The second chapter of our missions was entirely based in Pait, our base village, where we would be having Missions Convention. There were close to a 100 participants, mainly from the B’laan villages around the mountains. But this also marks the first time Pastor Uriat, Pastor Galzote and Pastor Milan congregate together; bringing together the ministry of Davao, of the Muslims, the Tibolis and the B’laans.

From Tuesday evening till Friday evening, we had the convention; usually the day starts with morning service (for us, it begins at 4:30 am due to the bible school students singing during devotion), and after lunch, we break out into workshops, either worship or children, or creative arts, so our team would separate to do different workshops at the same time. Even in the worship workshop we broke up to different instruments and worship leaders. As Pastor Roland pulls me aside and somewhat distressed, shakes me and says, “What do I go for??!” He ended up flitting from guitar to drums to worship leader sessions and back again.

We had choir sessions as well and Jesse led his choir for the third night session, singing “I am Free” by Ross Parsley and our translated B’laan version, “Kagalwa“. Other songs taught were “Assuredly Yours” and “You, You are God.”

They love the drums. Say what you like about their rhythm, the B’laans have an innate ability to learn things very quickly. Roland had absolutely zero experience with the drums. By the end of Friday, he was already able to finish some minor rolls and slightly complex beats, thanks to Pastor Velos teaching. The singers however need to follow the drums; so what we have here is Roland in a world of his own, and the worship leader, who until now, only has an out of tune guitar to work with, in his or her own beat. Roland would occasionally remember he is supposed to follow the song and bail himself out with a roll, or a cymbal crash, all the while grinning unapologetically. What a wonderful spirit!

Our drums professional fixing the kit

Pastor Velos, however, although proficient enough at the drums, seems bent on murdering the instrument by whacking it with all his might. I am afraid the drum set will not live past winter.

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On the services, the move of the spirit was just astounding. Vincent and Kenneth really carried the anointing into the church; Kenneth, speaking on the unity of the church had everyone light up a candle and prayed. Vincent on the final night, made a ‘congregation call’, not an altar call. This time, everyone got prayed for. The pews were moved aside, and we just went from row to row praying, and having people slained and delivered. It was as if we were back in the times of Acts, and people were just weeping and being completely immersed by the spirit. It’s moments like this that our faith is raised, and truly as Proverbs 11:25 says:

‘A generous man will prosper; he who refreshes others will himself be refreshed’.

Candlelight service in Pait

Many of us wander around in life rationalising and trying to understand why we are so dry, why are so stagnant, why we are so defeated by sin when we are already filled by the Spirit: it’s because we don’t give out.

Have you tried taking in air and not letting it out? Your lungs will be so full but without an outlet, it’s not going to work naturally; there has to be a release. And when we do release, we experience that God’s intention for us in this life is not to mope around struggling with our thoughts and guilt, but to live freely and freedom is only experienced in giving generously. (Proverbs 22:9)

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Some more pictures below. For more pictures, have a look at Alf’s facebook here. You need to sign up though!

This is pretty much our diet: rice, rice and oh, more rice.

We got a pleasant surprise at the back of our parsonage at night, when they mounted the goats slaughtered for dinner.

The Yatz man doing his thing

The Pait Choir, led by B’laan favourite, Jesse

B’laan group shot

With the clashing of cymbals.

And booming of the drums.

These constantly served as a reminder to me every morning at 4:30 am. Why on earth did we agree to get them a drumset?

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In all my 5 trips to Philippines, this was by far, the most exhausting trip, pointing to a few things: I’m getting too old to be traipsing around the hills, or two, we are gradually traipsing a little too far. The moment we touched down, our team were whisked away to begin our mountain ministry. Alf, Yatz, Jesse and I found ourselves riding pillon on bikes in the dark, and due to the rain in the past days, ended up walking in shin deep mud in the middle of a corn field, in darkness, for our first village. And it’s not like the nice kind of mud we like to play in when we were kids. We’re talking about mud that grabs your feet and refuses to let go, sticking at the bottom of your sandals and refuses to be scraped off. Talk about Baptism of Fire!

