Right, after a few weeks of procrastination I have finally summoned the courage to tackle the epic task that is the soul edge blog. A lot’s been happening during our time here and during week 4 and 5 where we headed up to Kananaskis country and attended the Canon conference in Lethbridge are no exception.
I’ll begin with week 4, K Country:
Josh and Joel woke us up early on tuesday morning having packed out the trailer the night before with thermarests, sleeping bags and enough carbs to last a week hiking and camping. We loaded into Misty the van and began the day of travelling to get to The Blue Bronna wilderness camp. The journey was pretty fun, though with 14 guys and Kiri it’s very cramped. Once again having both Rich and Tim bring their macs was a huge blessing as we let the hours pass by watching films and numerous episodes of The Office. The obligatory stop off at Starbucks also makes the experience more enjoyable. I owe a debt of gratitude to Richard Maddock for the introduction of Caramel Apple Spice (Venti obviously...)!
After a good 6 hours of driving we arrived in Calgary to get lunch at subway and buy knives... the two being mutually exclusive. This was a source of great enthusiasm for all the guys, through there were a few moments in the dar afterwards where brandishing knives probably wasn’t the best idea...Sam also got a cool one, more of a piratey looking knife with a wood and golden handle! Very cool...
We continued on into Calgary for a bit to go to MEC, which I now hold as my favourite shop of all time. It has EVERYTHING to do with anything outdoors! You can actually see the Erb’s eyes light up when they walk through the door...
We left MEC loaded up with snowshoes and for some of us, new clothes (It’s very easy to spend money there!). From MEC we set out on the final leg of our journey...one that should have taken us-according to josh and joel- 30 minutes. As a group we have since realised that the twins work on a different time scale to regular humans, but they are ginger I suppose. The half hour turned into 2 hours-ish, though we did see a moose so it kind of made up for it.
We finally arrived at the camp around 7ish and got some food (expertly cooked by Josh and Kiri) and had a short night hike up one of the nearby mountains, had an amazing prayer time then headed back down again, some of us via a more rocky route which made scrambling a bit more fun! After some hot chocolate we went to bed in our cabins pretty quick amidst some classic banter, the kind that can only result when 12 guys share a log cabin in the middle of nowhere. The first proper day in K Country began by waking after a not so good sleep, mainly due to scruff absolutely stinking the place out and deciding to lick me while I slept at 5 in the morning. The sunrise was incredible, so colourful and made better by the fact we were so isolated. Once we had all been fed we set out for a short drive to where we’d be hiking for the day. We started by climbing a mountain in our snow shoes. Snow shoes are fun for about the first 10 seconds then you realise, that useful as they may be, they’re heavy and cumbersome which isn’t great when trying to navigate through the thick alpine. From every angle the landscape looked incredible, it really was such a blessing to be able to enjoy God’s creation with our own two legs and hike up the mountains and snowshoe the valleys. We stopped for food after a few hours of hiking. Once again pasta, being the souledge staple diet, gave us enough energy to continue on after being scared witless by Seb chucking a banger in the fire. As we continued on up our final steep slope everyone was feeling the aches a bit but the effort was well worth it on reaching the peak. Our resident photography expert James took some sweet photos and we hung round for a bit before scrambling back down to hike back to the camp. This gave Jeffs, Steve and I the perfect opportunity to reenact some epic Lord of the Rings moments, if somewhat poorly. We also had a load of fun sliding down the mountains on the way back. Once again we had great food that night and managed to get to sleep pretty quickly. That is, until we were awoken by Jordan’s Gollum impression screaming ‘My Precious’ in a sleeping Harry’s face, quickly followed by Harry’s questionable punch reflex and Jordan moaning about being hit in the face...
