and you should come join our family

Every year, our base does a base-wide outreach called Bones that leads up to Notting Hill Carnival. Notting Hill Carnival is the second biggest carnival in the world - a time when millions of people come to Notting Hill to drink and eat overpriced food and "experience cultures" (really, though, I think they mainly experience Red Stripe beer and rubbish-lined streets). Still, despite that, the carnival time is one of my favourite times of year on the base.

For the ten days leading up to Carnival, everybody on the base moves out of our three houses and into the church that we attend, which is right in the middle of Notting Hill. We sew, paint, glue together foam, and practice drumming, dances, and dramas to perform in the street. This year, I was helping with media, so I ran around with a camera the whole time. We invite others to join us, and we had teams come from Italy, Brazil, Spain, Austria, Scotland, the States, Canada, and more. There were 90 of us living in the church by the end.

Each day, we had worship and evangelism as well as preparation for carnival. We stayed up late at night working together, and in the afternoons, we filled the streets with the news of Jesus. During one of these evangelism times, I was accompanying Ezra, one of my counselling school classmates, as he walked on stilts. We stopped and talked to a man, Raj, at a bus stop, and we invited him to church. He showed up at the church that night, and after prayer and talking, he accepted Jesus.

Raj is the first person that I have led to Christ in London. I could barely contain my excitement. Here in London, we talk to a lot of people, and we even get to pray for many of them, but we rarely see people get saved. Raj told me that he had friends from the States who prayed for him, and I know that I got to reap a seed that had been sown a long time ago.

During Carnival, I put down my camera long enough to take part in a flash mob, and also to talk to a lot of people. Many times I just had time to explain that Jesus loves them, no matter what they do, but one woman allowed me to pray with her and gave me the chance to explain how to hear God's voice.

I'm sad that Carnival is over, and I'm back to the busy life of counselling school, but I just wanted to share what happened in the past two weeks and to encourage everybody to actually go for it when you tell others about Jesus. Don't be afraid to tell people the truth - that Jesus love them and that they need to take the step to accept Him as their Saviour. Maybe you aren't the first person to tell them, and maybe you will get to be the final person that they speak to before they take the step to join our family.

(Here is a link to the video of the flashmob. I am in the front right, wearing black).