I also found out that the guys in Nike knows absolutely nothing about what they are doing when they tagged their products “All Conditions Gear”. We have decided that it really meant, “All City Gear”, because it sure didn’t amount to much help in these conditions. Nike, you fail big time!

At the foothills of Mordor

The first part of the trip was ministry to the outer reaches of the western B’laan frontier. We headed to some familiar villages but our destination for the second day was the village at the highest peak; that we went on my first trip there, using an army truck transporting us up the trecherous terrain. This time around, we didn’t have any escorts, just Pastor G and two more of his member, and due to the weather, we didn’t have any bikes either, so it was walking, walking and walking.

The journey up

Near the peak, and exhausted

We crossed 7-8 rivers, flowing current much stronger than our previous visit in the summer - and by the time we reached the mountain village, we were pretty much half dead.

Any escape this time?

In a much milder sense than the previous one. We again had to cut short our mountain ministry and beat back to Alabel, taking the way we came. We missed the visit to two distant villages beyond where we were, in the valleys, due to the activity that was reported to us in the night before.

Our Aragorn surveying the land for ‘kritikal’ activities

We were already ready to crash that night, when one of the villagers poked his head into our room (in a crude hut made of bamboo) and woke Pastor G up. They hardly bother the pastor so we knew something was up. And the furtive glances he threw at us while conveying the message didn’t exactly give us the idea that he was taking orders for our breakfast tomorrow. As he chattered away, Pastor sat up for a while, and then spoke something and went back to his mattress; and the chattering villager faded away, leaving us to our own imagination of what is happening, or what would happen to us should we be required to run.

As we wondered, wide awake, Yatz promptly responded to the rather alarming news with a series of his loudest snores, in the key of E flat.

Find rest, O my soul, in God alone; my hope comes from him. — Psalm 62.5

Astounding view from the mountains

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The trip back to Alabel was a lot better. One of the miracles God did was to hold the rain during our trip up in the mountains. Rain was critical to our ministry. if it rained, we wouldn’t be able to go up through the slush. Believe me, the mud is so bad, you can’t even walk through it, much less ride through. But for two days, the blazing sun paved the trail for us, and even some villagers expressed surprise at the sudden change of weather. The one time that it looked to be pouring was the critical stage when we were trekking up to the highest village. We were going to be caught, but God only sent showers to cool us and promptly allowed the sun to peek through again. Indeed, He controls the weather!

That night when we arrived back in Alabel town, in Pastor’s place, the heavens opened and rain completely drenched the mountains and the city. If it had happened when we were up in the mountains, it would have made the trip back infinitely more complicated and difficult.

As it was, all we had to worry about for that night was the road condition tomorrow up to Pait, our base village to start our Missions Convention. And for one of us, the cluster of lizards on the ceiling.

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More pictures here, and some commentary. Due to exhaustion and possibly the only way to keep us sane during our trek, we weaved an imaginary tale of our exploits based on the Lord of The Rings. Please do not sue for copyright.

Samwise (often interchangeable with Gimli, depending on situation and exhaustion) and Mr.Frodo

Frodo yearning for the shire (Please, not again!!)

One of the elves salvaging our refreshment

The hobbits devouring their ilfro!

The Council of Elrond deciding whether to leave us behind or not

Thankfully they don’t and we cross the Fords of Rivendell

Along the cliffs to the Misty Mountains

We finally rendezvous with our ride back to the shire!

Here’s an attention-grabbing one from Mark Jarman, ‘Five Psalms” in To The Green Man  

First forgive the silence First forgive the silence That answers the prayer, First forgive the silence That answers the prayer, Then forgive the prayer 

First forgive the silence That answers the prayer, Then forgive the prayer That stains the silence. 

Excuse the absence 

That feels like presence, 

Then excuse the feeling 

That insists on presence. 

