danny’s space

Unfortunately I started NTE one day late because of a really tiring week leading up to the conference thanks to 21st’s and other late nights. After falling asleep during the strand groups (the Bible study training sessions) and the main talks, I realised that coming late was a bad idea and coming tired was even worse.

I missed the initial talks from both speakers, about the Church and from Deuteronomy, and arrived in Canberra around 10:30 after driving up with Nathan (the tall one from Ruse!). I’m heaps thankful that he came up with me in the morning otherwise I’d probably be in a morgue somewhere. We had a good chat about lots of things, like ministry and our futures. The 4-hour drive up was probably the most we had ever talked even though we went to high school together, and it was fantastic seeing how connected people in Christ are with each other.

We arrived at 10:30, just missing the end of the first talk from Richard Gibson (Gibbo) about the Church. It was in time for morning tea though! But we had to figure out where we were staying and how to sign on and stuff so that took a while. Then strand groups followed, which was a tough time for me because of tiredness and the fact that I had missed the 3 hour strand group on the previous day, meaning I was pretty much lost. Thankfully another girl in the group was equally lost, having only come up this morning as well. Nevertheless it was a good learning experience anyway, seeing how the Bible talks about the resurrection of Christ and the general resurrection that is yet to come.

And then it was lunch. Sydney Uni were staying in John 23rd college with people from around Australia like Melbourne Uni and even the Fijians. Chatting to people was interesting, although it seemed scary at first, stepping into a dining hall with a few hundred new faces. But a real testament to the fact that we are all part of the family of believers was the immediate connection you felt with anyone you struck up a conversation with, making chatting much easier and genuine. As with all college meals, the serving sizes were ginormous, which is probably why I feel much larger now than before the conference started. The food was pretty decent though, considering the mass-production scale of it all.

Then free time for 2 hours, where Grant and I sat in his room chatting for most of the time, catching up since we hadn’t seen each other much at uni over the past year. He had bought a DVD about Islam so we had a look at some of the material there, which included the interesting Muslim belief that when you go to the toilet, Satan can enter through bodily orifices and come to reside in your nose so you need to sneeze 3 times to get him out. We listened to quite a few Christian songs - Grant pretty much has every decent Christian song ever written put on his trusty laptop. We chatted about the year that had been and the year that was to come, and shared our thoughts on other things.

At 4pm we had practical ministry workshops with topics including evangelising overseas students, conversational evangelism, and apologetics. Unfortunately we could only pick one to go to, and wanting to get more into one-to-one ministry, I went to the one about doing one-to-one bible studies. This was heaps useful, as the guy gave us a pretty fundamental and applicable framework for studying passages in a 1-on-1 setting, which involved iterating through the verses while investigating the who, where, when, how, what and why of the text.

After dinner, we had the second talk from Richard Chin (the first one for me) on Deuteronomy. I have to confess my attention span was probably running into the goldfish memory end of the scale, and the half-conscious scribbling of notes in my book reflect this level of consciousness. I think basically what Chin was trying to get across was that the ‘Big L’ Law was given to the Israelites after God’s grace had been shown to them, in being chosen by God to be his people. Essentially, it was God who made the first move, and this is the same with Jesus where God made the first move in reconciling the world to himself out of love.

Thankfully sleep was next, because I was way too tired to go to question time with the speakers and missionaries. I had a shower and while waiting for my hair to air-dry, revised the resurrection strand material that I had missed. It was very interesting seeing how most of the apopstolic speaking about Jesus involved both his death and resurrection, and what a central part the resurrection played to the whole salvation deal.