The next day was the day we would set out to go snow camping. We drove out for an hour into the middle of nowhere and met Steve, one of the camp experts. He knew pretty much everything from which way to face the car in the wind so it starts in the morning to Pine Beetles and their effect on the alpine forest. It was really cool to listen to his knowledge. We hiked for ages along a pretty straight path drawing closer and closer the the mountains and further into nowhere. It was a nice easy hike and we arrived at the camp sight with enough energy to spend a few hours building our camp. We had a lot of fun building it though chopping enough wood to feed the fire through the night seemed to take forever. Once built we all wrapped up warm, had a fatty meal of pasta and sausage and got into our sleeping bags. It was about -14 so was very cold. It was such a surreal experience for all of us, we could hear cyotes up in the mountains howling which was awesome. Unfortunately sleep was made difficult by the cold but perhaps more by the two brainless dogs we had among us. Jasper and Scruffs between them managed to wake everyone through out the night. Jasper was relentless in playing fetch with Seb whilst he tried to sleep. Once you throw a stick to Jasper he WILL bring it back and didn’t stop poking Seb all night until he relented and threw, which further encouraged him. Scruffs on the other hand was just stupid and funny as it was to observe Jeff’s getting a faceful, didn’t seem to understand that people don’t like having his butt on their face whilst they slept. I would also like to make a formal apology for waking James Hunter on behalf of the group for quoting Zoolander and informing those who were unaware of the existance of Land Octopus at 3 in the morning, thus waking and annoying him in an admittedly funny way. Sorry James. We woke to a breakfast of muffins and poptarts and then cleared up the camp for a quick snowshoe hike. Again the views were incredible. We hiked back to the van which took a few hours, which in the surprisingly hot sun was an effort. It’s hard to get too tired though when the scenery is so cool. Joel pointed out some cougar tracks, sadly we didn’t see any actual cougars though. We got back to the camp later that day and after a much drawn out game of ‘who can blow the half full bottle (or half empty...whatever) over’ we went to bed and did our best to provoke Steve before going to bed through stealing his mattress and the like.
When we woke on Saturday morning we packed our bags, said goodbye and set off on the long journey home again via the usual stops to MEC, Subway and Starbucks, once again made bearable with liberal volumes of The Office.
Church was great on sunday morning, Rich Erb spoke on retaining our ‘saltiness’ as christians which was great. After lunch we prepared ourselves for an afternoon of rivalry and banter watching the Superbowl final at Shelly and Daryl’s. I rooted for the New Orleans Saints with a few others while Josh, Joel, Steve and Chuckles headed up the attack on the Indiana Colts front, with full body paint. Too bad they lost... 31:17... For every touch down the penalty was 50 press ups which added some competition.
Week 5 went along as usual for Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. We had some good talks on leadership and spiritual warfare and hit the ranch. Standard.
Wednesday morning saw us loading the van again (this time with out the trailer) full of people and clothes to last til sunday. It was VERY cramped, and Misty’s heating system was the worst yet, frying anyone at the front and freezing anyone in the back two rows! After a 4 hour trip to Lethbridge where we were helping and attending at the Canon Of Truth conference, we entered the massive River of Life church, where most of us wouldn’t leave for a few days. We stayed in the youth room upstairs and spent a lot of time playing throwing an american football around after discovering a new found enjoyment in it since watching the Superbowl.
The conference started on Friday though we went to a ‘Rooted’ meeting on the wednesday night which is River of Life’s young adult meeting. There was some brilliant teaching on God’s actual call for us sometimes conflicting with what we think is God’s call on our lives. We used thursday just to help set up a few things for the conference and did bit of prayer in one of Lethbridge’s parks and had fun walking on the frozen lake. Ryan invited us to his house to prayer for the conference with some members of rooted and the worship team in the evening. We prayed for ages and God moved really powerfully, everyone managed to get some great prophesies and really encourage what was going on which was really sweet. Friday evening was the first Canon meeting and Ryan spoke very passionately about the word and having faith in God. The rest of the conference was brilliant, some great teaching mixed with some good laughs made it a lot of fun and I felt God really move and shift some false perceptions about Him that I hadn’t even realised were there. Some of the guys went back on the friday night to play in the band for the Crossroads Church Valentines Sweethearts night. It seemed very empty without them but was very funny to hear how Steve had managed to clear the church with an innocent use of a word in Wheatus’s ‘Teenage Dirtbag’ which apparently doesn’t go down well in Canada ha. Jordan also managed to change a hilariously inappropriate George Straight country song into something less dodge and sing that which went down well. They came back to the conference on saturday morning to catch the last couple of meetings so didn’t miss a huge amount. Saturday night was mostly taken up with helping clear up the church again for the sunday morning meeting though it wasn’t too tiring and we went out for 1.30am doughnuts from Tim Horton’s (also competing with MEC for best shop). After another night sleeping on the floor we went to the main morning meeting and then got back in the van for the 4 hour trip back home.
We were really blessed again by Rich and Polly when we returned as they had prepared an amazing dinner for us when we returned. After travelling for a few hours it was so nice to get some good food back in us before we went to bed and started the week’s routine again!
Basically this longwinded account only generalises a lot of what we’ve been doing and what God’s been doing in us. Overall though, God has worked so powerfully through all of us, building our strength and relationship with him as well as with each other through the last few weeks. And Josh and Joel have continued to be incredible for encouraging and building us up as leaders, and as always getting on with serving our demands without even batting an eyelid! Thanks guys.
