random thought sunday night.

Daylight saving started last night. I changed my clock and everything, woke up at 8.30 to wake Emily up so she could get the 9.30am bus… then I was online and was wondering what time it was and checked, and it was 9.44, and Drew had forgotten to change the lounge clock and somehow my phone got screwed up… late for church, we were, to say the least.

The cat at the place I’m housesitting is weird, seriously. His name is Oscar and he meows at me constantly and I don’t know why… he has food, he has water, and the catdoor works… maybe he’s a people-needy animal. I think that makes sense. I’m not home that much.

Dinner tonight was a cup of soup (tomato) and bread. Cup of soups aren’t as good as they used to be. Especially since they don’t make lotsa-noodles-tomato soup anymore.

Blowing bubbles in milk through those chocolate wafers that are like straws is really fun…

I like heatpumps. Can’t wait till the Prayer Room one is in.

Wednesday mornings we always have to open the doors in the prayer room… the men have men prayer at 6am thru 7am, and it smells a bit funky (or ‘close’ as its also been termed.) so as long as it doesn’t rain we let in the sunshine.

I want to pray till revival happens but it takes a lot of faith. post coming soon?

i started watching love actually. Don’t like it, got bored, maybe when I’m a bit more experienced.

Helen Clark is New Zealand’s longest reigning Prime Minister woman… she’s also the only elected PM Woman, cos Jenny Shipley staged a coup and became the first woman PM. Last year, we had too many women in leading positions.

I ordered some books from IHOP… Rewards of fasting, Hungry for God, Pursuit of the holy and end-times simplified. Looking forwards to getting those… they’re youth library ones but I plan to read them first .

Gym tomorrow, I suppose. I have no enthusiasm, maybe I’ll just sleep in since I have to be at work at 9… go in the evening to visit Mr. Les Mills… although today I ran for 30 minutes, go me!

Kirk and Lewis and Shanan are all back now. That means that Tuesday week we might manage to have a full staff meeting, although I’m not sure when Ben gets home… I haven’t been to a staff meeting everyone has been at in like 6 weeks.

Baptisms today at Lifeswitch. Good times, good (amazing) stories of how God moved in their lives…

 It’s very windy. I’m going to bed

Matthew 1:1

I like Matthew 1:1. Usually its a verse that I glance over very quickly… who wants to read all those names every time you go through Matthew… but I looked at it today. It’s a good verse.

“This is the genealogy of Jesus the Messiah the son of David, the son of Abraham.”

First verse in the New Testament, and there’s no holds barred. The identity and role of Jesus is stated explicitly. According to Holman’s Bible Handbook (I’m referring to it this once, probably never again. From now on it’ll be ‘that reference book’) church history believes that Matthew, who was also known as Levi, the tax collector among Jesus’ 12 disciples, wrote it for a Jewish audience. While I haven’t looked into this enough yet, I took it at face value for the purpose of this blog.

So, every good little Jewish boy who grew up and studied the Torah and the Prophets would have known that the Messiah was to be the descendant of Abraham, and of David, as shown in these verses:  

Genesis  26:4 refers to the ’seed of Abraham’, citing that ‘through your [seed] all nations on earth will be blessed.’ Paul refers to this verse in Ephesians 3:16, saying “Scripture does not say ‘and to seeds,’ meaning many people, but ‘and to your seed’, meaning one person, who is Christ.”

Scripture also refers to Jesus being the son of David. Jeremiah 23:5-6 reads
“‘The days are coming,’ declares the Lord, ‘when I will raise up for David a righteous Branch, a King who will reign wisely and do what is just and right in the land. In his days Judah will be saved and Israel will live in safety. This is the name by which he will be called: The LORD our Righteous Saviour.”

Isaiah 11:1 also talks about this  ‘A shoot will come up from the stump of Jesus, from his roots a Branch will bear fruit, the Spirit of the Lord will rest on Him…’

There’s a couple of other verses, but the main point is that the Jewish people knew that the Messiah would be one of the Jewish people – as Abraham was the father of the Jewish nation – and that the Messiah would also be a descendent of King David.

