Outreach begins in Taiwan

Well,
Our outreach has only been going around 48 hours and we have already seen God's faithfulnes in some pretty amazing ways, starting even before we left Kona. Arriving at the airport at 5:30 AM I was kindly informed that the reservation for my team's tickets had been canceled by china airlines, and we no longer had tickets to Taiwan. This is not what I considered good news (even that early in the morning I could figure that out). I had to talk the airline offical through each name on the reservation, and he found that all of the student's tickets were good to go, but when he got to my ticket he says "oh, here's the problem, the ticket for Andrew Greenplate was canceled, the rest of them are fine" I can't help but feel the irony as looks of panic spread across the faces of my students. Ok, maybe it was spiritual attack and not irony, so as our team prayed I called our travel agent to see what could be done about this ticket. I sent the students ahead (they were with another team and their staff whose tickets had not been canceled) and stayed at the counter to work things out. Bottom line was China arilines gave me my ticket back, I missed my first flight to Honolulu, but got on the next one and met the team before we all flew off to Taiwan.
We almost got detained in Honolulu as well because the security found out how much money YWAM teams were carrying out of the country. For individual teams, none of the teams had enough money that they needed to declare, but there were 6 teams on the same flight. So these security guards thought we were trying to trick them or something, leaving as different teams from the same organization, and were pretty upset about that; I had to get statements from each team leader about how much cash they were taking out of the country, and then stay behind as the plane was boarding to fill out some paperwork and try and explain the situation. They held that plane for me, and I got to witness to the police as I was taking care of those forms. They were eventually convinced YWAM was not trying to launder money out of the US, and they were really blessed that I took the time to witness to them, share with them and get all the money stuff sorted out. They offered me 1st class seating for my trouble, but I decided to sit with my team in coach :-).
So we made it to Taiwan, So far we have been having a great time getting oriented in a new culture. The YWAM base runs a ministry called "the Rock" cafe, which is a free cafe people can come hang out, and we went there last night to talk to people and witness. It is awesome for me to be back in Asia again, and the team is really committed to seeing God move, and we are pressing in with our prayers and worship to see His kingdom come in this place. Our first ministry time is this afternoon with a christian school program, and tomorrow we have a church service, so we are jumping right in. The YWAM has been such a blessing in welcoming us and getting us prepaired for what we will be doing. I know over 50% of the people working here, which is kind of strange, but so good to see some old friends. Please pray for us as we are already sensing the spiritual darkness in this place. Pray that our team will make an impact in bringing the kingdom of heaven to the town of Dan Shui where we are staying, which is a suburb of Taipei. I will make sure to keep you all updated regularly,
In Christ,
Andrew