On the 14th of December 2008, last year now, Cabramatta Anglican Church had their combined Baptism and Confirmation Service. Combined being both the Chinese and English services combining together.
Anyways, on that day I got Baptised and Confirmed, something that probably should've happened years earlier but I never felt compelled to do, or found the time to do so due to impromptu powerpoint commitments or laziness or I didn't want to do it alone or something silly.
But this year, I took the plunge and did it, albeit I notified the proper people a little late and almost didn't get baptised, but I think being at the church and a Christian for years helped in allowing me to being baptised given the late notice.
Baptism is a Sacrement, or a outward sign that a Christian does to show their faith in Jesus Christ, so baptism is just one of the sacrements that Christians do, but we only need to do it once. People are baptised in different ways, depending on your church, some like to do the full body dunk, others just sprinkle a bit of water on your head. In my case, I got the the head sprinkle, which was fine with me because I wasn't dressed to be drenched.
I never saw baptism as necessary for a Christian to do, as once you believe that Jesus died for your sins and commit your life to him and ruler you have been baptised by the Holy Spirit, so thats a spiritual baptism, as opposed to a physical baptism. That was my main reason for putting off my baptism I think, but then I saw that being baptised for all to see was a good thing to do. I'm a Christian and should not be ashamed to publically declare it, and being baptised was a good way to show not only the people at church but my friends as well that I'm a Christian, a person who doesn't just live a good life, but a Godly life, there's a difference there, a big difference.
So that will be a day for me to remember, as I honestly can't remember the day I became a Christian except that it was years and years ago, but I now can remember the day I got baptised.
Last Sunday, the 10th of August, the children's ministry at our church, SonRise held our latest Evangelistic Event, meaning an event for the kids aiming to tell them about Jesus.
The event itself started with a cold morning, at the school across the road from our church so we were all shivering while setting up each game, which were bean bag throwing (skill), running (speed), quiz (mind), balancing challenges (balance) and lastly cup-stacking (team).
At 9am we started, and kids started trickling in, we broke them up into groups, so we had a blue group, red group and yellow group.
One thing we found is that holding events early means that kids take a while to arrive, but once they arrived it was all good. Prior to this event we did a lot of advertising, and it paid off with a few new kids coming which was awesome indeed, and they looked like they had fun too, which was even better.
We had planned for running each game for 10 minutes but some games ended up running a bit longer, and because of our time flexibility we just allowed them to stay on each game a little bit longer, and scrapped our cup-stacking game, saving it for another time.
But of the games we did have, I think bean-bag throwing was the most popular, if only to watch the kids try and aim beanbags into a hoola hoop. Relay was good to get the older kids tired, but kids these days recover pretty quickly so they weren't tired for too long.
Following our Olympic games we headed into the school hall for the talk, done by yours truly, and a puppet originally name Donny, by my sister, and then renamed Sonny, pronounced Sunny, by Lisa S, because it fits the SonRise thing.
I decided to try and do the whole ventriloquism thing, which I think worked pretty well, originally Sonny's voice was going to be more squarky like a parrot but 20 minutes of practicing the voice destroyed my throat, the voice I ended up on kind of came out of nowhere when I was practicing so I don't know how to describe it, other than 'easy on the throat'.
The talk itself I think went alright, trying to stay inline with the Olympic theme I talked about a race, and how in the Bible if we run the race and win, we get a crown, that gives eternal life. The passage below was where most of my talk influence came from.
1 Corinthians 9:24-27 (New International Version)
24Do you not know that in a race all the runners run, but only one gets the prize? Run in such a way as to get the prize.
25Everyone who competes in the games goes into strict training. They do it to get a crown that will not last; but we do it to get a crown that will last forever. 26Therefore I do not run like a man running aimlessly; I do not fight like a man beating the air. 27No, I beat my body and make it my slave so that after I have preached to others, I myself will not be disqualified for the prize.
So how do we get this crown that gives eternal life, lasting forever? Well, we have to trust in someone, and who that person is, is Jesus. We told this to the kids through a skit, which, due to my poor planning had me running up to people and enlisting their help, explaining their role to them in the morning. So big thanks to Julz, Wendy, Sylvia, Billy and Mr Patterson, who is always willing to help. The skit turned out well, involving the main character wanting to play Trust with people, Trust being the game where you fall back and someone catches you. Julz was the main character, and I was the narrator. With no rehearsals beforehand things were interesting, and it ended up being a combination of the characters working off my cues, and me working off their acting. After the skit I concluded my talk, getting the kids to acknowledge that we should trust Jesus, because he will catch us, more so, he will look after us, and give us salvation forevermore!
My attempt at ventriloquism After the talk we handed out ribbons to the winners, which took a loooong time, then ended with food, a lot of food, so much that I wish I was a kid and could stay around eating and eating, so I settled with 3 cups of jelly, which I ate during morning service at 11am.
