As our reporter is busy prepping for the English camp (exciting!) tomorrow, I (Louisa) shall come and help to write this entry.
This day was centered on the youth discipleship camp at Tachang Church. The intent was to challenge the youths to bear the servitude of Jesus, to simply live out the ‘new commandment’, that is to love one another. The focus would be an episode from the gospel of Luke when Jesus washed his disciples’ feet.
Uncle Henry wrapped up this morning’s devotion with a challenge posed to us, whether we are able to love another first before even preaching this message. Can we walk the talk and not just talk the talk? Surprisingly and ironically without much surprise, church members criticize each other the most. It is impossible to preach the message of loving one another if members of the same body are warring against each other.
We started off the day with a few setbacks, considering that Joanne and a few others were under the weather and they had to stay behind and recuperate. In addition, the sink in the girls’ toilet almost dropped on Jasmine, but thank God that there were no serious injury other than a few scratches. Honestly, we seemed a little discouraged in the beginning as we seemed a little short on manpower and we also woke up a little late and hence our engines are not warmed up just as yet. However, once we started setting up the stations, we fell into a familiar pattern and it really started taking the team’s mind off all these setbacks.
Uncle Cheng Kie started off the camp with a game where the youths (and surprinsingly quite a number of children) fire catapults to knock over bottles with their fears written on them. This was based on the story of Goliath. They really seemed to have fun with it. Hopefully they have learned something from this game. Then, we challenged them to take on the same love that Jesus actively demonstrated his disciples when washed their feet, after which we prayed for them. However, we realized that there were too many children to continue with our original lesson plan, so we decided to throw everything (well, not everything, but most) out of the window and adopt a new schedule.
Then, we decided to get them to build a pyramids that symbolized the tower of Babel that man trying to reach God through various mean (religions and good works) but God has destroy all work of man. Instead of reaching to God, God reached down to man through Jesus. We thought them how to reach to God and established a relationship with him through prayer (holding of breath under water) and the word (seeing your reflection in the mirror).
Then, we did an impromptu act of the resurrection of Lazarus to demonstrate the power of Jesus (hahahahaha, it was funny because Justin and I are not you know, what we call great actors) and asked them to act it out. This probably helped them to internalize the story better and they had loads of fun wrapping their chosen “Lazarus” up in toilet paper. After which, we acted our skit (which of course, had loads of us in makeshift roles) and ended with praying for any problems for them. After the skit, a few youths responded positively and indicated that they would be coming for the English camp the next day.
I’m really proud of everyone today. We had lots of changes in schedule as we had lots of “holes” in our manpower allocation. It’s really cool considering lots of people really worked outside of their comfort zone, and they stepped up and took initiative in the absence of “seasoned” people.
We ended the day with lots of games with each other (it was really fun!) and of course, the usual packing and debrief and discussion of the next day’s schedule and jamming session of worship.
Prayer requests
- Pray for good health for everyone and God’s protection and peace to be upon every single one of us
- Good turnout of English camp this morning and God to prepare the way and hearts of the participants.
0 comments:
Post a Comment