I recently had the opportunity to share the gospel with a friend on campus, and it was extremely exciting! After not having seen this friend for a number of months, I had organised to have lunch with him.

One thing that we need to be careful with on campus is “being friends just so we can share”, as opposed to “being friends, and sharing because someone is our friend.” Sometimes it’s easier to (appear to) be in the former category, so I decided that when I met with my friend, I would not bring up the topic of the gospel unless he brought it up first. We could always meet again later.

Now this particular friend of mine has heard the gospel before, on several occasions, and one of his parents is a Christan. We met for lunch and talked about all sorts; languages, culture, food — he is not a Kiwi — and then he said to me, “So how does someone become a Christian?”

Needless to say, God has been working in his life! This was the open door that I needed to share the gospel, because as a friend he asked me, instead of me asking him if I could share. So for the next 30 or 40 minutes I shared the gospel with him (from the Knowing God Personally Booklet in this case). The most exciting thing however, was that I could see that he understood it. His face told the story that he was putting the pieces together — the pieces that he had heard before — and now understood.

And that is exciting!

In short; technology breaks. In this case, I dropped my cellphone onto concrete (which actually happens fairly often to me, just that this time it broke). This is the second time this year that I’ve broken my cellphone this way. I hope that the phone still works enough to get my data off of it (appointments, phone numbers, birthdays, Yahtzee high scores etc); the screen is definitely out of order.

I’m seriously considering going back to a paper diary to organise myself, rather than a gadget based diary. (I like gadgets, but there’s too much room for things to go wrong).

I love playing with words. I enjoy learning new words, and I enjoy games that involve words (’Balderdash’, ‘Boggle’, ‘Take Two’ anyone?) And I enjoy crafting sentences, because they involve words.

But sometimes I find it hard to organise my thoughts in a logical way when it comes to writing something of a decent length, which I think has to do with the fact that I am a verbal processor; I need to bounce my ideas off others. If I can do this, then I tend to do well in my writing. This is why I wish that I could have my own speech writer. Not that I want them to do everything for me, but I want someone to bounce ideas off so that I can put things in an order that is both logical and yet mellifluous at the same time. I tend to have an ability to be quite logical — and I like to say what I have to say without wasting words — this sometimes to the detriment of a personal side to what I am writing (or speaking).

On this note, I would like to say thanks to my friend Karin, who helped me in this way with the sermon I had to give at my parents’ church this past Sunday!

Photos (1400+) from the North Island Tune In Conference can be found online at http://www.flickr.com/photos/joefish/sets/72157600693670442/

Wow! Conference is over and now we’re all exhausted - but we had a blast! So for those of you who have no idea what a Student Life Conference involves, here’s some of what happened:

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