18 April, 2010 in Church, Personal by Aonghas

The Book of Genesis

We resumed our Genesis Bible study at Sunday School today. We’ve nearly finished chapter 1 now, and already it’s raising some pretty interesting discussion topics. Like in verses 29-30 when it says:

Then God said, “I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They will be yours for food. And to all the beasts of the earth and all the birds of the air and all the creatures that move on the ground—everything that has the breath of life in it—I give every green plant for food.” And it was so.

The meaning behind these verses is a bit iffy since it talks about eating green plants but doesn’t actually mention eating animals. Does that mean we should all be vegetarians? If that’s the case I’ve been doing the wrong thing for the last 19 years. But I can’t live without meat, where will I get my protein? Soya bean just doesn’t do it for me. There were several other points of contention that were raised but I don’t have time to list them all out here. I’m sure more will be revealed as we study the rest of the book.

It’s the night before Uni starts again, and I’m feeling a bit edgy. I really am. Okay so basically I have an assignment due tomorrow morning at 9am and I’ve finished it (tick!), but I have a project due Tuesday afternoon that I haven’t really started (no tick…). What’ worse is that after I sweat blood and tears to get this project done on time, I’ll be fried and won’t feel like doing anything else for the rest of the day. Even though I have a test on Wednesday night which, as you can guess, I haven’t studied for! The last two weeks for me really have been a holiday… for the wrong reasons. I feel like I’ve wasted so much time doing, well, nothing really. Let’s just take one thing at at time. First, this maths project…

4 April, 2010 in Church, Personal by Aonghas

Easter Baptism

We had a combined service today with the other Chinese churches so we were expecting the carpark to be packed when we arrived at church. Sure enough, when we got there, the cars were backed up nearly all the way to the Bible College. Luckily we weren’t the only ones who were late; as we were walking back to church, the Chin family arrived as well. There were hardly any seats left in the gym either so Calum and I created a couple of extra rows of chairs at the back. The highlight of today’s service (for our Sunday School class anyway) was Jennifer’s baptism. When she was being baptised, I went up front to join the entourage of photographers all crowded around the stage to film her.

From left: Sherman, Aunty Stephanie, Nadine, Jennifer, Calum, Hamish, Claire and Aonghas

There wasn’t any Sunday School after service today, we just went straight to lunch. I always like special occasions like today because we get free lunch in a box with a variety of different treats. In today’s box we had a tea egg, a piece of chocolate cake, this Asian sweet thing (I don’t know what it’s made out of) and a nice sandwich.

I always look forward to these free lunches

Primary light colour shoes

While I was sitting with Carmen and Claire, we realised our shoes were similar (except for the fact that mine are from Cotton On while theirs are actually real Converse Chucks) but different in colour. Cleo decided to join in with her white shoe as well. I thought it was a pretty cool photo actually, especially since in terms of light colour, the coloured shoes around the outside (red, green, blue) combine to make the white coloured shoe in the centre. Coincidence?

This afternoon I went to the Waikumete Cemetery with my parents to visit my grandparents’ headstone. It had been a long time since I last visited, and I think it was quite fitting to go back to remember them on Easter Sunday. The engraving on the headstone had become dull and despite my dad’s efforts, we couldn’t clean off all the dirt with a piece of tissue. Nevertheless I took a photo.

My grandparents' headstone at the Waikumete Cemetery

I really like the quote at the bottom of their headstone:

Unseen, unheard but always near.

Mt Erebus Air Disaster Memorial

It’s a reassuring reminder that the ones you love who have passed away are always closer than you think. We also had a brief walk around the cemetery to look at some of the other graves, notably the Mt Erebus Air Disaster memorial that was set up after the plane crash on my birthday in 1979. The cemetery is such a peaceful place. Next time we visit I want to polish my grandparents’ headstone and make it shiny again!

2 April, 2010 in Church, Youth Group by Aonghas

Odd Time for Oddfellows

Today was Good Friday – the day remembered for Jesus’ death on the cross. As was customary, we attended church this morning for the special Good Friday service. Pastor Chan invited us to play accompaniment music on our accordions for the prelude as well as the Holy Communion. The song was called “Old Rugged Cross” and we played together with Tim on piano and Jenny on violin. The chairs in the auditorium were arranged to face the centre where there was the table for Holy Communion. We sat through the sermon before having refreshments afterwards.

