Today I have been working on my personal support – so I have been writing letters and speaking to people on the telephone.

Each British YFC staff member agrees to raise 50% of their salaries. I always find days like today hard to start but quite rewarding too. The idea behind ‘‘personal support’ is to free up more money for frontline mission and provide resources and support to those who are working with young people. Every penny that is given in personal support for an individual staff member, such as myself, is put towards that individual’s salary cost.

I am nearly at my 50% target and am looking for a magnificent seven …. 7 people who can help me get to the target which I am currently £100 short of per month. I am looking for 3 people to be able to give £20 per month, and 4 people to be able to give £10 per month.

Anyone fancy joining my magnificent 7?
The rewards are eternal and get to join a great mission!
If interested – lets meet over coffee!

Good day today working on strategy with Richard and Phil.
I even enjoyed the drives there and back.
It does always amaze me how much traffic is still on the road at 530 in the morning. I get tired doing this just now and again, but some people are driving at 530 every morning – what are we doing to ourselves??!! Or, as Joe says, ‘What is that all about!’

Today was an excellent day. Today was a day of chatting with friends. YFC is one great bunch of friends united under the task of youth mission.

YFC staff from London and around the south east got together to listen to each other, catch up and pray together. We heard news, looked at new resources and trialled a new resource called Overcoming to help teach about HIV in schools. This is a great resource developed by YFC and Samaritans Purse and I think it will work great in schools.

It was a pleasure to meet up with so many people that I have not had the chance to speak with for a while. The day started with a brief examen as we looked at what energised and what didn’t. I remembered that meeting with people energised me, and traveling drained me – hence my feelings of excitement now!

After the YFC day I was able to meet up with 2 of my very generous supporters. I had a coffee with Barry who has been supporting me for a year or so despite not knowing me! It was good to meet him and learn a little more.

After leaving Barry I caught up with Leesa in a local curry house. It’s always cool catching up with Leesa and today it was great to hear of Leesa’s wonderfully innovative course that she has written around the subject of pampering to help local church connect with women outside the church. This sounds a cool resource which I am really looking forward to being able to see.

A great day just chatting!
But it’s amazing what happens when people with similar outlooks and desires chat!
It’s not idle chat. It’s not just friendly chat.
It becomes creative chat. It becomes a chat of accountability and a chat of challenge.

Today it’s easy to stay behind computer screens and not really engage with people.
If we do that too much though, I think we start to take ourselves too seriously.
We forget how to laugh at ourselves.
More importantly we forget how to listen to the thoughts of others.
If we do that we start to think we are always right!

Today has been a great day for listening to the thoughts of others and in doing so becoming excited by hearing of how God is blessing friends in many different ways.

Big thanks to all I have chatted with today – you are all individually great and special people.

For what seems like an age I have been trying to put a strategy down on paper.

Today things just seemed to fall into place and I’ve just added up that I’ve worked for about 8 hours on this today, re-drafting and rethinking and all the time getting a little more energised, rather than deflated which is what normally happens when I try to get stuff on paper.

It’s strange as I look at my work now and think ‘that’s flipping obvious’, and ‘how come I never thought of that before.’ It’s probably not a great strategy, but on a day when I planned to be doing other things the ideas for this just flooded in.

Seems like that when I took my focus of this task which has given me a headache in the past that the ‘de-focusing’ allowed my creative brain to start to work on the problem. I’m pleased with what I have so far.

The day ended well chatting with Malcolm from GYFC and then with a good short governors meeting at my local school.

Tomorrow I am off to Loughton to meet up with a good number of YFC friends at one of our annual get togethers.It’s a highlight of the year for me as I look forward to catching up with so many people.