Beginning of the New Testament. Matthew opens his case very clearly, by saying who he believes Jesus is, and relating it to his audience. My English teachers would be proud.

Summer lovin…

I am pleased to say that Summer is on its way. It made a bit of an appearance about a week ago, then went into hiding again… but today it’s here and its the sort of day that would be fantastic to take a boat out or to BBQ by the river type thing… daylight savings starts tomorrow which is excellent. The only bad thing is that it means I go back to getting up in the dark at 6am for my gym-ness.

I’ve just started housesitting… and I had to force myself to come down to the church today. It was so nice to be at home… all alone… in the quiet… and just reading and doing nothing.

Ongoing Community

The question has been raised around here – and not answered yet – as to how community is developed. How do we come up with something organic, so that the core of what we do is not programmes and structures and so that our meetings don’t have to focus on what we do next, but rather on developing that community. It’ll be slightly chaotic and messy but it’ll be ALIVE and growing and shifting and changing, just the same as we are. It’s a far more accurate way to have a youth ministry or any ministry that represents the people, rather than being something that our young people just show up to and go home from without it showing who they are or affecting who they are.

I saw a little bit of an ‘ongoing community’ today, in the best of how it can be. Organisations like YWAM are a bit transient -  people come and go from location to location. Some would say that this prohibits ‘community’ being formed, but once you’re past the issue of geographic-community, anything is possible.

I was involved in King’s Kids (it’s YWAM for kids, pretty much.) from 1999 through 2005. In 2002 the annual summer outreach was in Auckland, and so me and my sisters and a couple of girls from the year round team we ran in Lower Hutt went up, and there was this other girl, Emily, on the camp. I’ve hardly seen Emily over the last five years… there’s been maybe three times that we’ve actually seen each other, maybe four. We haven’t talked online all that much, and often months go without communication.

I love the fact that she flew into Wellington to spend a week down here, arriving this morning, and straight away we’re tight. It’s one of those friendships that continues, regardless of the fact that she’s an hour flight away, or that I didn’t have her cellphone number for about a year and a half. It’s great. I love Emily. I like this form of ongoing community… it gives me great hope for the future when I’ll be marauding around the nations…

Stoneface

I’ve had one of those weeks that is full of questions… full of what I should be doing with my life. I’ve been considering going to university next year and going back to YWAM or going to do the nightwatch at IHOP-KC… I had made the call to stick around but then it was feeling kind of iffy and so I was looking at other options.

Look at this though:
^{Isa 50:7} “Because the Sovereign LORD helps me, I will not be disgraced. Therefore have I set my face like flint, and I know I will not be put to shame.”

That’s a very good verse. “I have set my face like flint” because I know that I can trust in Jesus, in who He is, and in His plans for my life. So I’m going to stick around. I want to learn to be a ‘long-haul’ person, and not to plan to move around all the time, but only to move when the wind blows (John 3:8.)

Plus, even leaving doesn’t mean that the iffy-ness feelings will go away. It would probably still feel yucky in Europe or America. So, if I’m going to set myself and learn to grow, I want to do it here… where I know that I’m wanted and that there’s a dynamic that I bring to our little community. I want to be part of seeing a prayer room and a prayer movement continue to grow until we have something 24/7 in our city.

And I’ll still get into the nations… I’m being told by my leaders that I should go to Oregon next year when we send our next team over to run the Redline conference… I would like to go back to Perth to visit the YPDTS 2008… there are mission trips this summer…

So my face is set like flint. I want to learn tenacity and commitment in the middle of a world where everything is designed for instant gratification, and a significant number of people in my generation lack the ability to dig in and keep going when it gets rough.

Godspaced

Tuesday nights is what we term ‘Godspace’ – our live music slot in the prayer room. Dan and Anna, two of our youth worship band, get along on the piano and guitar and play devotionally for a couple of hours.

