This is the account of my exciting/rewarding travels to Japan and the Philippines in the summer of 2009:

This Agust, I went with a team of 17 people from WEAG to Japan and the Philippine Islands. Our goal was to run performing arts workshops at Faith Academy from two weeks.

We first stopped in Tokyo for two days.  Our time there was crazy fun. The first day we explored around our hotel a bit which was exciting and exhausting all at the same time, considering the fact that we were all still extreemly jet-lagged.  The rest of our time in Tokyo consisted of visiting a Japanise (or as I would say, “Japanian”) garden, eating at an authentic Japanise “hole-in-the-wall” reasturaunt (with a huge language barier I migh add), and sight seeing at Tokyo tower and the Buddhist temples. We had a ton of fun, but I’m not going to lie, my faovrite time on this trip definately happened in the Philippines.

So on to the Filippino part of our trip:
After a night of blissful sleep, we got up bright and early to conduct s few workshops.  The one that I was co teaching, however, had a grand total of 0 students.  That’s right, apperently modern has developed a bad name for itself over in Asia.  This happened again the next day, but by then we had a plan. We ended up kidnapping dancers from the hip hop workshop to do a modern workshop for the last half hour of the time that they had.  The style grew on a few of them (mostly the older ones), so by then we already had dancers .  The students loved it so much that they asked their principle if there was any way to start a dance dept. there, and He found a way to do that!
The first week and a half there was mostly a time of conducting workshops, running rehearsals, alone time with Jesus when off duty, and a couple performances.  We had a lot of fun, and I was really able to get some alone time with God in too, something I wasn’t expecting of this trip. It was pretty chill; we got to know kids, and we got to wander around the campus.
We went on their high school retreat at this old coconut plantation which was gorgeous (minus the 3 or 4 machine gun armed gaurds that were walking arround the whole time – creepy!!).  That was probly my favorite time because it was even more alone time with Jesus and a lot of getting to know the students.  We played with them, prayed for them, and worshiped with them, it was phenominal! There was one day when the Lord just gave me a huge burden for those kids. He really likes every single one of them, and He has a huge desire for every single one of them. I prayed for a couple of hours that day, and the Lord gave me tears for them.  I don’t know what He sis that night, but He did something.
After retreat, we had our own retreat at the beach. Snorkling, geting insanely burned, swimming in the clearest water ever, and getting burned by banka boat exhaust were just a few of the exciting things I was able to do. The food was amazing too; we had Filipino Italian food every night and the most amazing bananna pancakes that ever graced planet earth in the mornings.
This experience, of course, wouldn’t have been anything without our many “fails”.  1) Cariga-fail: on the day that we were supposed to go to historic Carrigador, our ferry got caught up in the aftermath of Typhoon Morakat and had to turn arround after a half hour of vomitting passengers. 2) jeepney-fail: the most popular form of public transpertaion in the Philippines is called a Jeepney. We decided, on numerous occations, that this was also the best way for us to travel. Tight spaces, flat tires, and pteridactal noises were just a few of the perks of our long rides.  Needless to say, in the midst of all of our fails, our sucesses tended to take over.  We went to this awesome basketball game, in which the team we were rooting for won in over time. And we went to this waterfall/hiking place called Darenak (sp?) that was beyond breath taking.

Amazing trip, and what’s mentioned above isn’t even the half of it!

So during the Immersed Internship at the Richmond International House of Prayer in July, I was meditating on Hebrews 1:4 and this is what I got from it (just thought I’d share):

…”having become so much higher than the angels, as He (Jesus) has by inheritance obtained a more excellent name than they.”

I thought about this part of the sentence in two sections: 1) He became higher than the angels, and 2) He inherited inhareted “higherarchy over the angels.  My question was this: if someone has inhareted riches, why then does he also have to become rich? This is what that verse is saying. It says that He inhareted a name higher than the angels, which we know, considering the fact that He is the begotten son of God and therefore is of the same nature of God.  But then it also says that He has become higher than the angels.  Well, why does He need to do both? Isn’t one sufficient? The truth is that one is sufficient, but, because Christ gave up His inheritance to Israel (and the grafted in gentiles – you and me) by coming to earth, He needed to earn it back.  And that is exactly what He has done.  He gave up His inheritance in order that we would have the opportunity to become higher than the angels, and then He gained it all back.  Thats massive. Go back to the riches metaphor. What man, after inheriting immense wealth would give it all up for the sake of someone who despises him and then gain it all back again.  Not only is this improbable in our minds, but it is also impossible! Jesus did it.

Generation, where has our fear of God gone? Is He not the same God that created the ocean and can calm it with one wisper? Is He not the same God that we believe can call fire down from heaven, or flood the whole earth in 40 days? Somewhere along the road, we lost the true reality of God’s ultimate power. That caused us to lose the fear of God that He intended for us to have when we were created.

When God created man, He intended for both sides (us and Him) to respect the relationship that He established then and there: that of creator and creation. He put the tree in the garden so that man could respect that relationship. When God asked Adam to leave the fruit alone, He was asking Adam to say, “I know you’re the creator and I am the creation. I respect that You know what’s best for me, and I fear the consequences of what might happen if I defile this covenant that You have established for the two of us.”  When we broke our covenant with God by eating the fruit, we defiled the relationship of creator and creation established by God. We became, for a moment, unafraid of what might happen if we were to break our covenant with God. Once broken, we realised that the covenant was what we truely wanted; it was our stability and our security. Our fear that had been established in the covenant was keeping us in a place of innocence, perfection, and unity with God. I guess you could call it blissful ignorace of all that didn’t matter and blessed communtion with all that did matter.

After that dark moment in history, God, in His mercy, and because of His desire to be in covenant with us, made a way for us to restore relationship with Him. But how can that relationship be restored when we consider ourselves to be better than the One that invented the nature of the relationship? When we continue on with that mind set, we lose all of our fear of God (a key component in the restoration of this covenant), and thus are unable to enter into right relationship with Him. The funny thing is, we actually want this relationship more than anything else, but we are too consumed with the idea that we know more than God that, that we are unable to recognise that as our one true disire.

Generation, you have to admit that if you were asked to sacrifice something as preceous as a son (as Abraham was), you would deny that the request could have ever come from God. But that is because we are not in right relationship yet. We truly do not know the God that we claim as our own. He doesn’t fit into the mold that we keep trying to put Him in. He is not all rainbows and butterflies all the time. If we really were to fear God as creator, we would know His calling without a doubt.

Our porblem is this: I think that we are so afraid to fear God because we are afraid to lose control. What we don’t realize is that the loss of control is the gain of stability and security from the creator. We are so blinded by false desires that we are unable to reveal what our true disire is: communion with the only thing that matters. Because we do not fear God, our eye sight has been shifted so that we see everything backwords. Somehow we have gotten the idea that the power we store up on earth protects us better than the power of Him that gave us the ablity to even comprehend the word “power”. But, tell me, how can that be?

…pretty sure half of that only makes sense in Olivia-world, but if you can decipher some of it, let me know what you think…