All Good Things
FRIDAY
How beautiful on the mountains are the feet of those who bring good news, who proclaim peace, who bring good tidings, who proclaim salvation, who say to Zion, “Your God reigns!”
Isaiah 52:7 (NIV)
The final day of our week came in a blink of an eye.
Our morning devotion was a blessed time as Denise demonstrated how to use prayer beads, gifting each of us with our very own prayer beads that she lovingly handcrafted. She then led us in a time of prayer, as well as anointing. What a beautiful way to start our last day!
For more prayer resources click here
Because the Canada Day breakfast was cancelled, we had a day to decompress and debrief. Gen gave us a tour of the property (Eagle’s Cove) where, pre-Covid, the ministry would run their weeklong camps for kids, as well as provide weeklong stays for the families going through their Family Strengthening Program. It was easy to see how time in nature would be restorative. Eagle’s Cove provides the Land-based portion of NorthWind’s four pillars of care which are 1) counselling; 2) Life build; 3) Land-based; 4) spiritual growth.
Please pray for wisdom in how to safely bring back this portion of their services to their participants.
For more information visit NWFM
We were then given a tour of Thunder Bay’s Sleeping Giant provincial park and treated to a picnic lunch at the beach at Mary Louise Lake. (The weather (and our general lack of energy) helped make our decision for a van tour instead of a hike.)
We finished off the tour by treating Bonita and Bera to Prospector Steak House, where Bera had told us of the legendary buns!
A few of us left dinner early in order to join the Street Outreach team. Each week, the team would prepare wagons of refreshments and resources and meet for a one hour devotional before heading out to the streets. Even though this was the last opportunity for service with our NorthWind family, it was easily the most challenging one. Many faces were familiar as we had met them earlier in the week serving coffee and bannock for Next Steps. It was nice to be able to call some of them by name. But, as one of our team members shared, when we first met the participants, they were “coming into our space” but now we were “meeting them in their space”. The harsh realities of life on the street were more blatant here. Most of the people we interacted with were intoxicated, the drink of choice being “babash”, which is a homemade mixture of hand sanitizer (or mouthwash) and water or pop. And yet, the Holy Spirit was moving in this space as we had opportunities for deep conversations, sharing encouragement and the hope of the gospel, with offerings of prayer and requests for a Bible to read, sharing verses and speaking the promises of Scripture and directing them to some of the programs that were available of which some were unaware. The debrief time afterwards allowed us to encourage each other by sharing the experiences of the night.
Even though the evening went later than anticipated because of unexpected events, we were still able to have a precious time of debriefing as a team with Bonita when we returned to our last night at Eagle’s Cove. We were also able to lay hands on Bonita and Bera and bless them as they continue their ministry. The multitude of stars in evening sky as we returned to sleep one last night reminded us of the Sovereignty of the God we serve and that the magnitude of the needs in our broken world were unmatched by the power of the Almighty Creator who already has a plan in place to restore all.
