Encounter Weekend: The Mustard Tree, St. Ives. 6-9 Nov

I feel complete and whole and very blessed with so much love I receive and can now freely give
… a glorious weekend … it’s amazing how the Lord met my different needs

Living stream at Carbis Bay

Two testimonies from a weekend in which we were once again favoured by the healing and restoring presence of Jesus! Shaming events in our lives can leave us with a legacy that overrides our God-given identity and makes us feel unwanted, unloved and irreparably damaged, resulting in negative thoughts and behaviour towards ourselves and others. But God’s promise is to restore what we have lost! This weekend we engaged with this promise, expressed by the prophet Isaiah (61:7) in the words:

Instead of their shame my people will receive a double portion… instead of their disgrace they will rejoice in their inheritance… everlasting joy will be theirs

Some of our group

Not just a great promise, but one that God commits himself to, through a binding agreement (or covenant), as Isaiah goes on to say,

In my faithfulness (says God) I will reward them and make an everlasting covenant with them

As someone else noted at the weekend, “I will hold onto this covenant thought and this will truly be a blessing”.

Great shelter for breakfast on the beach

An unexpected blessing at Sunday morning’s breakfast on the beach at Carbis Bay! For the first time in all our Encounter Weekends we were provided with a wonderful shelter – a reminder, someone remarked, of God’s protective covering over us. The weather may not have been typically warm and sunny Galilee, yet we were there! “The experience I had on the beach, with the waves coming in and going out, taking all my troubles with it …..”.

Cornwall House of Prayer

The House of Prayer is always a special place for us on our visits to St.Ives. Once more, the sweet Presence of Jesus filled the place, as we soaked in the ministry of His Holy Spirit. “At the prayer room I felt God released me from all the tough questions and confusion and disturbance within me”; “At the prayer room, God spoke to me about releasing anger and other things I’m holding onto”.

Great thanks to John and Anne for their hospitality, wonderful care and excellent food! Looking forward to the next Encounter Weekend in 2016. DO join us, whether or not you’ve been before.

Shalom at Carbis Bay

Ministry report: Encounter Weekend, 11-13 Sept

A combination of God’s healing grace and Presence, liberating truth from God’s Word, sun and warmth for the bbq breakfast on the beach, warm fellowship and excellent hospitality meant we were truly blessed at our Encounter Weekend in September, at Nicholaston House. God met with us!

We thought, taught, talked and prayed about how shame affects our lives and ties us into false identities of who we are, masking or stripping away the person God created us to be. As we confronted these difficult issues, God broke through , healing years even decades of emotional and mental pain for some folk. Some experienced it at the weekend. Others realised the extent of what God had healed and the freedom He has released them into, only after they returned to their everyday routines.

Some testimonies show what God was up to!

K: Straight after we did all those prayers, Jesus walked with me through my life as a child. He was with me and I saw him with me in every incident where I felt totally rejected, unaccepted, unwanted, ridiculed and unloved. There were so many of them, it becomes a state of being, so that everything is always coloured in that way…even times when it was never mean to be. But this time, as Jesus and I went through my childhood, I felt loved and accepted and it was beautiful. Jesus rewrote my whole history for me – with me – as accepted and loved, in every single moment with every member of my family and moment of my childhood. It was very lovely. … I’ve always felt like my skin was being whipped when people accused me, criticised me or said evil things against me. Now I know that I don’t have to take the whipping. Jesus took it for me. (Jesus was whipped by Pontius Pilate before being crucified. The prophet Isaiah, 600 years earlier said, “by his stripes we are healed”).

D: It has been a weekend of tears and laughter and God has done some amazing things. I’m going home feeling free and excited about what God is going to do with me next. 

H spoke of God rolling away years of isolation and bitterness and being reconnected into His love.

Others found beauty, refreshing, strengthening and fresh hope as God met with us.

Thank you to everyone who joined us and made this such a special time. Thank you to the Lord for His Presence, that made ALL the difference!