We had pizza for lunch after the Good Friday church service

Because of the morning service, our youth group “Oddfellows” was shifted to earlier in the day instead of tonight. We all had pizza together for lunch before going into the church library for the youth group programme. Today Karvin led the programme by showing us a video about Jesus’ death on the cross. It looked like quite an old video and it was a bit cheesy in parts but on the whole I think it delivered quite a strong message and there were parts of the video I never realised about Jesus’ death before. When we were having supper after the programme, Cleo and I decided to swap jackets to see how they looked on us…

Apparently I looked like a Mexican gangster, or a cholo. After looking online, I found this article about how to become a cholo. I didn’t realise there were so many steps to consider in order to be one. I wonder if anyone actually takes them seriously.

19 March, 2010 in University, Youth Group by Aonghas

Building with LEGO®

Our group's LEGO model

On the topic of churchy stuff, tonight at Youth Group we had activity night. Calum led worship while I played the piano (tried to!). We also brought Angie along with us to Youth Group tonight as well. Gabrielle led the programme and told us that we’d be building a model using Lego. There was a bit of a twist though. Each group had to nominate someone as the ‘President’ and someone as the ‘Vice President’. In another room, Gabrielle had constructed a model earlier using different Lego pieces and each group had to recreate it without looking at the original. Only the President in each group could see the original model and then report to the Vice President what it looked like. The Vice President then went back to the room where the rest of the team was and had to tell them how to create the model, but only being able to answer “yes” or “no”. In our group I was the Vice President while Rebecca was the President. It took our group a bit of an effort to get started, but once we had the base sorted, things started to take off quite quickly. Rebecca did a great job explaining how the different pieces were positioned, using her arms and hands to show me on the wall. In the end we managed to finish the whole model, and amazingly we were only one space off from being exactly perfect. Great team work guys!

15 March, 2010 in Church, Social by Aonghas

Church Camp 2010: Willow Park

This weekend our church had its first family camp at Willow Park Christian Camp out in Howick. The purpose of the camp was to encourage everyone to get to know other people at our church and also to just have some time to relax and have fun. We left home at around 6:45pm hoping to arrive at the camp by half past seven. Earlier in the day our car tyre was punctured by a screw, so we were still driving with a space saver tyre which meant we couldn’t drive faster than 80kmh. Still, we managed to get to the campsite just on 7:30! The location of the camp was really nice, with Bucklands Beach pretty much across the road from where we were staying.

[googleMap name="Willow Park Christian Camp" description="1 Hostel Access Road, Eastern Beach, Auckland" width="630" height="250" mousewheel="false" zoompancontrol="false" typecontrol="false" directions_to="false"]1 Hostel Access Road, Auckland New Zealand[/googleMap]

When we arrived, we were shown to our room upstairs by Sherman. We were allocated to Room 10 with Jireh, Andrew, Rayson and Bobby also together with us. We went back downstairs to meet up with everyone else outside and found them playing on the trampolines across the field. Jireh demonstrated how to do a forward flip on the trampoline while the rest of us looked on. I had a quick jump myself and although I attempted to do a forward flip, I landed on my back! Pretty scary experience at first though; I hadn’t ever tried that before!

The ice breaker game to help us get to know one another

The bell was rung and it was time for the official camp programme to start. We were all ushered into the auditorium where Gabrielle gave an introductory speech and welcomed us all to the camp. Camp programmes were handed around which included all the names of the people and their group numbers, as well as a timetable outlining the schedule of events during the weekend. After a few more introductions, Richard’s wife Michelle led us in a few ice-breaker activities. We all got out of our seats to mingle with people we didn’t know before we were split into two halves with a division down the centre aisle. For this activity we had to sit facing a curtain with someone from the other side facing us (but we couldn’t see them). When it was time, the curtain was dropped and we had to call out the name of the person sitting across from us. I was filming for most the time and it was pretty funny seeing the looks on people’s faces as they tried to scramble their mind for a name.

