Oi

alright, THIS POST WILL BE LENGTHENED LATER TODAY, BUT FOR NOW I"M GETTING THE BALL ROLLING





I seem to have lost my Thursday Zip up.... which is needless to say, very dissapointing.

This morning I washed my Jeans for the first time since I got here... excellent.

Our speaker this week is this Argentinian guy (Alexandro Rodriguez) who has a translater just so he can get his points across much quicker a nd much more fluently without having to search for the "perfect word". It's pretty cool, really good speaker, AND it's funny when sometimes instead of talking to us he just turns and talks to the guy who is translating (A staff at YWAM). It's good.

Went swimming at sunset yesterday in Ocean, pictures later.
I really...really want to buy a surfboard,,,,, decision later



Annnnnd, oh! myself and some others almost got into a fight with some drunk little punk last friday, but we didn't provoke pr respond, so he couldn't really do much... more updates later :)


Okay! so what happened was on friday is I was talking with his Muslim guy (Adiel) from Pakistan. We had been talking for a while and we kept talking till 2am haha he was so interested in EVERYTHING I had to say, it was amazing!, BUT anwyays while IU was tlaking to him and some friends were there as well (Chucky, Chris, and Eric) and this group of drunk teens came up and started hanging out nearby. I guess one of them had a problem with my face because he kept yelling at me telling me to stop smiling, and then cussing and saying I was showing him disrespect. Anyways... he got mad, came up to me and was all up in my face, I kept my feet feet planted and didn't move even when he slapped me and would put his fist up against my face. Then Chucky, (our amazing Samoin warrior) got up and told him to get out of here we didn't want to start anything, and this got the little twerp even MORE upset so he started getting all up in Chucky's face telling him to sit down before he calls up his brother who will stomp him down. blah blah blah

Anyways... all's well that ends well, he got freaked out by the Bible, and left us alone HA. When he saw Eric's he was acting like it was some sort of disease.... funny stuff.

What else..... I just saw a guy this morning who I thought looked like Chuck Norris

And i realised I need to put more pictures up on this thing so that I can remember more stories of my escapades.

OH! On Sunday we had a car wash to raise money for outreach. haha I held signs all day at the intersection and had people giving me money just because htey htought i was funny. People coming to the carwash were syaing "that guy over there is great" and all sorts of awsome compliments from nice aussie drivers. It was sweet, i had some people laughing so hard they were hitting their steering wheels at the red light.

So much fun.

Peace up
A Town Down.

-Jon


SKYPE: Jonarkle

LAYLA

I just checked the mail thing today.....




Thank you guys so much.... I havn't been able to stop smiling, it is the most amazing thing ever, thank you so much. Haha, danny I saw your present and it made me laugh, thats awsome buddy, thank you so much hahah man, i miss you dude. And mike, your present probably has the most sentimental whatnot to it, and thank you so much, those two are going to be put to good use. You'll see. And michelle, thank you so much for all the work you put into that, it's amazing i'll be looking at it all the time. Ms. Keyworth!!! (well... not anymore heh) I was so shocked to see your letter haha but i could tell it was you as soon as I opened it! I'm so happy for you and the picture looks amazing!

Thank you most of all to Nicole though, for putting all that together, that was awsome, your amazing, and thank you so much for the shirt haha and the CD! and just.... everything!! man, I love all you so much, looks like you all had fun at mike's whatchamacallit, good to hear.

Thank you



Today at work duties Simon (Aussie) and myself drove to this part of perth to try to get rid of some junk, we drove around forever, took some risks only to find out that it closed 30 min before we got there.... grr

I love this DTS, and I wish you guys could all be here doing it with me, it's life changning, and only in the positive way, Revelations like nuts... and just.... wow, i would reccommend this to all of you in less than a heartbeat. I don't regret a second of this.

Weekend now... I need to get a book report done, hopefully go to the beach becuase I havn't been there in forever and i want to go, i'm sereoulsy contemplating buying a surfboard.... and tommorow i might go over to our School leaders place. (Caleb Brownhill) he announced the other day he's having a baby, which is really awsome, I'm pumped for him.


The last few days have been really good for my patriotism, I've been having so many of my habits classified as "Canadian" even my sarcastic humour which not all the americans particularily appretiate, but it's still Canadian so to me and the others, it's all good. We understand it.

