Mid-Year Conference 2011 – Friday

So for once on the last night of MYC, I managed to rack up 3-4 hours of sleep as opposed to 0 hours. Still, the dawn of the last day pretty much meant that camp was coming to an end, and we would soon no longer have all that time to sit together with other Christians, to have fellowship and to study God’s Word. Which is probably why over the years we’ve managed to see that the time spent at MYC is precious and needs to be used in a manner that reflects how rare the opportunity is. Just like all the speakers say, you really don’t get a daily chance to study God’s Word so in depth outside of MYC.

 

Anyway for this last day I was a bit detached from the activities that we did and so I wasn’t really paying attention too much. So I’ll spend the latter half of this post just reflecting on everything that happened over the five days.

 

Bible Study

The last Bible Study for the week was just going over the passage once more and making sure that we’re able to digest everything we looked at over the week. Every group had members missing here in there (most likely catching up on sleep) and so we disbanded groups and formed new ones. This allowed us to see what other people learnt from the passage over the week since we were pretty much stuck with the same people the whole week and never had a chance to compare “research” with other people. We formed a group of about 5-6 and just shared what we learnt over the week, and sat together to read other relevant passages to “humanity”. We had quite fruitful conversation and it was good for us to pray at the end, showing how indeed we as Christians are united because we can so freely pray with one another.

 

Final Talk

Because we only had the morning on Friday to do stuff, the talk was much shorter than the ones in the night session; and this last talk was just to wrap up everything we’ve learnt about humanity over the week. The last talk was on Acts 17:16-34 and we were reminded that we live in a world where people fail to acknowledge God, and in some cases, refuse to acknowledge God. We were reminded that we will suffer for being Christian because of all these conflicting beliefs that people have. But we are reminded to not worry because we are at peace with and in the day when Jesus returns to judge the living and the dead, we will inherit the kingdom of heaven alongside Jesus. Until then, we should be ready to endure any type of suffering and we should also be actively seeking out those who are still “lost in ignorance” and calling them to repentance.

 

 

Journey Back

After taking a bunch of photos during and after lunch, we finally left Merroo Christian Centre and headed home. Transport wasn’t too hard to organise and once we got it all sorted we headed off. Traditionally, the car I’m in always heads back to Hong Kong de Cafe for afternoon tea; and I think we really that meal because we were all so hungry, especially for this last day. Condensing the final hours of MYC into a sentence or two, we simply drove back, had afternoon tea, went home, slept, and today here we are heading into semester 2. Such was the conclusion of our semester break.

 

 

 

 

 

Reflections

Thinking over the last five days, I felt like a lot was accomplished. I’ll probably end up repeating some of the things I’ve said over the last four posts. There was no way I’d miss MYC this year and I was glad to have come. In terms of learning about the topic “humanity”, I didn’t feel like I learnt much extra, most of the stuff we learnt this week was stuff we knew most of (as opposed to say last year’s topic of “Holy Spirit” where we probably knew next to nothing about it). However, one thing I wasn’t able to do before was to put all these factors together and weave it into one big picture. It’s somewhat easy to look at the different aspects of the Bible and to treat them separately; but when you manage to put everything together, you really do get a much bigger picture that enlightens you. Of course, we’re not talking about a complete and sudden change in the way we live, but it certainly does change your perspective a bit and allows you to direct your life better based on the knowledge you attained. Humanity was a pretty good topic to go through this year and I found it was quiet relevant to many worldly issues we face today, things within our culture which we don’t think too hard about such as career and relationships because we just treat them the way they are right now as normal, when the Bible might say it’s not a good thing.

