Happy September!

We are excited to give you an update on what our three mission outreach organizations and individuals have been up to this summer!!

Abundant Grace of God Maternity Centre

Writer: Georgia Macad

Transitions

These last few months have brought some changes to our family. Emmaus has officially started grade 9 at Faith Academy in Manila. This has been something we have been praying and thinking about for a long time and something Emmaus has been excited about. He is getting so grown up!

Another new transition is that we have another teenager in the house! Lucas celebrated his 13th birthday with a dozen friends at a local pool. It is so hot in Tabuk these days that the pool was like a giant hot tub ...yuck!

But the boys had fun :)

Lucas starts grade 8 at the local high school in a few weeks. Another big change for him.

Achao and I brought him to the school at the beginning of August to meet his dorm parents and get him settled in. He is in the boy's dorm with 11 other teenage boys and his dorm family.

His dorm parents are Canadian and their eldest is Emmaus' age and loves basketball as well.

She keeps sending me pictures (because Emmaus refuses to - ha!). It seems like he is having a great time and fitting in really well so far.

Zion will be going back to his old elementary school for grade 5. When we went to enroll him today, he was remembered by all his former classmates from Grade 1! (the last time he was in a local school).

That was really nice for him and will make it easier for him to accept that he needs to cut his hair short again ;).

In June, B-lyn (my staff midwife) and I had the opportunity to attend the International Confederation of Midwives Congress in Bali, Indonesia. We both found ourselves inspired by midwives from all around the world working together to make childbirth safer. I was also able to meet some of my Master's cohort from the UK in person (above).

In July our clinic received our own Point of Care Ultrasound (POCUS) machine and a team of trainers from a Davao-based mission to teach us how to use it. This machine has already made a huge impact in the lives of our pateints. We have dozens of stories already of how being able to provide free access to ultrasound has improved outcomes for moms and babies.

In July we also had our first staff retreat since before the pandemic. We packed up all 25 of us and drove to the closest beach with white sand that we could find :). We enjoyed our time together swimming, eating, building sandcastles and taking selfies! Our good friend Cathee Mapes joined us as our guest speaker and inspired us to continue in our mission to provide: " Always Godly and Good Maternal (and newborn) Care."

Our training of local midwives in Neonatal Resuscitation was a success. To celebrate International Day of the Midwife we trained 30 local midwives in this important skill.

This August we have begun providing prenatal care to another area in Tabuk City. Some of our clients travel a long way to see us every month and we are trying to be more accessible to them. Our partnering radiologist who provides official ultrasounds at our clinic offered us the use of one of the offices in her clinic every Monday.

We are closing in on 4000 births at our clinic. We are always honored when mothers come to us for care and especially when they bring their sisters and cousins with them! The picture above is cousins and brothers, all born at Abundant, meeting the newest member of the family.

Praise and Prayer:

• Praise God for our ultrasound machine that is already making a big impact in the lives of our patients. Thank you to everyone who helped fund it!

• Please pray for Emmaus as he transitions to life in a dorm and a very academic year of school. Pray for his mom too - that she wont miss him too much!

• Please pray with us for sufficient funding for Emmaus' tuition and boarding fees. We are getting the 'missionary rate' which we are so thankful for! It is still a big expense for us though.

• Please pray the upcoming year of school for Lucas and Zion. For positive experiences and great teachers.

• Please pray for new opportunities in this next quarter to bring God's compassion and love to more families of Kalinga. We are praying about new villages to serve.

Thank you for your support everyone

Blessings from the Macad Family to yours!

Georgia Macad & AGGMC

director@abundantgraceofgod.com

Street Hope Victoria

Writer: Debs Moyo

Hello Table Church!

I hope you’ve had a wonderful summer!

Over the summer months at SHV we’ve met many new faces on Pandora Avenue as an increasing number of people have made it their home. Tuesday evenings are full of meeting new people and saying hello to those we’ve got to know over the summer. There have been quite a few weeks we’ve run out of food halfway down the block. Because of this we’ve started to alternate the side of the road we start on.

A group of ladies from Lighthouse Church continue to make the soup for each month. I’ll be away visiting family and friends back in the UK for October so on Saturday we made enough soup for two months!

If you’d be interested in joining us for soup making on a Saturday morning, please do send me an email.

Food for Thought….

A long time friend of SHV, Normand, he’s really our resident poet, recently wrote a poem called ‘Humility’ one of the verses says this:

“Unto Jesus Christ my saviour, I put my faith,

as he is the shepherd who is the guardian of my soul.

He has guided me through the labyrinth of life.”

We know Jesus calls us each by name. Please continue to pray for those we meet on Pandora, that they may know Jesus as their shepherd, the one who calls them, will guard them, and guide them. Also, for those who do know Jesus, that even in difficult circumstances they may share his Good News.