Thank you all again so much, i've been showing you off to all my friends here haha "This is Michelle, and this is Danny, and this is Mike, we've known each other since we were born..." etc etc etc

Amazing

(Laura Degraff! I need to get a picture of a person here for you... he looks exactly like Warren!)

Peace up
A town down.

Stuck in a Moment

I just want all of you to know that I think about you constantly, and I do pray for you. Every single one of you, and if your right now going "well, probably not me we don't know each other that well" ... I do.

I'm always going to be there for all of you... if you want me to be.
Hope is always going to be there for you... If you want it to be.

Banana Pancakes

Ack, I fell behind, Internet was outish again.


This morning it's raining, and it's beautiful. I'm listening to Sum 41- Does this Look Infected and boy does it bring back memories of Mexico. (Casey, Davis (heh), Ryan, Weon Joon, Rob, Nazuki, Robin, wow awsome times witih Mr. Arcuri)

Anyways, the other night (Sat) they had some "farce awards"night, to give people who live on base some funny awards (everything from look alike to 'foot in mouth' award, best toilet story on outreach etc). It was also a half birthday thing for the Founder/ Leader of Perth YWAM base. At the night they wanted people to either dress their best or dress as movie star's etc. That day I had worn a bandana and then chucky comes across this revelation that "JON LOOKS LIKE BAM MARGERA!", I didn't really think so, but I played along, and went as Bam. Pictures are below. (It was suprising to say the least, up to that point soo many people say I look like Tom Cruise in his younger years. Some people just call me "Tom", so it was cool to hear I "look" like someone else)


Last night I watched "Tears of the Sun", some Bruce Willis movie about Rebels in Uganda, kind of a mix of Predator... Hotel Rawanda and Saving Private Ryan.... good movie none the less.

This week in lectures it's the one everyone has been looking forward to because it's so different from the rest of the lectures. "Relationships" haha, but not just in the romantic sense, just relationships with people in general. The Sports DTS and us (DTS classic as I like to call it) are being molded into one class for the week, Should be cool.


BUT the really cool news of the weekend was the Red Bull Air Race. On Sunday there was an Air Race on the Perth river, really cool, planes doing this course of sorts (Individually though, like time trails). It was the final, and had some F-18's at the end do some cool stuff. haha there was even a Jumbo Jet that flew over and went up and down over the river, that was cool.


And thats the weekend's update. Listen to Jack Johnson.


Pictures! (sorry to many for this being a "kangaroo post")

Me -- Peter Jackson (Travis) -- Tobias.


Cory (SOE) and I



















Class, don't let people see your camera.

Me.. in front of the river.



Bubble Tea phenomenon.





















Airplane can you see it?




Elton John. (Phil SDTS)






















AND THATS THAT. Enjoy.

Outreach Details

This is it.


So as many of you readers may know, come Christmas time I will no longer be staying in Perth but rather going onto the "Outreach phase" of my DTS.

My Country that I am going to is Fiji, however, there is an extra catch to what I am involved with...

YWAM calls it the "Summer Of Service" which is much like an extended "missions summer camp" idea. This will take place in Perth at the base from December 27th to January 2nd for preperation and then 5 days for the orientation and getting the youth (mostly u-17 year olds from my understanding) ready for Fiji. The SOS also applys to the DTS outreach team that is going to Indonesia. Myself and the rest of the DTS outreach teams are Staff for the SOS, so essentially we are getting a quick crash course example of what it would be like to be staff for the DTS itself.

Once the Perth time is over, the SOS outreach comes, that goes from January 6th to the 20th. That takes place in the Village that we are staying in for most of the time, building homes, churches and working with an organisation called "HOMES OF HOPE" that works with Women who have been victimized by Rape and other such injustices.

That outreach lasts till the 20th as I said, but then our leader, Joe Marino, heads off back to Perth with all the SOS youth and we are on the island alone for a few days, we continue to work.

When Joe gets back we continue to work in the village and possibly we may do some island hopping in which we Promote that IMPACT WORLD TOUR that I have mentioned before.


After Fiji we come back to Perth and work at the I.W.T.




And that is all I know for now, I also will be getting some forms for fundraising things that we will be doing that they would like us to send back to home and possibly get some help with funds. But I won't focus on that topic right now.



