I brought home a plush plague, but a real cold!

I did not sleep well at all last night. I was woke up for at least half of the night. I was pretty sick. We had to wake up and be at the church by 8. When I woke up, Bec had already left to catch a flight home for a wedding. When we got to the church we had to put some chairs and other things for the pageant in the car and go to the park.

The pageant was sort of a variety of things. They told the Christmas story through a pageant and had singing, the Girls' Brigade did a dance, and our group performed a puppet show to show the true meaning of Christmas. The puppet show was about a girl who didn't know the true meaning of Christmas and when she went to bed her stuffed animals came to life and tried to find it for her. Our group also did a skit around Hark! The Herald Angels Sing. In the skit, the group started singing, but they were interrupted by Frank and then Steve explained the lyrics to him. I didn't participate because I could barely talk, let alone sing. Afterward, we helped clean up then went to our billets for lunch. I just drank some "ensure" again. I also took a short nap before listening to Nathalie practice her testimony for church that evening. I got to sit in their massage chair while she practiced, and it was great.

Andrea in the puppet show

Erica was the narrator 

Girls' Brigade

Hark! The Herald Angels Sing skit

At 4ish, Jon and James came to pick us up for church since Rodney and Vanessa weren't home. Church was a 5:00 service and they have a very small church. There was probably about 20 people there that weren't part of our mission team. We sang, then Catherine gave a bus trip report, Nathalie gave her testimony, we had a skit, a pray, bible readings by Katie and Jo, and Steve talked about the reading. The skit that our group performed was one where Erica gave Jack a present and was really excited, but then he just smashed it up. I never would have understood it without the meaning being explained to me. It is supposed to represent Jesus giving us the present of forgiveness and most of humanity just destroying and not taking care of it.

After church, Vanessa was nice enough to take me back to her house to pick up my stuffed dog that I had left there. I got it for a present from my sister's friends in college when I was in the hospital for my brain surgery. I don't know what I would have done if I had lost it!

Next they had their youth group, which consisted of mostly middle school aged kids. When Vanessa and I got back, they were having a sausage sizzle. I don't like sausage, but I did eat some bread and they had neapolitan ice cream, so I ate that. After dinner, everyone went in to the common area of the church. Our group performed a skit where Jack was a superhero, but Katie and Erica played two girls that didn't need saving. It was supposed to represent people neglecting Jesus as their saviour. After the skit, Frank gave a talk.

We then cleaned up the church and had a group discussion of what had happened over mission. It was pretty emotional, although I don't cry. Everyone started looking at Katie when she was talking about how it affected her, and it brought her to tears. We then packed up the bus that we were borrowing and drove to Sydney. We didn't end up leaving until after 10 and they told us that it would take 2 hours to get there. It ended up only being 1 1/2 hours.

In Sydney, we were staying at Sydney Missionary & Bible College (SMBC) since they were nice enough to let us stay there. We had to wait for someone to tell us where we were staying, so Katie and I walked around for a bit. We saw some people watching a movie upstairs, but then we just went to wait by our luggage again. We ended up staying in the same single room and Katie just slept on the floor. After we dropped our stuff off, we went outside since we weren't really tired. We saw this giant slug on the grass. I guess it probably wasn't that big in Aussie standards, but it was big to Katie and me! We then met up with Nathalie and decided to walk around the campus a bit. On the other side of campus, we saw Rohan so we started talking and then Jae, Jon, and Scott came out too. The original plan was to stay up all night since it was the last night that Katie and I would be in Australia, but everyone else was tired and I was sick so we went back to our room after a while. Katie and I ended up talking for a while. Suddenly I just see this look on her face, like she had just seen death or something. I slowly turned around and saw this cockroach that was at least a few inches long! It was huge! (Again, by our standards, not Aussie standards...) We just watched as it did laps along the ceiling. Katie then asked if they could fly, and I wasn't sure. A few seconds later it starts to fly and she let out quite a loud high pitched scream. Nathalie heard her and came to see what was going on. We then were trying to get it, but we had no idea what we were doing. Nathalie went to go get help, and found Mark. I took a video of him killing it, and it is hilarious. He will want to kill me he sees this, but I feel pretty safe that he won't come to Michigan and track me down to do it!