Overall, the event was good, and is only just the beginning of the direction we want SonRise to head, with post-evangelism events the following two weeks, to ease the new kids into the way we normally do things. So big thanks to those that helped out and pray that the new kids that came will continue to come and find a new friend in Jesus, as he could possibly be the best friend you could ever want to have, water into wine, mass bread and fish, one-way ticket to Heaven? I'll follow that, and so should you!
As you may or may not know, and whichever it is, it now doesn't matter because after reading this you will know, I teach the children at our church (Cabramatta Anglican Church), not alone but along with a bunch of other leaders. And we call our children's ministry SonRise, for a number of reasons, the main one being that God's Son, Jesus died and rose again to life to take our punishment for rebelling against God so that we can have a right relationship with God, and enter the Kingdom of God if we believe in Him. The other reason is a sunrise happens in the morning, and Sunday School runs in the morning, and puns are awesome, so SonRise it was!
So this year, our team of leaders decided to have a retreat, as an outing and a way for the team to really bond together, building in our relationships and get some planning done for the ministry, and also to just get out together and have a good time.
Our SonRise team consists of 10 leaders, but unfortunately 2 of them couldn't make it to the retreat, so we had 8 leaders go. Which meant two cars, two drivers, and once again I was one of those drivers, which I didn't mind driving, because I'd be in some sort of control.
So on Friday the 4th of July, we met at church at 7pm, which meant everyone got there at 7:20pm, we had dinner and then got into our respective driver's vehicles and drove off towards Terrigal for our retreat. I had Billy, Kathy and Li in my car while the other car consisted of Emma, Lisa, Julienne and Sylvia. The drive up was dark, since it was at night, and quite uneventful with Billy skipping my music or criticising our driving, or making random comments to sort of keep me awake, or maybe to just annoy me, or Billy just being Billy. When we reached our destination it was quite a feat to get into the driveway, when I read the details of the parking in the information rundown we got earlier when they said it would be quite hard to get into the place, they weren't lying. It didn't help that we were trying to get into the driveway at night too, so that made seeing extra hard. Lisa parked her car in first, then I followed afterward, and I had no idea what the driveway would look like, so I was just going on directions from Billy and everyone else, basically I had to reverse into the driveway because it's the most efficient way to park and I took pictures, but I think a video explains it better.
Note: I took this video the next day and not while driving, as if you watch you can plainly see.
(For those reading this on Facebook, read the original post for the video.)
Driving Experience Points +100 (Level Up!)
So we got to our destination at around 10:30 or so and got unpacked and checked out the place, which looked pretty good. We also discovered a balcony, with a view of the beach, but since it was night we couldn't see the beach, so we looked up instead and saw stars, which never ceases to amaze us everytime we look up, goes to show you how amazing God's creation truly is!
And of course, we took photos. Julienne and I had cameras and she's more shutter happy than me so she took more pictures, and was better at getting us together to take photos.
The team, against the night sky
Our first night mainly consisted of unpacking, working out who sleeps where and then just relaxing, and how we decided to relax was by playing Taboo, a board game where you try to get your team mates to guess what word you have, without using the words they list on the card. So an example would be "Father Christmas", and you have to explain that without using the words "Santa, Presents" for example. It's easy to pick up but hard to be good at, but its very fun, and we ended up playing until 1am or so that night, which meant getting up would be a bit hard.
The place had a two bedrooms, which the 6 girls took, leaving Billy and I with whatever was left, which was a sofa bed, so thats what we had to sleep in. I'm sure there's a joke you can throw in here about two guys sleeping in the same bed, and a sofa bed at that but I wasn't too fussed about it, I trust that Billy's attraction to females were on the right orientation and that my sleeping bag was always zipped up. Once again my height and my slight insomnia prevented me from sleeping early but eventually I fell asleep, probably 3-4am?
Our uh..sofa bed
The funniest thing, to me was that where we were sleeping was pretty much the living room, which meant we didn't have a room to put our bags or sleeping bags in, and when everyone else woke up and say wanted to get a drink or cook breakfast, they'd have to walk through the living room, which was where I was sleeping, and me being me, I liked to stay in bed for as long as possible so I had people walking around while I was trying to get those extra few minutes of sleep, and I was fine with that, just building up the comfortability factor of having a person still asleep while everyone else is awake. Anyways, Hannah Montana on tv woke me up with her bad show and since I couldn't turn the volume down, I could wake up and escape the acting.
Our uh..roomAfter breakfast we got down to business and began the planning part of the retreat. We stated with praise and worship, which is basically singing, and since I didn't bring my guitar, we did it acapella style, which made me realise how bad my singing was (I need lessons or something). After singing, Billy talked a bit about our vision for SonRise and what we should aim to do with our ministry. Afterwards we went into planning for the next term, which was basically what we were going to teach the kids for the term (we're looking at the book of John in the Bible, one of the accounts/biographies of Jesus). We took a break after this and then moved onto more singing, then the next part of planning to do, which was for our Evangelistic, Olympic event on the 10th of August, which is close enough to the 8th of August for us. This took up a lot of time and was very productive in my opinion, since I'm in charge of the planning for the event and I'm bad at organising so I'm glad to have a team of great leaders to help.
