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Soul Survivor Melbourne 2009.

It was an exceptional week away where God did many things (visible and not so visible) in the lives of those attending. Geoff and I were on team and so spent a lot of the week running around. We had the added not-so-bonus of having to ‘tent it’ as Village Hosts. Which is great in principle but lousy for sleeping purposes.

I pulled out the camera on about day 3 after I decided that no one else was doing anything about recording the event in that way, but frankly wasn’t overly prepared and hadn’t thought much about photography where lighting is so horrendous. Next year – considering we are still involved, I think I will take it on a bit more and see what we can get. The variety of photos isn’t huge and I am a little disappointed I didn’t get more of general camping and seminars/workshops. Ah well, the recording of such things is important but not imperative and certainly not as important as what God was doing.

It was really great to see things pull together with the major shift of leadership that has happened since the 2008 festival. I’m really proud of the steering group and rest of us for our involvement and hard work. A huge clang, bang, hurrah must go out here about the individuals and teams running the food venues. As someone said, it’s such a massive but thankless task – even if you are thanked over and over. Priority here to Jess for her mind boggling coordination and Em, who didn’t stop running Le Den, also Nissa, Dave and Ruth who kept Revive up to scratch.

The Soul Survivor experience as far as scheduling goes consists of main sessions (music/worship, speaker), seminars (different speakers tailored topics), workshops (more hands on creative stuff), camping, fantastic food venues (of various themes and focus), gigs, music, prayer etc…

God spoke to me a little on dependancy, but not a great deal. I was perhaps more slowly – less vividly encouraged to do a few things differently. To realign some of how I am living. All good, no lights show for me, but then God kinda knows that light shows don’t press my buttons anyway.

photos here and here

Camping Christianity Holidays Ministry

{I’m back, by the way – photos to come}

While I was at Soul Survivor, my lovely friend Cat ran a creative writing workshop. One exercise she took us through was writing without stopping for a set period of time (2mins) – no real thinking. I have since added punctuation but the text remains the same:

Whatever is the matter when alphabets fly off the moon and cats walk around with cheese? And this sounds so ridiculous… But why do we waste so much time and waste so much breath, and hold so tight to what doesn’t matter? No one really cares about that or wants to jump into the duck pond; people help each other, they hold hands and skip and laugh and cry and they call to the birds and swap presents.

My brain is peculiar.

Camping Life Words

remoteAnd this then is the pause button. I’m off to Soul Survivor – which starts tomorrow, but there is much setting up to be done yet. I spent some of my afternoon doing PR damage control and malware hunting in code as some loser hacker duped the Soul Survivor website… I found one instance of the code but I think Tim S might’ve found the rest (Hurrah for him).

Tonight I have a bridesmaids dress fitting with Sam, April, Natalie and the girl making the dresses.

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*It appears I fixed it myself… am I allowed to be a little self satisfied? 😛

Camping Holidays Life Ministry Wedding

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Soul Survivor is nearly here. Geoff and I are relatively involved – between the website (and the new mysteries of Joomla), movies, village hosting and various other things such as opting in for a few shifts serving food and making cofee. Physical preperation begins in earnest on Monday and the festival kicks of Wednesday afternoon. Geoff and I will be armed with a bigger tent and better lilos than previous years. I will also faithfully lug around my camera and take full advantage of opportunities there. Prayer would be great for all those involved in getting things together and those speaking or running seminars and workshops. I am also involved somewhat in the Gospel Online workshop… full report to come.

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Camping Christianity Experiments Ministry