Sunday began with breakfast and then a beautiful worship service led by Peter Slofstra and with presentations from both World Renew and Partners Worldwide. It is inspiring to hear how much they are able to do in the lives of those affected by poverty. We sang the song 'Bind us together' and stood and we all held hands, it was a moving moment.
The service was followed by our first peloton meeting. Since we are such a large group we have been divided into 12 service teams. As a service team we will be on a weekly rotating schedule of serving by, breakfast prep, cleanup, hydration, loading gear, dinner prep, serving, cleaning etc. I'm not sure how the leaders of those groups were decided, but I was pre-selected as team 8's leader. Anyone who knows me knows that I am not much of a leader, except with kids 😬so God must be trying to stretch me! Basically I'm in charge of helping our team solve conflicts that might arise amongst our group and if unsolvable still bringing them to Ed Witvoet who is in charge of the tour. It's like how in the bible Jethro told Moses that he needed to delegate and make leaders of small groups so that Moses wasn't overwhelmed by all the Israelites' conflicts 🇮🇱 (Exodus 18). We also have a designated bike captain who in my teams case is an experienced cyclist having biked on previous sea to sea bike tours. He has already shared many helpful tips, that I'm sure will come in handy.
After lunch we participated in a CANBike program in which we were biking around a parking lot as a group. We practiced biking 2 cyclists wide all the way up to 5 wide. We practiced threshold braking, avoiding rocks and riding on grass. I was worried that it would be more of a test but it was actually fun biking beside different people and sharing with them. This training was 2 and a half hours and it was warm, but a benefit of biking is you create your own small breeze. The rest of the day was basically free time.
We were also able to share a cross cultural experience with visitors. Some people from the local First Nations people came and in their own cultural way prayed a blessing on our trip in their language and then taught us a simple dance, moving in s circle and going under each other's raised hands (like a tunnel). We all said the Lord's Prayer together too, which will become a common prayer on our trip.
Following dinner I had to gather everyone from my group together for our first meeting. I wasn't very sure of myself, especially because out of the cyclists on my team I am the only female, there is only one female volunteer on our team as well. Also they are all many years wiser than me (if you go by age😃).
I am not a very confident person so it is probably a blessing that I don't have people my own age in my group because they would intimidate me more. I enjoyed some more chatting time before coming to my dorm room for the weekend where I am now typing this blog.
Have a good night! Tomorrow we BEGIN!!!!!