Once we got planning done it was time for lunch, but we needed supplies, such as beetroot, hamburger buns and V, for those who needed a boost! I had to drive to the shops as my car was the most convenient to take out, and we headed to Erina Fair, which was quite huge. We bought supplies, discovered how bad the reception was in Coles, then drove back to tackle the driveway once again, conquering it a second time. We had hamburgers for lunch, courtesy of Lisa, which were tasty and filling and I must mention HP sauce is odd but works when you least expect it.
Awesome hamburger, with added chips
Now we pretty much had free time for the rest of the day, and since we were all full from lunch, we just wanted to sit and laze around, so we did and decided to share our testimonies (how we became Christians) at the same time, which I thought did very well in helping our team to bond, as I didn't know how most people came to accept Jesus as their Ruler and Rescuer, but now, I do! So it was very encouraging and interesting to hear other people's testimonies.
With the late night and long day, people got very tired, so some of the girls went to nap while others just bummed around. I took out my cards and mucked around with them and soon found myself playing Thirteen with those who stayed awake. This continued on for a while and soon enough it was nearly time for dinner, and Julienne was the chef tonight, making Wonton noodles, with hamburger meat, just in case we still had a taste for hamburgers. I showered before dinner and used Sylvia's shampoo, which after I used it turned out to be the shampoo for your body and not your head, so that was interesting to say the least. Dinner was great, though the noodles were quite mooshy, which made for an interesting combination but I'm never one to complain about food, and there wasn't anything to complain about to begin with anyway.
Awesome Wonton, with added hamburger
After dinner we watched Lois & Clark: The Adventures of Superman season 2 which Julienne brought along, and to me it was quite the blast from the past, and knowing what I know about comics and superheroes I could tell who was who when watching it again, we watched a Christmas episode which featured the villian Toymaker and then the next episode had Metallo, so that was cool. We then left it running in the background when we did our next planned thing, which was group bonding/activity, basically playing board games. We played Faces, a board game where you get an impression, and pick a face out of a lineup of faces that you think match the impression, if people guess the same as you then you advance on the board. It was an fun game to play, and I must admit we got very loud, causing an uproar when no one picked the same face as you or just laughing out loud at the faces people pick. In the end, I didn't win, but it's not all about the competition, it was about group bonding! So we moved onto our next game, Taboo! Which we played the night before but getting the chance to play it again was always welcoming, this time with everyone playing. Once again, I didn't win, meaning our team didn't win, but in the end we all won because we had a blast, and some of us didn't want the night to end and wanted to keep playing other stuff, so we took out the Cranium box and decided to go through the acting cards, like charades and stuff, which was funny watching people act out a streaker or sing Elvis Presley or try and hum a tune about something but have it sound like the Jetsons. But it got late, and people were tired, and while I would've liked to keep on going, Billy wanted to sleep, and since we sleep in the living room, no one can really hang around in our bedroom, so we retired to bed. Still not too used to the sofa bed, I kept waking up in the middle of the night so my sleep wasn't that great.
Billy came first in red, Kathy second in orange, I came third in white and Julz came way last in yellow.
Morning came and everyone was awake, I still wanted to sleep, so stayed in bed while everyone had breakfast, but when you hear people talk about you you know its time to wake up and get ready. One thing I have never been able to conquer is my bad bed hair, I always have bits of hair sticking up like I was a super saiyan, without the super, so I took a shower to make my hair look half decent, which is how it normally looks. I then had breakfast in the form of 2 minute noodles and then we packed our gear into our respective vehicles once again.
Before we left the place however, we did what was natural, and that was take photos, and we took a lot of them, of our team, each other doing silly poses and just enjoying the coloured wall we had.
Give me 5 more minutes...
All good things must come to an end, the saying goes, and it goes without saying that we had to leave the place, we drove out of the dreadful driveway and headed to the beach for a bit, as it was close by to take a few snapshots. After the beach we headed home, but the girls decided to take a pit stop at Erina Fair, to do some shopping. What ensued was 3 hours of shopping, with girls visiting each clothes/shoe store, while the boys, mainly me, checked out each games store, buying nothing, except for lunch. Some very tired legs later, we hopped back into our vehicles and drove home, I was sleep deprived and my eyes were tired, but I knew I would make it home just fine. Billy tried to help by talking to me to keep me awake, but he soon got tired and took a nap, then his snoring helped to keep me awake. We reached church, said hello to the people still at church, then I returned home, tired and ready to sleep...after dinner.
For three days and two nights, we spent some quality time planning, bonding, being in our pajamas and just having a good time. When you go through something like that you know that you have a good, strong team that's willing to serve God and relationships that will last a lifetime. I look forward to seeing where SonRise goes in the future, and await the next opportunity for a retreat.
The team, mucking up the view