If you’d be interested in praying with us on a regular basis, Eleanor and I meet on Wednesday morning to prayer walk for about 30 minutes around Pandora Avenue – you’d be so welcome to join us!

Over the summer we’ve gotten to know J. He told me the other week that he’d recently reconnected with his son and is transitioning to move in with him over the next number of weeks. It’s such great news when we hear people are transitioning to becoming housed again!

Please pray for J and his son and for the peace of God to dwell in their home.

Come Volunteer With Us!

If you’d be interested in volunteering on a Tuesday evening with SHV or getting involved in any of the other ways I’ve mentioned please get in touch, I’d love to hear from you!

Thank you for all your continued support, whether prayer, time, financial, or resources. You are such a gift!

Debs moyo

deborah@thresholdministries.ca

Intervarsity Christian Fellowship: UVIC & Camosun College

Writer: Alan Thorimbert

Our Common Journey

When I was growing up, I don't remember a lot of teens around my age being very passionate about prayer. Getting any of us to pray, privately or publically, typically was a bit like pulling teeth.

And yet, isn't cultivating a spiritual life a key part of youth ministry? Or of any ministry? Last year, when I agreed to return to Pioneer to help with the Leader-in-Program, Vanessa Kordupal, one of InterVarsity's high school campus directors, confirmed this to me by telling me that a good LIT program would help teens to begin hearing and discerning how God is speaking to them.

Value & Normalcy of Boredom

First, I hosted a session early on in the program on the value and normalcy of boredom. Perhaps an odd thing to teach at summer kids camp, and yet, wow, did the session bear fruit. In the photo above, you can see students encountering God through the Ignatian practice of Examen on our trip. For a whole hour and a half, the LITs spent time in silence, walking through a self-guided Examen. When they returned, many came back with stories of how they had encountered. One LIT named it as one of the highlights of the program, due to how the space the Examen gave her the need space to process her emotions around living with the aftereffects of a concussion. Beautiful! Praise God!

LIT Out-Trip Adventures!

Over the last two years, my key concern for the LIT program at Pioneer has been to think about the spiritual formation parts of the program. This year I did two new things to help Pioneer's LITs grow in the practice of prayer.

Creating a Prayer Booklet

The second innovation this year was to create a small booklet full of written prayers and spiritual practices from the LIT program. The booklet was partially inspired by Every Moment Holy, a book of prayers I find helpful, as well as one of last year's who shared with me in December that he has lost all the spiritual practice handouts I had given him during the program. I called the booklet 'Our Common Journey' and I was not prepared for the influence it had.

A part of Pioneer's program involves, passing on the leadership of the morning devotions in the second week to the LIT's in the second week. I was amazed at how the LITs repeatedly chose to use the prayer booklet in their planning. Actually, I think the booklet was more helpful for their preparations than the handout document I reached for the LIT's to plan devotions. Repeatedly, the LIT's chose to merge their own ideas for devotions with practices and prayers from the booklet.

However, even more profound, was the ways that the booklet, helped the LIT's discover how their faith in Jesus should lead them to live undivided lives.

One of the most profound moments of prayer was on the first night of the trip when I read one of the prayers from the booklet titled, "For the First Out-trip Meal'. The prayer goes like this:

Are you ready?

looking at the thunder of the packed, frozen soup, you might not be

you might be thinking, the camp stove too small, the propane bottles too few

the hunger of your peers – too loud.

Are you ready?

a miracle is about to collapse into this community

Moroccan stew become the King’s feast

provision greeted with whales in the bay

Are you ready, Servant?

As I finished reading this prayer in front of our camp stove, I heard one of the LITs say, "Woah. That's what we're doing here." There were nods from the rest of the LITs.

Boredom and beauty! That seems to be the secret sauce for helping Gen Z grow in prayer. I hope you'll join me in praying for this year's LIT's as they serve at camp this summer.

InterVarsity At UVIC and Camosun for 2023-2024

Prayer Requests

• Pray for students' curiosity towards our student fellowships and to Jesus will lead them to begin to encounter God.

• Summer Bible Study - Pray that students would encounter God through the study of Ephesians.

• Summer of Fun - Pray for my continued partnership with the Table Church, as we host fun gatherings for students in Victoria over the summer months.

• Pray for students graduating and/or moving on to new programs

• InterVarsity New Staff Training - Pray for me as I begin to prepare to lead a small group for InterVarsity's staff training for our new first-year staff.

Ways to Give

• Online to Personal Fund: https://ivcf.ca/donate/athorimbert

• Online to Uvic Fund: Go to https://ivcf.ca/donate/ and in the 'Select Designation' box choose the University of Victoria 

• Cheque mailed to InterVarsity. Please include in the memo: Alan Thorimbert - Undergraduate Campus Minister

Thank you Table Community for your constant support!

Alan Thorimbert

athorimbert@ivcf.ca