Pardon the delay 

Of revelation 

Then ask pardon for revealing 

Your impatience. 

Forgive God 

For being only a word, 

Then ask God to forgive 

The betrayal of language.

I am pretty sure that we are all very familiar with the term “open doors” in our prayers. We pray for open doors in our career path, for evangelizing, etc, etc. I guess different doors are presented to us throughout our walk with God on this earth.
 
Below is the summing up:
                                               
1) Open Doorway
The door leaf is flung open, welcoming us to simply just walk right through. This signifies a solid confirmation from God, and all we got to do is simply just walk right through.
 
2) Closed and Unlocked Doors
Just a little effort is required in turning the knob, and hey there, we’re on our way through.
 
3) Closed and Locked Doors
Doors are locked either temporarily or permanently. A temporary locked door means that the timing is unsuitable. Well, God uses temporarily locked doors to build up a resigned personality in us and edify us on how to wait upon Him. A permanently locked door is also an answer – and the answer is ‘N-O’.
 
4) Brick Wall With a Mirage of an Open Doorway
Needless to say, only a fool will merely see what he or she wishes to see with ignorance for the actual truth. It is in no doubt putting the so-called expression “hitting the wall” or rather ‘long phiak’ in Hokkien into perception. Some may have (well, you may defend) have walked, vigorously, into the glass walls few times back in the past and well, the pain and awkwardness of course, is somewhat embarrassing.
I presume each one of those glass walls we had had walked into, are treated with some anti-reflective veneer. Hahaha….

Found this in Phil Yancey’s ‘Prayer : Does It Make Any Difference’    
 
 
‘Be still and know that I am God’ : the Latin imperative for ‘be still’ is vacate. God invites us to take a holiday (vacation), to stop being God for a while, and let him be God. Too often we of prayer as a serious chore, something that must be scheduled around other appointments, shoehorned in among other pressing activities. We can stop doing all those important things we have to do in our capacity as God, leave it to him to be God. Prayer allows me to admit my failures, weaknesses, and limitations to One who responds to human vulnerability with infinite mercy.
 

I started this entry with the title ‘Indescribable’. After all, that would be our theme this Christmas: Indescribable. That’s what God is to Chris Tomlin, to Louie Giglio, and to many of us who watched the DVD Indescribable on Sunday.

Ever heard of the song we sang as kids: “My God is so Big, So strong and so mighty”. Boy, what an understatement. We read about how great God is from the scriptures:

Job 38

I love this scripture. Seriously. I mean, God answered Job out of a storm. Can you imagine how it is? Ultra amazing. And God goes through His whole resume. Serious. God’s resume includes, oh well, creating the heavens and the earth, laid the earth’s foundations, the seas, the land, and got the morning stars to be his choir. Been to the gates of death, decide where each lightning bolt will shatter into the earth, control the floods, and the rains, mastering the icy regions, and oh yeah, hold the Pleiades Galaxy in his hands and uncover the Orion constellation, the Great Bear Constellation is like His pet. Qualified for the job? You bet.

How about Psalm 8:3?

When I consider your heavens,
the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars,
which you have set in place,

Or Psalm 19, one of the most beautiful poem in history:

The heavens declare the glory of God;
the skies proclaim the work of his hands.

Day after day they pour forth speech;
night after night they display knowledge

Hundreds more scriptures bursting in adoration and the indescribable nature of our God. And the great thing? All the great Psalms, and songs and music and writings about the greatness of God cannot even come close to the real thing. He is beyond words, beyond imagination, beyond description. The old song got it right. He is beautiful beyond anything we have ever written, sung or imagined.

‘Indescribable’ brings us to a journey to the the outer regions of space, to the great vastness that we only imagine. I love astronomy (no I wasn’t disciplined enough to join any club in high school); but I love to sit and imagine flying through the outer regions of the universe and visiting exotic planets and different galaxies. As a kid, I grew up on fantasy and science fiction, I read Tolkien and Asimov, dieted on Herbert’s Dune and Raymond E Feist’s Magician. My fascination has brought forth a lot of questions, up to even today: “How big is the universe?” “Why is it so big?” “Are there any other beings on other planets?” “Will we ever be smart enough to get out to another galaxy?” and such questions that irritate adults.

