HAPPY BIRTHDAY, C! :)

We celebrated valentine's day at Pemuda yesterday. That was long, we started 5pm and didn't finish until quarter to 9. We had normal praise and worship time, then sharing by Rev. Joe on the topic "Looking for a relationship 2" with bible passage taken from 1 John 4:7-12. Basically there are 3 elements in a relationship: love, commitment and sacrifice. I liked the big letter 'L' he concluded with, isn't he creative? I really found the word of God spoke to me so personally. We then had few games, dinner, a farewell moment with Jule then finally a bday song for Monnie!!!! Because guys had to bring flowers, Monnie then had the priviledge to receive most of the flowers from the guys as bday gifts I supposed, isn't she lucky... :) *Happy Bday yaaa, Mon*.

Btw our group won! We were divided into groups according to the tables we were sitting. That was so fun, we had to make a poem dedicated to someone (anyone at all except anyone from our table). We did ours for Jule, hoped she liked it. :) Anyway we called our group "24 Karat" and those words had to be in the poem. We did our poem, then another task was.. we had to draw something about human relationship on a big piece of paper, I reckoned Ken did a great job on that! Final game was answering the trivia questions. It wasn't too bad, we got 7 out of 10 questions right. Yeah.. and we won! Well well.. only games. For the dinner we had spring rolls for the entree, pasta and salad for the main, ondel2 and rockmelon for dessert. All big thanks to the consumption peeps. You guys are wonderful ;).

All then went home, and I got home around 9:30ish, took a shower and composed few lines of songs. Went to bed 11:30pm and had to wake up 5:30am this morning to catch train and bus to church. I got to church pretty early 7:30am (considering I wasn't doing any pelayanan). It was a good time to sit down and pray just to prepare my heart to worship Him. Morning sermon was brought by Rev. Joni, it's themed "Bertumbuh dalam kasih" taken from John 13:34-35; Proverbs 17:1, 22.

Points which strucked me the most were:

• Love - because then the world knows that we are His children.
• When you love, you don't depend on your mood (happy/sad) - means you need to be loving at all times.
• Even people with both extremes: extreme 1 (ppl with self-confidence, arrogant, successful) & the other extreme (self-pity, shy, lack of self-confidence) - both need love. There's always some place in their hearts that yearn for love. We need to be loving them, understanding them.
• Love is real action - imagine if you don't have a mouth to tell others that you love them, you don't have hands to write them that you love them - it's what you do, how to treat others is real action of love, and it can be understood.
• Finally, it's Holy Spirit that works in us to enable us to love others - don't depend on your own strength, it's just impossible!

When I was listening to the sermon, I couldn't help but cry because it's something that I knew I needed to hear. I've been struggling with this, to love those that very close to my heart, it's often hard. I cannot be loving when I am angry and upset and dissapointed. God was loving even when we were in sin, He must be very dissapointed and sad, but that didn't stop Him from loving us. I realised (again) then how sinful I was.

So the rest of the Sunday went normal, I had to teach theory and then had choir (we are busy practicing for Good Friday and Easter services), lunch provided by one of the tante (yummy, thank you tanteee!), and met up with someone over coffee, encouraging chat, thank you.

Fred called me earlier today to buy some thai food from Tum Thai on my way back home for dinner, I had totally forgotten all about it!! When I got to the city, I was like "ooohh noooo...!! Fred is gonna kill me!" hehe. I am getting very forgetful now... o well. Signs of aging huahahaha.

So I went home and it was pouring rain! Met Irma and Victor at the Rockdale train station... 3 of us walked home with our umbrellas, but we still got wet. Got home around 6pm, I went for a nap for 2 hours, made up for the early morning.

I'd better stop now! That was how my weekend went.

Btw, cc Fang, happy birthday!!! Luv you much! :D