Chucky (Chenaniah) wanted me to say that my team is humbled by having his presence on the team. We are all so glad to have a person like Chucky in our lives and without him this outreach would not be the same.



-Jon

Further Seems Forever - Light Up Ahead

This isn't a good post, it's just to keep my promise to all those readers out there saying that i will be updating more frequently. In this past day nothing too exciting has happened, just the "regular"

Last night was a random free night actually, so I went out for what is called "Bubble tea" with some friends. It's like iced tea except with these wierd....things at the bottom of it. It's kind of wierd, but good nonetheless.

For those of you who are into music, my playlists as of late have been Cry of the Afflicted, some Stutterfly and Bleedingalarm, and alot of U2 and Further Seems Forever. Dan, if your reading this I've also been listening to Stick to your Guns haha.



I've finally found a pool! It's wierd.... as soon as i saw it i had a wierd deja veau like feeling.... it wasn't really like the 'regular' deja veau, this one was just like... i've seen this building before. It's unsettling actually... but I want to get some good excercise.



That's really all for me, sorry that theres not any new news about the school or Fiji or anything, but as i said before, this is just to show that updates will be much more frequent.


Thank you to everyone who would still check frequently even when it took me weeks to update, You are all amazing.

- Jon

Take this Day,

Alright,

So, last weekend the entire DTS (the name of the school I'm in) went to this campgroudn for the weekend. We were ending our week on lordship there and friday night ended late after a long time of "application" as it's called. Anyways, on Saturday we (I) spent most of our time down by this awsome little river that was beside the campground, and jumped in swam etc etc blah blah. Jumped out of a 30 foot tree branch etc. And that was that.


Oh! But, another crazy "is that God talking?" story starts now, okay, after a friend of mine (Jordan) jumped out of the 30 foot tree he took off his shirt in the water. (We were wearing shirts becuase the climp up the tree was pretty scratchy). The shirt sank immediatly after he took it off down to the bottom somewhere of this 10-12 foot deep river, and everything down there was pitch black (the water had a greeny tinge to it because of these "tea trees" all around it). He was a bit choked becuase it had been his favorite shirt, so I offered to dive down and try to find it. I looked for about 20 min (with goggles) and even got the help from another person just diving up and down up and down in this river trying to find this dark coloured shirt, but to no avail. We had scanned and gridded the entire area, and even prayed that we'd find it...nothing. Finally after about 20 min I gave up becuase my lungs were burning from all the diving up and down continuously and i made my way back to the shore. When I got back to the shore I looked back out to the water and then suddenly in my mind a pinpoint location was made, and my eyes focused on a very very specific spot on the waters surface and then this voice in my head....(for those dedicated readers...it was the same sounding voice as the one in my 5 in the morning talks) tells me "Look there" so i figure....meh, why not. So i swim out to that specific spot, that exact spot that had been pinpointed and then I dive straight down.... The shirt was right beside my feet when the hit the bottom.
True Story, no Exageration.

Sorry that this blog has been lacking on the updates, internet is not so good here, so please forgive me everyone.

Happy Birthday Mike

This week in class the lectures are on "Submission and Authority", really interesting week. Our Speaker is Andy Lim, our Regional Director for YWAM. Very wise and humble man, really good speaker (Quite different from Mark Parker last week, probably one of the most intense human beings I've ever met.)

When I get a chance on a computer that is not quite so slow, i will do my best to update with pictures. But as for now, that is all the news i can think of


Oh wait! haha I almost got Mugged last week. haha, alright, last tuesday i was out in a part of the city called Mt. Lawly with our small group. As we were walking back towards the base, a friend (Chris) and I ran into a music store to look at movie posters. When we got back out, our group had moved out ahead. So I say to Chris