Let’s put it into perspective and start zooming out like Google Earth. Lets call it Google Universe.

This is me. In front of my laptop. Zoom. In Selangor; in a little peninsular in South East Asia called Malaysia, in the Asia Continent, surrounded by water. Zoom out and you see the our beautiful earth. Wait a minute, there’s more? Zoom out and you see our moon, then mars, then venus, mercury, our burning ball of fire called the Sun. Zoom the other way, you fly through the giant Jupiter, beautiful Saturn, cold Uranus and Neptune, tiny Pluto.

That’s it, right? Our solar system? How big is this anyway? In terms of light years (light travels 186,000 miles per second, in a year, goes about 10 trillion km). What’s a trillion? Thats 10 with 12 0s at the back. Our solar system is small, don’t worry. About, say 5 light hours from here to Pluto? Thats about 186,000 X 60 X 60 X 5 miles. You do the math.

Ok, now we’re zooming out of our solar system. And we see our tiny little solar system in this humongous spiral division called the Milky Way galaxy with billions and billions of similar systems. The size of the Milky Way.

About 100,000 Light Years across? That’s 100,000 x 10 trillion KM. That’s a lot of mileage. Relative size of our solar system? It’s like the size of a 20 sen coin. The size of Milky Way? The entire North American continent. Can you find a 20 sen coin in North America. Oh wait, it gets better. Our Galaxy is just one of the billions of billions of billions of galaxies in the known universe. There’s more? Sure, many more trillions are still yet to be found, or light has not reached us yet and the universe is continuously expanding.

So it’s more like this: Our world is like a speck of dust on this earth. And we are living in that speck of dust. We are like the residents of that dust. Can you imagine how many people died trying to conquer this pathetic speck of dust? It blows me away. I don’t have a word to describe God, but I have a word to describe us.

Infinitesimal.

Can you just imagine, the guy that created the entire universe, and those billions of amazing looking galaxies and stars, would think us worthy to come and die for us? If science can just hold their breath one moment and just contemplate on the vastness of time and space: can they even measure the love God has for us, to choose to come to this speck of dust and suffer in the hands of his creation to save us from our sins? I suspect even the Angels could not comprehend it, how He was made lower than them (Hebrews 2:9).

To suffer for the infinitesimal.

In this great stage called earth, played out in this drama called life, we often overrate ourselves. We think ourselves more important, bigger than we actually are.

James 4:14 - Why, you do not even know what will happen tomorrow. What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes.

1 Peter 1:24 - For, “All men are like grass, and all their glory is like the flowers of the field; the grass withers and the flowers fall”

Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, the great emperors and empresses of Rome, China, of Napoleon, of Hitler. All the great men and women, as the bible says, faded, withered and left to face the one question that will beset everyone, great and common alike: “Where to now?”

We need to put things in perspective, and understand how small we are.

But how important we are in the eyes of the Father. In His absolute love and grace, He chose this tiny speck of dust in his entire creation to play out the drama of salvation. The God that holds Galaxies in his palm, measures the universe with his fingers, chooses to suffer and to be beaten by these infinitesimals.

Perhaps, we can understand it better if we look at the universe and the indescribable sights seen and unseen, the birth of a solar system, the implosion of a sun, the massive super nova of a dying star, we might understand our place on this earth, in this time, in this place.

Perhaps, we are not meant to explore the entire universe in this lifetime. Perhaps, its simply a great canvas for God to take us on a tour when we do meet him at the end. Perhaps, it’s simply a great map in a great auditorium in heaven, where we can see all the wonders of His creation and fall on our knees to worship His magnificence.

