Extreme Camp: Part Two

Extreme Camp: Part Two

If you read the last blog post you would have gathered that we were on our way to Extreme Camp. Was my first time going to camp as a leader so it was kinda exciting. Part worried about doing music and part happy about hanging out with the youth. So yeh, music. That was the main thing I was involved in at camp.

What is SOAP?? If you didn’t know, it stands for Songs Of Awesome Praise. It’s essentially just one way that, as Christians, we praise and worship God. It really aint about the music itself but about glorifying Gods name.

Highlight for me at camp was definitely Prayer + Praise night. Yeh, take it literally; we had 3 different prayer sessions each followed by a different set of songs. For those that weren’t there, the 3 prayer sessions were: prayer for ourselves, prayer for our church and lidcombe, and prayer for the world. Was very cool seeing all the youth gathered into that hall sitting around in circles praying about different things. I think its good at camps to have a time like this, as besides the study, there aren’t many other group prayer session opportunities.

We had brought along these stage light things that we found in the library at church. Pretty cool things. They would constantly switch between a bunch of colours. We turned the colour switch timing to really long in order to steer away from a disco night feel lol. Only bad thing bout the lights was the need for a dark room so following my music was kinda hard. Whenever the lights were yellow, it was like “sweet, can read the lyrics”, then it would change to a dark green or purple and it be like “ooop stand back from the mic a bit” lol. We had these glow sticks though, so when they were handing em out I thought it would be a smart idea to get the yellow ones cus they were the brightest, and place em on the stands. But alas, their glow was really weak and it didn’t do much to solve the problem.

Anyways, yeh, the music sessions were really awesome. We had done tons of practice the weeks leading up to camp and we had practiced a bit at camp. About 12 songs for that night so it was quite tiring. Luckily all the youth were really excited so it created all this energy in the room. Maybe a hiccup here or there but in the end everything worked out well and we could see at the end that all the youth were really excited about singing praises to God. We had people all standing together, jumping up and down, swaying their hands and all that. Before the last set, the music team got together and decided that, yeh, we should do an extra song on top of the 3 we had originally planned cus it looked like everyone wanted to keep singing. So yeh, we play the 4 and everyone is still really pumped up and theyre all pretty much jumping around shouting. Then the youth are like “Yehh!! Another song!! Woooooo! Encore!! One more!!”. At this point I think all musos were really excited and encouraged at the same time. Was so cool seeing everyone passionate about singing praises to God. So yeh, we were kinda stumped, so Ronnie asks what song they wanted to sing, and they all scream out this rabble that we cant really decipher, but eventually the words “let your kingdom come” kinda rings out a bit more. Mind you, we had just done “Let Your Kingdom Come” as the final song. So we just clarify with the youth again, and they’re all “YEHH!”, so we do it again.

We seem to have “Let Your Kingdom Come” a lot at extreme, but I really think its an awesome song. If you check out the lyrics, they’re really good. It pretty much talks about getting involved in Gods big plan and is our cry for Gods kingdom to come. Lets just check out the first verse (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zkKCb6Bmi6o):

Your glorious cause O God, engages our hearts

May Jesus Christ be known, wherever we are

We ask not four ourselves, but for you renown

The cross has saved us so we

Pray your kingdom come

If you read that then youd get the idea is that we want to be part of Gods amazing plan. I remember from one of Adrians talks where he said how everyone wants to be a hero. You see it in movies, tv, books and everything, and it kinda goes like this: bad guy comes, plants the bomb, you go stop the bomb, save the city, and get the girl, the end. Pretty much that’s how most action movies go. But yeh, Gods mission is much more epic and involves saving the world from a plague that everyone has, sin. He’s included us in his plan and we are told to go and spread the word of God. That’s why I think this song sums up that message really well. We call for Gods kingdom to come, we go and spread the name of Christ, and we do this all for Gods glory. So yeh, praise God for such a great night of prayer and praise. p.s. just listened to the song again while writing this, chorus is sooo good, such an epic proclamation of wanting Gods will/plan/kingdom to come about.