"Lets run up a back alley or something, and get ahead of them so they will see us and be confused"
Chris then asks "why would we run up an alleyway" appropriatly I responded with "So we'll have a good story to tell"... little did I know. So we find a backroad, and start to run around the block until Chris notices an actual alleyway going behind a restraunt or something. We begin to run down the alleyway until a big white van with no windows at the back begins to drive down the alley towards us. We move to the side of the alleyway and stop running so that we can get past the van (Narrow alleyway). As we approach the van I hear yelling inside "GET OUT GET OUT NOW", I assumed it was people fighting inside) anyways, as we begin to pass this van the doors slide open and 6 guys and 2 girls come speeding out, one of them coming around the van to head me off before I could get around. Actually pushing me back with his hand so that we were both surrounded in a circle by them all. One was jumping around and the one who pushed me began talking really fast "Why are you two running down the alley? Did you steal something? You don't run that fast unless you've stolen something, did you steal hash? you guys got hash? what are you guys doing back here? you wanna get robbed? whatcha got? these guys look like they want to get robbed" and they all started to move in closer, one of them getting all up in chris's face. We played dumb tourist and acted like we were so confused we couldn't answer the questions. These guys were looking for a fight and would get all up in our faces trying to provoke us, but we stayed calm and even when they moved in and threatened to take our stuff we stayed calm. The "leader" then lost intrest and shoved past me grabbing Chris' hat as he left saying "**** you guys, I'm taking this hat"
He then grabs Chris's black LA hat and walks off, while his "posse" followed him all swearing and obviously quite proud of their accomplishment of the evening. Chris as obviously choked and he just began to walk away in silence (he wears that hat every day) and as the 'gang?" started to walk away I got and the attention of one of the girls who was walking at the back of the group and said "Hey, we're not even from around here... is there any chance we could get his hat back?" the girl then said "oh? your hat got taken?" "yea... he just grabbed it off his head" "oh okay just hold on" so she goes around the corner after the guy we hear the 'hat thief' describe what he thought of us in a few explicit terms then the hat comes flying back into the alleyway. Chris walks over to it, picks it up, puts it on then goes "thanks bro, see you later" (very cheeky) then we run to catch up with our group... who were talking about kangaroo's or something...

WOAH! (Crikey?)

I'll update more often I promise, it'll become a daily to semi daily thing, but the posts may not always be so exciting....ish.



Oh, okay, for those of you who are reading who do not quite understand what YWAM is, it's a Missions organisation, so Missionary work. I am not in Australia for the entire 6 months, On December 27th I will be leaving Australia to go to Fiji. I will be in Fiji until end of feb, where I will then come back to Australia to work with this Huge international tour thing called Impact World Tour






This is my current "Job". It's the Property shed on base, everything in there has been donated from various places becuase YWAM pretty much has to live off of donations. The people in the picture are James (kiwi far) and Eric (close, american) Eric is on my outreach team to go to Fiji. It is Eric, this other guy Chucky





This is where I eat. Plain and simple, this is the Audotorium, it is essentially the "meeting place" there are two floors ish... same room, two levels? and they are used to help the Friday night service that YWAM hosts.













This is where I sleep. It looks messy.. it's not always that messy. Top two shelves are mind, and it is what I live out of. Top is for clothes, bottom is for food, paper/pens/books, toothbrush toothpaste etc, and such.












And thats that, I'm off to get some things done. I'll post again soon (PROMISE) so thank you for reading thus far and please come back.

Y-BAM

This is going to be short....for you Danny.


Okay, so it seems like everyone is kind of interested in how the school works.... alright, well every morning we have to be up by 6 for morning excercise. This maintains confidence that during outreach we will be able to be disciplined enough to be up and ready to start working. Some friends and I have started playing Ultimate Frisbee as our morning sport and it has become one of the more competitive games played in the morning (if not THE). The other day it was myself, Jimmy (Hemi, James, i switch around), Adrian (German, you havn't seen pictures yet, i'll get some) and this girl star (just becuase we had to) vs. like 10 people. We won.

After that we have a bit of free time till 8:00 when we have to do chores around the base, this switches up every few weeks and doens't last too long, then by 9:30-10:30 anytime there it is time to go to class. Our classes take place in..a classroom? at the base, it is cold but good becuase it keeps you awake... other than the large map of the world on the wall, the room doesn't have too much to keep you awake... except the speakers...*cough*.



heh... Fun with Macs Mike! I want one so badly now haha it is the sleekest computer ever.... i've been using a friends "MacBook" anyways enough about that

