What a week...

Last week (Mon to Fri) was spent at a supernatural worship conference called Transformation, held at Church Of Our Saviour. The speakers were all from the USA and were either part of or affiliated with the ministry of Bethel Church, a church in Redding, California that I've been to quite a few times and whose ministry I've been so blessed by. It's been an amazing week, and God just met me and filled me in so many ways. I can honestly say that I want more, more not of His manifestations but of Him.

I just tried to upload a video of a song that one of the speakers sang at my Worship Leading elective, but blogger.com keeps giving me error messages so I'll try another time. :/ But here are some pictures from the conference, taken with my new camera! *grin*

Emily, and in front of her, Ralph Nader, worshipping God with flags:


Dorea, also flagging:


Emily and Ralph Nader again:


De Wen, looking at someone's prophetic art piece (I forget if it's his own):


The drama elective at rehearsal:


My prophetic self-portrait (asked God for a picture that represented me in some way and drew it out myself):

I later got the word "sound of gold" with this picture, and Cynthia, Ai Lin and David helped me interpret it during dinner.

Me and Dan McCollam, one of the keynote speakers and the teacher of my Worship Leading elective. He has such a light and joyful spirit...


Some of the ladies, hanging out at the hawker center before the last night session:


Worship during the last night session:

I really like this picture. It looks so glorious like we're dancing with angels, and so much glory is being released as we worship.

And finally, praying for the entire team from the USA. They were all such a blessing to us:


So that was my week last week. Surely, surely my days with God can only get better. =)

Meet my latest gadget/toy

*shiny!*


It was a birthday present, from a bunch of friends who've come to form an unexpected second Singaporean spiritual family to me (after my cell group in City Harvest), and from myself - they gave me a really generous voucher to an Electronics store and I decided to pay a bit more myself to get something a little better than the average compact-sized ridiculously-megapixeled digicam. Have yet to download any photos into my computer but I'm expecting the pictures to look pretty good. :)

Stewardship

I like this article from the Bethel Church (Redding, California) website:

http://www.ibethel.org/features/journal/index.php?f=journal.php&id=40

"...at its core, stewardship is not really about money. The foundation of true biblical stewardship is renewing our hearts and minds. If we guard our hearts and minds, the other stuff will take care of itself."

In particular, I like how it ends.
"A great steward, however, would know his master so intimately that everything the steward did would reflect the will of the master."
I've always heard of stewardship in terms of what I should do. But being a steward is different from 'doing' the stewarding. It's not about how well you handle your finances or how wisely you make your choices. It's about knowing God. It's always been about knowing God, and Him knowing us. Somehow I've always thought of the term 'steward' as a sterile concept, a servant who's emotionally detached and doesn't think for himself but only thinks 'what would my master want'. It's never occurred to me that a steward by definition must know the master well. Take Batman, for example. Alfred wasn't just his servant. Alfred was the steward of the entire personal Wayne fortune, AND Alfred was Bruce Wayne's closest and most intimate friend, and even his advisor.

Despite all that, the parable of the servants and the talents still puzzles me. I mean, I can explain it 'theologically' but it still doesn't make sense to me. Compare that parable to the parable of the prodigal son. Placed side by side, the two parables just don't make sense. One seems to suggest that God rewards productivity and expects nothing less, and the other says His heart is that of a father whose love and acceptance is never limited by anything we do (or don't do), no matter how wasteful or rebellious. And no matter how hard I try to look at the parable of the talents to find a deeper meaning of relationship or anything of the sort, I just don't see it. It remains just as plain and simple as ever - God not only rewards but expects productivity. More important (and confusing) in that parable is the implication that the stewards there represent us, but it paints the stewards in such a practical, un-relational manner even though Jesus came not to reconcile our actions to God but our hearts.

Oh well. It would be good to have the answers but I don't need to understand to be able to move on.

Bites of manna

A revelation about 1 Cor 13:

In God's world, love isn't the excuse. It's the reason, the main point. Love isn't the precondition to everything; it is everything.

Quotables

I just watched Get Smart yesterday. Love that movie. It's funny, witty and the humour isn't just slapstick. There's actually some substance to the plot and the characterization.

A really good line from the movie prompted me to make a post on a few quotes that stuck in my mind lately:

"That's what they do, not who they are."
- when Maxwell Smart is talking about the bad guys being, well, bad guys

Couple more...
"If you're not enough without it, you'll never be enough with it."
- Irv Blitzer, the Bobsled coach in Cool Runnings, on why he cheated to get a third Olympic gold medal and risked losing the two he already had.

And last of all, to end on a completely different note, a quote from Patrick, one of my fellow counselors at the EPGY camp held at NTU in Singapore over the last 3 weeks, whose first response upon hearing the live firing from the army camp nearby was, in a calm and collected manner as he stared as his Uno cards:

"Is China attacking??"

Weird psychology

For some reason or other, whenever I'm awake when others are awake, I have this subconscious urge to do stuff, to be productive, or at the very least active, even when I want to take time to myself, so that even if I decide to sit back and watch some TV or something like that, I still feel crappy for not doing much. But once everyone else is asleep, I finally feel like it's my own time. For some reason the night's more peaceful - when others are up, alone time is dreary, but when no one else is up, alone time is solitude. The fewer people there are awake, the less bustling the environment is. It seems completely understandable and normal to me, and at the same time it seems so fundamentally flawed. It doesn't make any sense that the night time should be the only time when I feel like I can be still. God made the entire day for me, why should only the night be mine?

Mendicants Spring Show 2008

Check out the trailer to my a cappella group's Spring Show happening next week...