And that was the end of our official prayer + praise night. All the youth headed out to the campfire as Dan played his exit music lol. While we were at the campfire someone, cant remember who lol, came out and got me my guitar, so we did so singing around the fire. The atmosphere was really cool, and it was just great seeing everyone hanging around the fire. A bunch of guys stayed back to sit around the campfire and sing and chat some more which was fun. We sang about pokemon and created a song about this bowl of mi goring, that I got from my secret service person, that danny kept knocking over in the dark lol.

In summary, I guess my time at camp leading the music sessions really reminded me of how differently Christians view things of this world. In this case we are talking about a bunch of people standing upfront playing music. From a world point of view, I think that the main reason why people would get up and play music for others is to gain glory for themselves. You got a guitar strapped on and you’re rocking it out for your own glory. I think that’s where music service at church really stands out. Instead of trying to be the centre of attention, the job of music leaders is to help others to focus on God and to express their worship and love to him through their singing. In a sense, we assist people in their worship of God.

Final words. Hope you’ve enjoyed and been encouraged by the camp series. Praise God for saving us into his family and thanks to him for including us into his epic plan; all the glory to our sovereign God!!

-Matt

Extreme Camp: Part one

First of all…extreme camp was sooooooo AWESOME!!!!! A lot of learning, fun and fellowship. Gonna post the camp experience up in two parts. So yeh, here's part one

The road up:

Our journey started off on Friday when we met up at church to pack all the things we needed and to head to camp. I was in Roys car and he had a GPS so we decided to use this along with some google maps printouts. Seeing as though he had the GPS, Will with Dan decided to just follow us (Ronnie and Andy had already went ahead). We punched in the address and it came back with 1 result for the GPS so we headed to that place. GPS was pretty much totally fine, took us a fair distance. It was only until one of the first main turnoffs that the GPS did some funny stuff. Roy missed the turn so I start to freak out a little and I was saying that we should probably turn around when we can. Roy was chill bout it as the GPS created a new route; but too bad this new route told us to drive on road right next to ours that totally didn’t exist. So we end up just deciding to carry on (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CB17uWuBrL0) :D. After sometime we kinda realise that we seem to have been driving on this one road for waay too long, so I start ranting at Roy about how we were heading the wrong way.

Now it was sometime on this neverending road that I see probably the most epic thing ive ever seen in the sky; a flaming meteor. When I see it I just start freaking out. It was some kind of mix between total awe and laughter. Cannot be described. Well anyways, im pretty much in tears and laughing at the same time as Roy comments on how it’s not a meteor. Seriously, this thing was pretty epic. Size was quite decent with a visible kind of ball and very obvious trail of some sort of white smoke. Speed was like shooting star walking pace. Then Roy, the genius, says that its probably a plane. Hmmm a plane which is obviously lit up with a flame trail?……cool. Then I thought, maybe it’s a transformer. Sold. Cue music (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4H0JDomv8ac). Yeh pretty much this excitement carried on for a while and this was also what MeteorMatt spawned from lol.

Later on we pass some farms. What’s a classic farm animal. Cows. Yes cows. So we see all these cows and so I do a “milking cow motion”. So here, Mr Common Sense Roy who was obviously totally oblivious to the context of my actions, decides to imitate my movements by twisting the wheel frantically left to right, left to right and so on, causing the car to do these totally not safe swerving movements. Ahhh silly Roy :D

Ok well anyways, you know when you drive far south and stuff to these camp places, you generally go through some civilization and then get to some bare place where you go up some mountains or something and there are no houses in sight and then you reach the camp place, well we drove so far south that we went from civilization to nothingness and then back to civilization. Quite far. We check the GPS and its says we got about 8km or something till we reach our destination so I call up Dan in the other car and tell him bout our dilemma; this civilization stuff has got to disappear in 8km. At around 2-3km left, I was feeling pretty worried cus we were in some flat ground place that didn’t have many trees around. Not good. I again frantically keep telling Roy that we are totally lost. Then something interesting happens. We were listening to the Beatles and “Let It Be” starts playing from Roys ipod (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9SgDoypXcI). Facepalm. Let it be lol. As soon as we heard the song playing over my complaining to Roy we both start to crack up and we pretty much just sat there waiting for the “distance to destination” to run down as the Beatles mocked us.

