Manifest, memories, and God

God is awesome. I really feel like I've had a breakthrough at this time. I haven't felt this good in at least 6 months. I don't know really why..the timing is wierd, but yeah..it's good. Mood in a word: excited. Music in the background: Replenish - Underground. Just listening to it takes me back, and I can remember very clearly. It was a Monday during the holidays last year. I was sitting at the sound desk about half an hour before something. The sun was shining and I had just brought 3 new CDs, which this was one of. This was before camp last year...I was listening to it for the very first time, and I seem to remember Matty coming in for something.

I've read through The Sacred Romance and Journey of Desire by John Eldredge..yeah I know, I'm a John Eldredge freak...get over it! lol, he rocks. Anyway, one of the things that came up briefly in the former and explored in the latter was this idea of a 'haunting'. Memories of times when your heart was lifted and there didn't seem to be a problem in the world, when you were at peace...memories of times when you simply didn't want them to end. Different things trigger these memories, ie. for me it's music in a big way, I don't think I can really listen to any of my albums without remembering something...it can be other things though, I can remember big things like camp from certain smells sometimes..yeah..anyway...

My mood isn't dependent on the music however...it's just God's grace. I can't say enough how awesome God is!

Manifest was awesome despite the first day being really kinda...not so good. The second day more than made up for it. I really learned a lot from the different streams and I think I picked the right ones:

Creative Ministries - Sidney Mohedhe
Worship Leading - Henry Seeley
Drums & Bass - Dave Nygaard & Ben
Leadership - Bram Manusama
Youth Bands - Henry Seeley
Song Writing - Ben Manusama

There was heaps of material, and I have been applying some of it in Illuminus & worship already.

I've decided to put in each blog entry a memory with as much detail as I can, so if I forget, I can always reference it :) so..here goes...


Manifest:
Saturday: I got up at 5:00am..still dark...and had a shower, walked over to Mils' place at around 6:00am. Started zoning just sitting on the couch. Michelle and Brad took ages to get there from picking up Matty. I was absolutely smashed...my state was pretty much summed up by these words at Maccas: "Why don't you...drop it...every time then?"..trust me, it was demented.. The worship that morning, in the stadium, everyone was going absolutely mental! God was in the house and He anointed the worship leaders up the front. The first song was One Way - United...as soon as I heard it smashed as I was, I was like "Nup, going up the front!" I really let go and worshiped God with everything I had. That afternoon, the sun was fairly hot overhead. We went out onto the grassy field to eat lunch. Me and Sam on a spur of the moment did a run-around into the oval underneath the sprinklers. Didn't get that wet, but I was damp for a while. I laid on the ground almost the entire time and covered my eyes with my arms. I left five minutes before my stream started because of the conversation topic..yeah Sam..you! lol!! My first stream for the day was Youth Bands, it was really good and practical..so I'm not going into to much detail here...I have the notes. Second stream was song writing. Ben Manusama had a really different approach to writing songs. He went in depth into the lyrical structure of songs..one example he used was Rock of Ages..others were, Adonai, All Honor, etc. The drive home was pretty anticlimactic...we stopped at Maccas for tea, Sam freaked out some Greek family or something. I slept most of the way home. At some point Mils' put Johnny Cash on...that's when I fell asleep :P...but we had United We Stand and Blessed on for most of the car trip. We got home by about 8:00pm.

Okies, this is a seriously long blog entry...

Cheerio, D-Man