We were then asked to get into our concert groups (there were eight in total) to start planning for our performance at Saturday night’s concert. Four groups had to perform songs, while the other four had to present skits. I was in group eight along with most of the other people from Oddfellows, and we had to prepare a skit with the theme of “Welcoming new people to church”. It was nearly 10pm before we all headed back to the dining room to have supper. I had a cup of coffee to keep me awake (not knowing how long I was going to be staying up!) and we spent a while talking at a table. I also had a chat with Tim which was pretty interesting. The instruction we got from Gabrielle was that we had to go upstairs to our room at midnight so in the end we didn’t actually get to stay up that late to talk. Then again, Calum and I had to get up early in the morning anyway because I had to take him to Lincoln Heights so he could teach his recorder classes at 8:30am.

Willow Park Christian Camp is quite a nice venue

The first night of sleep was a little bit of a roller-coaster because I kept waking up. Maybe it was the fact that I was sleeping in my regular clothes, or maybe it was because I wasn’t used to the different environment. The first time I woke up I thought it was nearly time to get up but I didn’t feel like I had had enough sleep. It was only 3:50am. The second time I woke up it was nearly 6am. Trying to think about sleeping didn’t really help, which was a little strange because usually I find it really easy to fall asleep. Before long there were sounds of little children bellowing out in the hallway. Once they started up, I knew I wasn’t going to get anymore sleep. Calum and I left the camp just after 7:30am; I left the video camera in the trusty hands of Ray so he could film the morning programme while we were away.

We finally got the tyre replaced after half a day

As it turned out, we made it to West Auckland with 20 minutes to spare before 8:30 so we decided we’d take a quick detour through the McDonald’s drive-thru for breakfast. Little did we know that Calum’s hot chocolate would end up with a dead beetle inside! Yuck. After dropping Calum off at Lincoln Heights, I headed down to the car repair garage in Henderson Valley to see if I could get the tyre replaced. I must have arrived too early though, because everything was still closed when I arrived. I went back after going home for a shower and by that time they were open so I managed to get the tyre changed. Yay, now I didn’t have to worry about driving faster than 80kmh on the motorway!

The camp food was delicious!

Calum finished teaching at 11:30am so when I went to pick him up, we headed straight back to camp so we’d make it back in time for lunch at half past twelve. Our timing was pretty much perfect actually, because lunch was just about ready when we got back. It was my first meal at the camp since being there and I must say it was very nice! We had pork rib patties in bun with pasta, salad and beetroot! After lunch there was a little bit of free time so we headed to the gym to have a bit of a play. Some of the guys were playing with a soccer ball while the others were playing tennis without a net, playing random stuff on the piano and throwing around other balls. Later the rest of the people joined us down at the gym for the prepared group activities. There were four groups doing different activities in a rotation.

The group activities were crazy but fun

The activities consisted of: blowing flour off a plate in order to grab lollies with your mouth, transporting water by cupping it in your hands and balloon relays in partners and also with a stick. Sounds pretty crazy I know, but I think everyone had lots of fun. Most of the time I was filming and it was definitely a lot of fun watching them all looking silly. After the four activities I thought it was over, but I was wrong. We only stopped for a short break to have afternoon tea before we were back into it! The second round of activities was more about skill. Each group was given a number of plastic cups and the goal was to construct the highest tower of cups. There were many tumbles and crashes along the way, but in the end I think the winning tower was stacked 17 cups high!

The end of the group activities segwayed nicely into the soccer game we had during free time. Originally we were hoping to have a soccer game between the different fellowships at church, but it ended up being just mixed teams. I don’t know what the final score was but if we lost, I’m sure it wasn’t by that much We were all tired and exhausted after the soccer game but luckily it was just in time for dinner so we could all refuel.

'Welcoming new people' was the theme of our skit

The highly anticipated evening concert was held on Saturday night with all the eight groups performing their prepared presentations of songs and skits. It was pretty entertaining even though I couldn’t understand any of jokes in Chinese. The basic summary of our group’s skit was Calum, the church pastor, welcoming all sorts of stereotyped people to the church from emos to nerds to homeless people to druggies… I don’t know how I’d cope if our church had so many extreme stereotypes like that though!