We drive down some deserted road passing some trailer truck going the opposite direction; obviously a serial killer coming back from the bush. Quite scary as it was getting dark. Then we finally reach our “destination”. Roys cheap, happy meal, GPS had led us to the wrong destination lol. We decide to pull out the iphone and use its googlemaps feature to try and get us back on track. Turns out we over shot the camp site by about an 1hr and some minutes. So I phone in hand, I direct Roy as we follow Will and Dan. We reach the classic “windy road mountain that precedes a camp site” so we are all quite relieved. After sometime we then roll into the campsite (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnfFTVjRpLI) :D, and luckily the youth havent arrived yet lol.

Well that was just a little account of the getting there adventure. Check back in a few days and hopefully ill have posted about soap sessions and camp in general.

Take care!

-Matt

a ball of flame

Hey all

Im Matt Chan, some people call me chano (more recently, MeteorMatt), and yeh I play guitar. Yeh…kinda new to this blog thing, never done it before, but pretty much this is the mandatory introduction I must do, being the newest cross.transmission band member. Hopefully this all makes sense and is understandable. The other guys threatened to create a mini series of blogs for me, comprised of fact and fiction, if I didn’t get this up soon, and im thinking that they were quite serious so I better get this going lol :D.

Im a Christian who loves God. God through his amazing grace and love for us, sent his son, Jesus, to die for all of us sinners so we can be friends with him again. This is really cool and I hope my non-Christian friends will come to understand this and get to know God. I guess this is probably a good time to share a bible verse I like, so *BAM*..here it is:

1 Corinthians 2: 4-5 “My message and my preaching were not with wise and persuasive words, but with a demonstration of the Spirit’s power, so that your faith might not rest on men’s wisdom, but on God’s power”.

That’s Paul speaking to the church in Corinth btw. A lot of the time as humans I think that we think that we have to nut out this Christian and understanding of God business by ourselves. So this verse gives us great relief and also reliance in realising that it is only through God’s power that we can understand him and his word more.

So now, some of you may be thinking, “who is this cool kid and how did he manage to come to post on the c.t. blog?” lol. So yeh, if some of you guys didn’t know, about a week ago Roy asked me if I wanted to join cross.transmission. I had pretty much been playing with these guys for the past 5 weeks, or whatever it was, to practice for extreme youth camp so i was already hanging out with em a lot which was cool. Initially I was like…”mmmh ehh uh, sounds cool but I gotta think about it man”. Sometime later Roy bought me a bag of candy which sealed the deal….actually not, although I wouldn’t have minded candy. Pretty much after thinking over it and talking to Roy I decided I wanted in.

Bonus facts that may interest you:

Im first year at UNSW studying Commerce (Liberal Studies); as you can see “Liberal Studies” is in brackets, this indicates that this course is not in fact a double degree as many people tend to think in confusion when I tell em. I got 15hrs of uni including between lec/tute breaks. Hope you science degree people and kids in school are jealous. But actually no….15hrs kinda sucks a bit if you check my timetable.

Obviously I like music. If you asked me right now what my favourite band is, id have to say Mumford and Sons. They are soooo uber-cool. Check em out if you haven’t. These guys emanate energy.

Seeing as though cheese seems to be a recurring theme with this band, or with Roy at least who has some influence over other people lol, I shall tell of a random cheese fact about me. One time after finishing up an assignment for uni, I stayed up and youtubed ppl eating/making grilled cheese sandwiches. I was very hungry. Yes I kinda do a similar stuff to make myself hungry. Have a look at http://aht.seriouseats.com/. I check this regularly even though there is no chance in the near future that ill be going to any of these places, or even America. lol. I hope you’re hungry now.

Anyways, that’s it for now. Will probably be posting some stuff soon about music at extreme camp and just camp in general.

Thanks for reading! :D