relaxation. Today we went to the coast and visited the quaint city of Ayr. (pronounced Air) We went to the Irish Sea, some got their feet went, others walked on the sand. After that we went and explored the city. A large portion of the group had lunch in an old church. It is actually a sad process that has been taking place in Scotland. Many churches have failed and have sold their buildings. These beautiful churches, hand built centuries ago with Stain Glass and Steeples are being converted into housing districts, restaurants, and bars. So as we walked into the building, everything liked so similar to one of the churches we worked with earlier, but there were tables everywhere. Jim actually took a photo of me standing at the pulpit, many wont even notice that surrounding that pulpit was 100 people eating their burger and fries.
After lunch we split into smaller groups and explored the city. Some people hopped in a taxi and visited a local castle. My group just walked the streets exploring for any hidden treasures. We had quite a lovely dinner with the best chocolate fudge cake I have ever consumed, and here we are now back at the hotel. Tomorrow is also a free day in Edinburgh, Scotland's capital, and I am quite excited.

So today has been quite a long day, but what a great day it was. We started by going to Harvest church in the morning, it was just like attending Ocean with Holland leading worship and Jim speaking. The church was so hospitable that they took us out to Pizza Hut after the lunch and I think most of the team ate more pizza than they ever had in their entire lives. After Pizza Hut we drove to Shotts, which was Jim's home town for the majority of his life. Up on a hill is Shottskirk. Kirk is a fancy word of church, the church is also known as Kirk o' Shotts. It was such a lovely service, many of the pastors we have worked with throughout the week drove down to be a part of it. After the service we went to the graveyard and paid respect to Jim's family members.
From Shottskirk we went to "The Fort" which is a mall. By the time we arrived everything was closed except the book store. We head inside and on the 2nd floor was a starbucks. I must say my gingerbread octopus was delicious. From Starbucks we went to Elim Fmaily Church in Coatbridge. We had a lovely service and myself and April shared our testimonies. After the service we went to get some Indian food. Yes it was 11 o'clock at night, but anytime is a good time for Curry. So now we are back at the hotel, everyone is asleep after an exhausting day. Tomorrow is a free day and we expect to sleep in and then travel to the beach. We are excited to have a day of relaxation as many of us are exhausted. Keep us in prayer for strength and health, but so far we are all doing great!

Today was Carluke today, a favorite city of many of our team. But alas my friends it is another long day and it is time for me to go to bed. Keep us in prayer for tomorrow, its a long hectic day with many twists and turns, but is also the day i am looking most forward too. The morning we are joining a church known as Harvest (no relationship to Riverside) and Holland will be doing worship and Jim will be giving the message. After that we will be traveling to Shotts to Jim's old church. This is the place where is mother and 14 other relatives are buried. We will be having an old school Conventicle there. Then we will be traveling to Elim Family Church, and having a night of worship. For this worship service all the local churches have been invited. Also a secret to all you blog readers, we filmed a short video tonight at the evening service and it shall be played at the Sunday morning service at Ocean. So if you miss our beautiful faces, go to the service and watch us wave and say a "wee hello"

Since most of you havent seen dakota scooter, I thought I might add a little video to show what we are doing at hte skate parks everyday.

So I wanted to add a few more things that took place today. We are working with Calvary Chapel Stirling, its a quaint church in the center of the city. Stirling, similar to Dunfermline, is a dark city. In fact to get to the church you are forced to walk by a Spiritualist church. The city is really neat though, everything seems to be in walking distance on the cobble stone streets. We spent the day walking the city and handing our the flyers for the skate session and tonight's concert. I dont know if I've shared, but we made 2,000 flyers per city and on average thats how many flyers we go through. One of the cool parts that differentiated today was the concert in city. The local pastor got permission from the council to have street preformers. Billy played guitar, Matt was on Djembe, and JD played his saxophone. We then had other team members handing out flyers while they played inviting them to the concert that is taking place right now as I type.

As you will hear in the following post, many people today went to Stirling Castle. A fortress built in the early 1500s. The castle was enormous and had many amazing facets to it. Then an even smaller and braver select few made the long journey to the William Wallace monument. A giant obelisk upon a separate hilltop.