Last night was fantastic. Their playing was amazing. I loved it. I can’t wait for Godspace next week

Lord, please send us some more musicians…

My French Teacher was right….

I had a slightly eccentric French teacher while I was still at high school. There were two French teachers – Ms Davison and Ms Hart, if my memory is still right. Ms Davison taught all the senior classes – so I had her for Year 11 – but she also took various younger year groups, so I had her in Year 8, and at various stages throughout Year 9+10.

One of her most common threats, when she was talking and we wouldn’t stop writing down notes or doing our exercises, was that she would break our pencils in half, set our desks on fire, and throw something (our chairs, or the desks?) out the window. I never actually saw her do it…

She also had a dog that I used to ask her about… every week…

But since French is such a crazy language to learn (I think they TRIED to break every single one of their own grammar rules) she used to teach us all about verbs and grammar exercises. She believed, and told us, that if you keep doing something that you hate eventually you’ll learn to love it… verb endings being the case in point.

Anyway, yesterday night I was at the gym and I decided to treadmill. I usually hate the treadmill, and get off as soon as I feel justified in having done a little run (10 minutes or so… then I’m off to bike or the ellipticals.) But yesterday I conquered the treadmill… and ran for 43 minutes solid… running 6km. And I enjoyed it! My French teacher was right.

Of course this morning was a different story…

The Question: I for Iphone, Ipod?

This morning I was standing in the lift on the way up to work, pondering life and all its mysteries, when I started to wonder, what exactly does the ‘I’ used so frequently by Apple stand for?

Here’s what my search has shown up:
- ‘Imac’ was marketed as an internet-ready computer when launched in 1998 – therefore ‘I’ stands for internet.
- Steve Jobs is passionate about innovation, so ‘I’ stands for innovation
- ‘I’ is simply personal: it’s mine.

It’s probably started with the Imac in 1998… and then just continued on as the Apple way…

Missionary mindset

The concept of going to the nations is tossed around a lot at Hope Centre, with all of our pastors doing international itinerant ministry, and an increasing number of our young people heading out. One of the things God said to me before I left to do DTS was that it was a forerunner thing… that there’d be lots more young people that went because I went. Coming home, that seems pretty true… two girls are planning on going to do different DTS in Hawai’i next year, another two are headed to North America to work and travel, we have 8 of our young adults in the middle of an 11 day ministry trip to Oregon, USA at the moment, and others are thinking about moving to Australia to work or study.

It’s possible to become far too caught up in the ‘going’, however there’s just as big a danger that we will grow too attached to home and never leave. If you’re called to the nations, but based at home, it creates a huge amount of tension and trying to find the balance can be a bit of a balancing act. Right now, I really dislike the fact that my rucksack is sitting on a shelf in my wardrobe, and my suitcases are full of stored belongings… yet when I was in India, I was counting down the days until they would be empty and I would be home again.

I was talking with Tiffany last week, and we came to the conclusion that we both have a bit of a missionary mindset in regards to travelling. She’s gone as part of the team to America, but they left last Saturday, and will be back next Wednesday.  It’s only 11 days – which is the shortest international trip that she’s ever done. The shortest international trip that I remember was 10 days… but most of my travel has been for at least three weeks, upwards to seven months at a time.

I went to the airport on Saturday (and parking cost me $12 for 92 minutes… ripping me off… after which I had to pay another $3 at Te Papa for parking for an hour) and saw the team leave. Part of me was desperately wanting to go with them… first time I’d been to the airport since I arrived home and they were all going and I had to get back into my little Honda Civic and drive home… but its okay. Psalm 2:8 is an invitation from the Lord for me to ask him for the nations – and that’s exactly what I’m doing when I get into the prayer room and lay hands on the world map.

Random thought Wednesday

The trial is over. We finished last night just after 5.

http://www.stuff.co.nz/stuff/4190119a12855.html

See there.