We sang Shirley 'Happy Birthday'

After having a relatively early first night, we were all keen to stay up late on the second night. There were still quite a few people awake after supper, bantering away around tables in the dining room. It was also Shirley’s birthday so we gathered around to sing her happy birthday by the sofas. Gabrielle told us that we had to go upstairs to our room when the other fellowship decided to go to sleep. Since we found out earlier that the Canaan fellowship stayed up until 3am on the first night, we thought we’d still have ages to talk. Unfortunately for us, the other fellowship decided to go to sleep just after 12:30am so we were pretty gutted because we knew we couldn’t stay up for much longer. We savoured the remaining minutes we had together before we skittered upstairs back to our rooms.

We had the Sunday service in the auditorium

The final day at camp on the Sunday was more or less a wind down to the weekend. More people arrived at the camp in the morning for the church service that was held in the auditorium. Ada gave the sermon while Sherman was the translator. Before lunch we also had another time for group activities. This time each group had to collect items that were called out by the person running the game. The items on the list (such as belts, necklasses etc) then had to be used to dress up a volunteering member in each group, who then had to parade across the stage in a makeshift fashion show. Hamish was the model for his group, brave man!

The whole camp was over in less than three days but it had felt so much longer. On the drive home from camp I started thinking about Uni again and how long ago it seemed since my last lecture. I don’t feel like going back to Uni so soon; it feels like I should still be on holiday. Overall I think the church camp was definitely a great way to spend a weekend away from home and relax. I wish we could have more weekends away like that!

Smile everyone!

27 July, 2008 in Church, Work by Aonghas

Goodbye Denis!

It was more or less a typical Sunday for me today. I didn’t fall asleep during the sermon that many times I don’t think… although I can’t really remember to be honest. After the service at Sunday School, we were talking about personal body image and how we perceive ourselves. It was a pretty interesting conversation though I don’t know if I said everything I wanted to say.

Today I didn’t have to start work until 2 o’clock (I usually start at 1:30pm) so I had more time to eat lunch and not have to worry about the time. At lunch we had pork buns and sticky rice; the buns were separated into separate bags – because usually they have a vegetable bun and a pork bun in the same bag. I sat down at a table with Hamish and while we were eating, Sherman came over to sit with us. I hadn’t talked to Sherman for a long time and he was interested to know how I had been over the last little while. I told him about school and how everything this year has been really busy. I talked about going to Atlanta for the robotics competitition and he seemed quite interested (well, I think he was…). He then told me about his work at the hostel and his intentions to do further study in Christianity. Later my mum came over to our table and we continued our conversation for a little bit longer until we had to go.

When I arrived at work I was greeted by Rosaria, one of the new girls. I remembered that Denis had transferred to work at Cotton On Newmarket, because he usually worked with me on Sundays. I didn’t even get to say goodbye to him properly. Oh well, I’m sure we will meet again the next time I feel an urge to buy some clothes from Cotton On Newmarket. Make sure you come to visit me sometime too Denis! Rosaria’s shift finished at 2 o’clock so I was going to be working the rest of my shift by myself. The four hour countdown began.

One of the things I like best when I’m working is when friends and whanau come to visit me. I like to keep a list of the people who come to visit (and hopefully I’ll add the grand visitors list to my website soon). Before I actually started my shift I met Zhan Curtis who was buying something at the counter. I had to stop and think whether or not Zhan still went to our school; I didn’t want to ask him and embarrass myself if he said yes. I think he does still go to our school though… yeah, let’s go with that. Nobody else who I recognised came in to see me for a long time after that, so I spent most of the time trying to rack up the store and make it look tidy. There were a few boxes of stock in the changing rooms which I didn’t know if I was supposed to do or not, but upon closer inspection I noticed that most of it was sale stock and we don’t have the sale stock on the floor at the moment. Anyway, halfway through my shift Kriza came into the store. Kriza was one of the supervisors who was working at Cotton On when I first started in December 2006. It was really good to see her again after such a long time. We had a short conversation and she told me that she was doing her honours year of her Food Science degree at Auckland Uni. After Kriza left, the visitor numbers started to grow! Great! First it was Serenne who came in, then I met a Korean girl called Jenny (who used to learn violin from Mrs Green with us) before Ari and Elina came in to visit. Apparently it is Kento’s (their younger brother) birthday tomorrow so they came to the mall to look for a birthday present for him. Gees Ari, took you long enough to come visit…