As I type now, Joanne and Donna are handing out some quilts during the service. Baby Jonathon Macdonald, just received a quilt, as well as his 4 year old sister, Emily. Fioana Macalaster, a friend of the church and a "senior like us" (their words) as well as Gillian the Pastor's wife here. The pastor just shared that the quilt that was selected for them is the same color as their bedroom. The quilts have been an amazing opportunity to minister and share with people.
The other thing we were blessed with was Libronix, a family donated 10 copies of the software. Libronix is a Bible research tool that is simply amazing. Type in a Scripture message and it will have easily 30 different commentaries on the text, it will have dictionaries of every word, it has the original languages, and so much more, it easily makes studying the Word for messages so much easier.

Right now Brett Schorr (our wonderful lighting technician at Ocean Hills) is sharing his testimony. Throughout the week Jim has been bringing up different people from the team to share their testimonies.

Jim has been doing a wonderful job preaching, he has tackled the very very difficult route of preaching a different message everyday. To be honest, I tried to persuade him to preach the same message every night, yes the team would hear it daily, but it would be fresh to the intended audience every night. But he said that he was going to do a new message, new text, every night. Trust me its a toll on a pastor, but he is doing a wonderful job. Holland has also been doing a wonderful job with the band, there has been some amazing and oh so wonderful times of worship.

Please continue to keep us in prayer, many of us our tired. Our schedule is simply this, breakfast at 8:30am, leave the city at 9:30pm, so we are putting in 13 hour non stop days, and its exhausting. But we are all healthy, all doing well, God is being served faithfully. But the band could use prayer as it is strenuous on vocal chords to sing ever day (professional bands would never tackle this difficult of a musical tour) but they are holding strong. Pray that we are drained of ourselves and filled fully with the Spirit.

Also I have been adding photos throughout the week to the photo section. Click photos at the top of the page to go to all the high school photos, and then click the 1st one, cleverly titled "Scotland 2008" for our current trip photos.

So I thought it would be fun to have lots of people post today. We are getting ready to have our night concert in Stirling and there is internet access so instead of the boring old evan updates, lets have some team members do it:

Hello, this is Brett ...
Today while at the castle I got stung by a bee. I also got some coffee at Costa (it's Scotland's Starbucks) and passed out some flyers in the town. Thing are going great and we are getting ready for tonight's concert. Pray for a good turnout of people tonight and for the remainder of the trip.
Cheers!

This is Dillon,
Well today we went to sterling castle it was interesting.... we then headed for the skate park where Shelby walked into the street almost getting hit by a car I grabbed her and pulled her back just in the nick of time .... very scary we proceeded to the skate park where they convinced me to skate so i did, barefoot. All of the locals where wondering if it hurt and if my feet were sore we walked back and went into a clothing store and shopped for a little bit it was fun.

'Ello everyone, it's Shelby...
Scotland is absolutely beautiful...rain and all. Today a bunch of us went to Stirling Castle, the stake park, and Dillon saved my life! Good times. I also had the pleasure of enjoying an apple pie milkshake. It sounds really weird but it is actually pretty amazing. It is a huge bummer that Americans aren't creative enough to think of flavors like that...(31 flavors needs to take notes.) So basically I love it here and the people are great too...
CHEERS'

EY! This is Jenna and I wish you all could be here. Scotland is amazing and there is such a need for for these people to hear the truth. It is also a brilliant country filled with lots of history, Stirling is fantastic and the people here are amazing. Service is about to start so it's time to go, God bless!


And the service has started, so more testimonies later.

Today was ministry in Dunfermline, and honestly it was a difficult day. Everything went smoothly, and we had no issues, but Dunfermline is a very spiritually dark city. We had our skate demonstration and while Jim was interviewing Dakota someone in the crowd started shouting, he shared that he was an "astronomer" and called us out for witnessing to youth aged children. He then proceeded to call the cops on us, but by the time the cops arrived, the event was over, and almost everyone was gone. Jim spoked to the cops and they were completely for us. We handed out lots of flyers and lots of people said they would come tonight, but not nearly as many did as they promised. The pastor shared the culture and history of the community and shared that many people will promise to go places and even accept the lord just to have people leave them alone. However the concert went very well, I spoke to the Pastor afterwards and he was so excited. He has been there 8 years and has a congregation of 12 people, its a very dark city. So having the concert was a huge blessing to them, and something they will not forget. Tomorrow is Stirling, so I shall share about that tomorrow.

