When I was fourteen years old I was able to go on a trip with the People to People Student Ambassador program to Australia for nineteen days. During my trip, I was able to take part in a home stay with an Australian family in the little town of Henty. This home stay changed me as a person and gave me a new outlook on my faith as a Christian. On our first day with the Klemke family we were able to learn about the way of life in this small farming town. I had never actually worked on a farm before and it was so neat to see all the hard work and effort that was put into their profession. After our day of work we were able to attend church with the family. Attending 21^st Century Church in Henty, Australia was an amazing experience for me as a person. When I was accepted into the People to People Student Ambassador program, I received all of the information about past trips and watched videos where students claimed that their lives were changed over the course of their trip. I was definitely uncertain of how this experience could possibly change me, especially in a matter of only nineteen days. We were only tourists, after all. But on July 12^th, 2006, at the 21^st Century Church in Henty, Australia, I was changed. The makeshift church was located in a mess hall on an abandoned street. The room contained a mere forty people from this small town of under a thousand.

But somehow, this was my change.

 

I had been confirmed in June and this small service on a Wednesday night was simply a miracle to me. Here I was, in a little town in eastern Australia, attending an unfamiliar church service filled with people I had never met in my life. Graham Klemke, the father of my family and the pastor of the church, strolled to the front of the room and began the service. But instead of delivering a sermon of his own, he instead asked the congregation to speak about how God had touched their lives. Almost every person in the entire congregation volunteered their insights. Not one person was afraid of being judged or criticized. Men and women spoke about drinking problems, broken marriages, and brutal accidents. They spoke about hopes and dreams for the future. They spoke about regrets and about eternal fears. People spoke of their confessions and revelations. They spoke of triumphs as well as failures. And during that church service in Henty, Australia, I was changed. I was trusted with deep and personal stories in the lives of people I had never met. I was given encouraging wisdom and positive advice for the future. And in the end, I realized how our all-powerful God was working indefinitely in the lives of everyone I had met that night, as well as my own. I was a part of a larger plan for the kingdom of God. It was something bigger, something unexplainable, and something real.