Wake Up!

Today is Friday, the night of our special event called “Defro!” Basically, “defro” means “wake up!” and was originally an idea started by a brand new Christian in Cardiff who was saved but immediately became frustrated with many of his longer-term Christian colleagues who seemed cold or indifferent to the pursuit of their faith. His idea was to “wake up!” those around him to the power, joy and purpose that Christ brings to our lives. One of the students who attended that event was a young man named “Milon” (Ok, the name is in quotes because he is actually Chinese and we can’t actually say his name). Milon is a student at Swansea University who is part of the very large foreign student population, and is apparently the son of an affluent business leader in the Bejing area. Through a friendship with some students as Swansea - one of which is our good friend Tomos - Milon began to attend Capel Gomer (even though he doesn’t understand Welsh, and not much English either!). In the course of attending worship, talking with Tomos, Derek and others, and the Defro event, we understand that Milon has become a Christian, and tonight’s event was all his idea!

In addition to final preparations - like cleaning up the room where 8 college students had been living - Derek took a few of us to Carmel, Pontlliw, another of the churches where Derek runs a kids club and where we will be attending church on Sunday. After some great fun, crafts and games, one of team, Kirsten, even got to teach the story (Jesus calming the storm) and did a wonderful job. We did forget to take 2 cars with us and ended up stranding a few of us at the church until another ride could come, but that we fairly easy to overcome.

In the meantime, Milon & Derek had gone shopping and bought an enormous amount of food. Milon literally spent from 12:30 until 6:30 preparing, chopping, cooking, dishing and serving our meal. He actually prepared 7 Chinese dishes to serve 50 people! The food was actually very, very good and enjoyed by all. The night itself was a huge success. In fact, between groups from Hope Siloh, Capel Seion, Carmel, Capel Gomer, some college students from Aberystwyth, Cardiff and Swansea University, around 20 high school students, Derek’s parents, Gareth’s parents and Arfron Jones (the actual translator of a new translation of the Welsh Bible - www.beibl.net), we had 70 people attend!!

The food just stretched far enough, Derek powerfully shared the Gospel, we worshiped together (singing English & Welsh together), played games, heard Tomos’ testimony and made lots of new friends - several of our men Oklahoma men seemed to be continually surrounded by the young Welsh college ladies for some strange reason. It was a fabulous night for everyone a great lead in to the new English-language Bible Study Derek is starting on Monday.