For us, what we do here, and what we choose here, in this speck of dust, in this pale blue dot called Earth, would simply determine where we end up in Eternity. He gave us that choice when He sacrificed His only son.

How infinitesimal we are, yet, infinite, the consequences of our decisions!

Winston’s Birthday!

Hi all

I am now at midpoint of my 2 ½ months stint in Amsterdam, how time flies! Attached are some photos of last week’s highlight:->

http://ange2910.multiply.com/photos/album/4/Amsterdam_Wk5_London

Ching and I went back to London on Friday evening for the weekend to celebrate Uncle Tim’s 91st birthday. He is a super and an amazing and man. I cannot stress this enough. Aunty Anne and Uncle Tim are familiar figures to a lot of you in this email loop and if you recall from my London updates years ago, you will realised that any stay at Pepys Road is about food indulgence. In fact, the whole weekend was about food. The photos attached will indicate just how much food we consumed in 2 short days, given that there are more photos of food than there are of people this time round. Hahaha! You can see more photos of the home on www.pepysroad.com Aunty Anne runs a fine B&B from their semi detached Victorian home.

Aunty Anne organised a dinner party for 11 on Saturday night as a preamble to Uncle Tim’s 91st b’day on 8th November. She designed a five course menu – see photos Ldn_17 to Ldn_27. Aside from dinner parties at Pepys Road, I hardly ever have quails anywhere else. This was the main course for Saturday night. In Malaysia, I guess we are penultimate consumers of quail eggs, but aside from the deep fried version we get at pasar malam, we don’t tend to eat it any other way (at least I have not seen it done any other way – Alvin C may beg to differ:->). They are best eaten, slightly underdone with the flesh still a little pink inside. Absolutely delicious. Aunty Francoise (Aunty Anne’s great friend) brought a plum crumble (Maddie, I can see you salivating!) and blackberries and apple crumble for dessert. The crumble went so nicely with crème chantilly (with grand marnier:->).

On Sunday evening, Ching and I took them out to dinner at Foliage at Mandarin Oriental Hotel (see Ldn_28 onwards) . We did the 4 course tasting menu. London is very good with degustation type menu for good value (but you mustn’t convert:->). You can’t possibly get such good menu in KL on one to one exchange rate. Originally, we wanted to take them to Ubon, but it is closed on Sundays. The food was excellent – the upside being that I get to try another fine restaurant in London, although the service a bit slow (perhaps they wanted us to digest each course before they served another). See the photos to believe it. The menu had enough variety for each of us to try different dish for each course. For starter, I had tuna (with foie gras, ponzu and grapefruit), followed by an intermediate course of scallops with cauliflower, ceps and sherry. Main was beef, with smoked onion, oxtail and garlic and for dessert, I went with the mascarpone which was absolutely delectable with dark chocolate, passion fruit and pistachio. I learned a new word over dinner – grue. This is actually the skin of a cocoa bean. The restaurant served this with the calvados soufflé which Aunty Anne had for dessert. Ching was most brave to try the rabbit with truffle cream for main…I had to pass; I somewhat feel the connection with this little furry creatures even though they are great pests in Australia.

I (of course), managed to squeeze in some shopping over the weekend. Some pretty good bargains but there were some price resistance to certain goods I was eyeing (especially when its “Made in China”). We also managed to catch up over lunch with Suzan, Paul and their lovely twins, Dylan and Yasmin at their cosy home in Swiss Cottage. The twins are so adorable! I continue to count my blessings having had Suzan as a great friend since we were 14 years old!

After the excitement of the last couple of weekends, I think I better lay low for the coming one:-> Anne Frank House and the Rijkmuseum are top on my list of things to do while in Amsterdam so will most likely visit them this Saturday.

Trust you are all keeping well. Take care! Have a good day off on Thursday for Deepavali (and enjoy the jogathon).

To the Philippines mission trip, you guys are in my prayers!!!!! Have an awesome time! Look forward to hearing the updates.

Love Ange

Pauline’s Birthday!