Hmm…sorry I have been a bit quiet for the last month! Here is a brief update of what I have been up to:
Glætan
I started work in Glætan, the café I am living above. I am working 10 hours a week, so I have been getting used to the café environment and how to do everything. They have introduced me gently, I started with washing dishes and learning the till, now I am making and preparing food and cleaning the cafe. I am still learning how to use the Gaggia coffee machine, but the coffee is really good here so I have a high standard to attain to! I am really enjoying the people side, meeting people in the café and chatting to people. There are a lot of British tourists who come in here, and they are often surprised to find a Brit working in Reykjavík…I work with some great people as well, so it´s a lot of fun.
24-7 Prayer week
We held a week of 24-7 prayer at Café Rót in central Reykjavík in the lead up to the Global Day of Prayer on 23rd May. We ended with a service in the Lutheran church in Kópavogur called Digraneskirkja where people from many different churches and denominations came together to pray for Iceland. We are partnering with YWAM (Youth With a Mission) to open the prayer room here regularly. The prayer room is downstairs in a former strip-club venue, which is now a café run by YWAM. The prayer room is the room where the strippers use to get changed! I love it when prayer rooms are set up in the most unlikely venues. I will post further about this room and explain a bit more about the 24-7 prayer concept soon.
Parents visit
My parents visited me for a week in the middle of May and we had a great time in Reykjavík and took a trip to the countryside as well, we did the Golden Circle (the national park Þingvellir, Geysir and the dramatic waterfall Gullfoss) on the first day and stayed at the lobster-fishing village of Stokkseyri on the south coast. The second day we drove west via Skálholt and up to Stykkisholmur on the Snæfellsness peninsula. I have been to all of these places before, but they are stunningly beautiful and I never tire of driving through the open vistas and dramatic landscapes of Iceland. We had some nice meals out and some fantastic fish in Stykkisholmur.
Community meals
We have continued to have our open-house community meals every Tuesday, which have been great. New faces in May include Veronica from Norway and Jórann Inga who is a friend of Eric and Katie´s who has just returned from Switzerland. My parents helped me cook a courgette and parmesan soup when they were here. I love hospitality, I just love having people over for food, conversation and laughter.
UK election
I stayed up all night to watch the UK election on 6th May with Carl, a fellow Brit who lives here in Iceland. We got some drinks and snacks in and settled down into some comfy sofas in the basement of Café Rót and watched all the action live on a huge widescreen TV via the BBC website. To many people this would appear weird, but i love a good election, with all the stats, swings and surprises unfolding during the course of the night. The British make an election into a real drama, and this was perhaps the most dramatic yet with no party with a majority, and all kinds of rumours about how the parties would form a government and who would be Prime Minister. Normally this is clear by about 4am in the morning, but this time it would be a week before a government was formed. I will comment more about the election shortly in a separate post and my thoughts on the new government.
Testimony
I have had a couple of opportunities to share testimony of some of the things God has been doing in my life. At Catch the Fire church in Reykjavík I talked for 5 to 10 minutes about the reason I have come to Iceland and my desire to create space in my life for intimacy with God, and to pursue some of my creative and lesser used gifts. You can read more about this in the post New adventures. I also got chance at another church, UNG, (which means Under God’s Grace in Icelandic) to share about how I had a lot of trouble sleeping last year. I would often wake up repeatedly in the night, often have bad dreams and dark thoughts. I got some friends in London to gather round me and pray for me in February of this year as I was getting really tired from the lack of sleep and disturbed sleep. They prayed for God’s peace and freedom in my sleep. From that day on I have slept deeply- in fact I can’t remember ever having such deep sleep as I have had since the day my friends prayed for me, I go to bed now and most nights am asleep within 10 minutes (it often used to take an hour!) and I also have trouble waking up now! So I thank and praise God for this breakthrough in my life, it has made such a big difference!
Will be posting more regularly from now on so keep reading!