Today we were at Bridgeton Life Church in the center (centre) of Glasgow. It was one of the best days of ministry I have seen in a long time. The day started with some staying back at the church to do construction on the building. Bridgeton Life is a new church but is housed in a church built 130 years ago, with giant arched ceilings and stainned glass windows. So there was much work that could be done. The Pastor, Paul, had a goal of us painting one of his children's classrooms. I am excited to say we were able to paint 2 rooms, and it took all day. The first room was tackled by Bryan, Jeremy, and Dillon. The three of them dilligently painted most of the day, Bryan and Jeremy didnt stop painting until after 9pm. Billy and myself started working in the other room, it took half the day to spackle all the holes in the wall. After we spackled, a group of people sanded all the walls, preparing them for paint. It was around 5pm that Esther, Caroline, and Jenna started painting this 30x10 foot room. They too didnt finish until 9pm. My favorite part was they didnt want to get paint on them (they had to paint the ceilings) so they put on trash bags to protect their clothes. The majority of the team took 2000 flyers and tons of tracts into the city. The flyers promoted Dakota and his scooter outreach, as well as our concert in the evening. At 5pm the church put on a giant potluck dinner for us, many of us had authentic Scottish food, but sadly no haggis. At 7pm we began our Night of Worship. The service lasted 2 1/2 hours because God wanted us to keep going. There was times of song, times of messages, Dillon shared his testimony. It was a great, great service. We also began our quilt ministry, and I asked Donna and Joanne to share a story of a person they came acorss that day:

6 Aug 2008, Bridgeton. (quilt
Edgar "John" was sitting in his wheelchair framed by his doorway, with mere stubs from his calves down. JoAnne and Donna approached with Life Church invitationion in hand. John's warm welcoming smile masked decades of pain and lonliness. John shared that his "born again" sister, who is now declared, had shared the gospel message with him, but that she had turned her back on him early on. After chatting and hearing his story he allowed Donna to share the message of God's love and the gospel message of faith in Christ Jesus' free gift of salvation. John was fearful that he;d know no one in heaven as his only friends were drinking buddies and "the Bottle" was his only (we're takinig off now, so you will have to hear the end of the story later...)

So today we wandered the streets of Glasgow for most of the day and it was quite fun. We bought some cool things and saw even more amazing things. I myself purchased the Glasgow Bible, a Bible translated into Scottish. In the morning before shopping we visited a very old church. Part of the church was built in the 1400's and the rest of the church was established in the 1500's. The architecture was amazing, giant vaulted ceilings with amazing arch ways. There was a catacomb under the church with graves everywhere. Some of the most amazing stain glass windows. We took lots of pictures. Hopefully later tonight I can upload some of those photos, my power inverter caught on fire after using it for 15 minutes, so im going to get an alternative one. Matt McKenzie is our photographer for the trip and he is doing a great job, but we kept losing him as he walked with his eyes through the lens, so I had Bryan job be keeping an eye on Matt. For lunch we had fish and chips, most of us really enjoyed them, but Billy wasnt a fan and graciously gave them to Dillon after two bites.

Keep us in prayer, tomorrow is our first day of ministry. We are heading to Bridgeton, which is a community in Glasgow. We will be handing out tracks and quilts, meeting new friends, and inviting people to a skate demonstation and a concert in the evening. Until then....

So it took some time, but we cracked the secret codes to unlock the internet. The username and password are both "student", go figure. We landed safely yesterday after what I must say is one of the more enjoyable flights I have been on, I got to watch Kung Fu Panda, that movie rocks! We made our ways to the student dorms and many of us are reliving our college years. The rooms are large flats with a kitchen and 2 bathrooms and then 6 single bed rooms that break off of them. As I write now we are enjoying a breakfast meal together and getting ready for a devotion from Jim. Our plans for today include going to George's Square in the Centre of Scotland (like how i spelled Center, that was on purpose...) Its going to be a great day, please keep us in your prayers. Also I am going to have some sweet photos soon, Matt has been snapping pictures like there is no tomorrow.

For those interested, here is the Scotland Flight information. We are leaving from LAX on American Airlines 136 and that will land in London. Then in London we will take British Air 1486 to Glasgow, Scotland. Its going to be a long day of travel, so please keep us in your prayers. I will update the site as soon as we land and I can find an internet connection.

Well tomorrow is the day we leave for Scotland. Is everyone packed,
i'm not, but I did finish unpacking from Costa Rica today. But keep
checking back here for the next two weeks for all the Scotland updates
and praise reports.