Classes end at about Lunch time, usually cut into it so then we eat, then it's work duties time. Everyone has a work duty ranging from Media (Graphic art for the website www.ywamperth.org.au etc) to Garden work. I'm on property which is the labour job, everything from carpentry to welding, building to tearing. The work duties have two main times...1:30-3:30, and 3:30 to 5:30, the time you don't have shift is free time, otherwise your working. Then it's dinner time and we eat... food that varies but overall we all like it, then the evenings are basically toss up, every night is different,
Monday is more lectures,
Tuesday is "small groups" (i'll describe that in a bit),
Wed is the free night,
Thursday (heh) night is "outreach" where we go out into the city and such to talk to people about everything from what Ywam is, to Jesus, to what batman movie is the best (WHAT? JON'S AT A CHRISTIAN THING? WOAH WOAH WOAH) , i'm on a "skatepark" team...the best I think.
Friday is... i can't remember to be honest.. thinking... thinking...oh yea, free night except the Base puts on a friday night service so we go to that.
Weekends are free except for weekend duties that kind of cycle so you only have it a few times


there, so that was the itinerary, now "small groups" is essentially your "pod", there are a bunch of staff in charge of our school (DTS 'classic' as I call it, there is Sports DTS, Surfers DTS, BSN, SOW, etc etc many schools here) and every leader has a bunch of students who they are more personally in charge of. So once a week we have a "one on one" with out leader where they just check up on us i guess.... or something, and then on tuesday we do stuff as a little group, go into town together etc. (Chris is in my group, It's his Mac)



This week we are learning about "Lordship", Now, for those of you who arn't interested in hearing about "Christianity Stuff"... keep reading HAH. Essentially Lordship is about understanding that in the scheme of life, nothing should come before God, which you would think is a given.. but actually goes quite a bit deeper. It's about being willing to lay down everything if God was to ask you to, and although that at first may sound like some kind of suicide attempt "What?? Give up EVERYTHING i've earned and worked for?" you realise that so many people who have... have received so many blessings as a result (modern day people, i'm not just talking about "bible stories" for you cynics out there). Anyways, I won't go into a large thing about religion, religion vs. science, whether you believe religion is a "crutch" etc right now, becuase i'm writing a blog not an essay or debate BUT I'm completly open to hear any critisicm from any readers, communication is key for friendships, and I'd love to discuss and hear what you have to say about any of these things (and i'm nottt going to just argue my own opinions, i'm too much of a diplomat (as a previous speaker told me) who knows.. my opinions might be closer to yours than you think..dun dun dun). FUN!


Anyways, this weekend we're going into the outback as a school to go camping, which is cool. My school leader Caleb Brownhill actually did his DTS in Westbank (Kelownas YWAM is down at green bay), and then did his outreach to both Tofino and Fiji. cool.


Well, thats all i can think of... I need to go the washroom (or Thunderbox as the Aussies call it), so i'll wrap this up.
Oh! went to this thing called "Church together" on sunday night, it was allt he churches in perth coming together for one HUGE service/concert. 5-6,000 people all packed on this field with fireworks (nice ones) good concert of this band called "Hillsong United" (United is important, i guess "Hillsong" is a bunch of old people, Hillsong United is the younger ones, really good show!

And that's that.



This picture reminds me of 'Mallrats'

(Too much fun with Mac's Mike...)




Love, Jonathan

A Sequel

DOES ANYONE HAVE SKYPE???



IF SO! COMMENT WHAT YOUR NAME IS ON IT SO I CAN ADD YOU!!! I HAVE IT HERE SO THIS WAY WE CAN 'PHONE'/ WEBCAM FOR FREE! HEY! YOU! YEA YOU!


(Casey, i've been listening to alot of Legion of Doom in the past few days, so yea... say hi to steph for me as well, and i'm working on getting back to you so calm down... CALM DOWN! WOAH)

Actually, Casey, theres a girl here who kind of reminds me of you mannerism wise...well she started too, but then i realised...no, noone beats or even comes close to casey, then i started getting pumped on disneyland haha. BAM

and Mike, i know you have Skype, so Get back to me

And everyone else...hey, this is a really quick blog entry as i have to quickly run off, so I'll get back to better/more interesting whatnots later (if People are interested in how the actual School itself is going, then please tell me haha i could write so much more about the actual course itself...but i feel like the only thing people want to know about are the homeless and kangaroos.... the most interesting stories i've been writing so far...


man Jon.... get on top of things!

Freaking IDIOT ughhhh


_Seeyalata