 

I won’t nag too much about food, but this year food was a bit of an issue; there just simply wasn’t enough to eat. It’s a bit hard day after day going through each meal knowing you’re not full, and feeling upset because of it (because that’s how your body will feel if you don’t feed it). Of course, there are many factors that attribute to this; the most obvious fact is that there were about 700+ of us at camp, and preparing food for 700 people is no easy task. So our hearts must definitely go out to the camp staff for being able to pull of such a feat. Because food had to be mass produced in a short amount of time, this also means we can’t really expect any sort of gourmet food. Of course, most of us could’ve had seconds (and thirds and fourths) but for our faculty, we kept ending everything very very late; most of time up to 30 mins into a meal, so by the time we got down to the cafeteria most of the food was gone and we would get the chance to have even seconds (let alone thirds and fourths). Again, that’s what you get when you’re in a discussion group with 125 other people, it doesn’t move as fast as other groups with half the number of people. Sad how all these factors were just stacked against us this whole week. But in any case, we must be thankful for the food because everything had an explanation and was within reason, even if our stomachs did not feel the same.

 

Catching up with people was hard because we had the responsibility to look out for the first years or anyone who was coming to MYC for the first time. And when you get heaps of first years coming, that just adds a lot of people in your personal list of people you need to catch up with over the five days at MYC. As such for me it was hard to balance my time between meeting up with new people and catching up with old friends. I can’t say I got to know many of the new people that well, but proportion-wise there was just too many people to go through so it felt like we didn’t talk to many people. I was glad to have been able to catch up with my primary and high school friends, particularly those not in the Commerce faculty. There were many people I hadn’t seen for a long time and so being able to sit down with them at breakfast, lunch or dinner and just chatting to see how our lives had been was a moment I valued a lot. Becoming more and more busy as life goes on really makes you look and see that even the short 30 minutes you get to chat with a friend over a meal is a very precious time indeed. I was able to catch up with most of my friends I hadn’t talked to in a while, there were others I wasn’t able to catch up with as much but I was glad with the time I managed to get. And since MYC is over, it simply means that we need to learn to create time for ourselves to catch up with these friends, outside of our normal weekly routine.

 

The last thing I would want to reflect over is of course the issue concerning Mandy; it wouldn’t be a complete reflection unless I actually addressed this last issue. I’ll be sparing with my words in case I say anything offensive. Most of you who went to MYC would know (though it was never spoken) that one of my primary duties was to “look after” Mandy (I’m not quite sure what the appropriate verb clause should be). Anyway, we know that’s it’s always a hard issue to get the message across to everyone that when Mandy seizes everything is actually completely okay, that she isn’t in any danger. It was a pretty rough week as people saw or heard and there really isn’t explanation that either one of us can give, that’s just how camps occur. But I was quite encouraged by the number of people who did flock by to ask if she was okay, and in many cases, to assist in keeping her physically safe from hurting herself (again she is never in any danger at all). One memory comes to mind, where in Wednesday night, we all banded together and formulated a strategy to get Mandy back to her room, which was an impossibly long walk for her to pull off in her state. And so we all formed a crowd control/escort unit; we managed to border her off from other people, to keep them from staring and making her feel nervous, and then we had a driver bring their car to the entrance of the hall and a few of us carried and transported her back to her room. That was an image of not only simple cooperation but an also an image of Christian love; where people who didn’t really know Mandy well all came to help as much as they could. Having said that, most people just stood at a distance, stared and pointed, which at first I thought was quite rude and unloving; but I see that they probably have never witnessed anything of the sort and so they wouldn’t know how to react to it, that’s completely fine. For everyone else who was brave enough to check up on her, you have my many thanks as well; it was encouraging to see everyone’s love and support for her.

 

Well I think that wraps up MYC for yet another year. There were many experiences to be had over the week; and as we continue to grow year by year in the love and knowledge of Jesus Christ, I hope that we’ll be able to continue looking out for one another and keeping each other accountable to their godliness since it seems clear that as things get busier, it becomes harder to keep track of our own Christian lives, which is why it is a good thing to have others helping us through that. I look forward to chatting with people over this year’s MYC as well as to seeing everyone again for next year’s one.

Mid-Year Conference 2011 – Thursday

It’s funny how by the fourth day, you seem to not think about the rest of camp that lies ahead, but start to reflect on how much has gone by in the last three days. And to put things into perspective, the start of Thursday makes me think about how there’s only one more night left to enjoy the fellowship with everyone, one more night that have fun and to catch up people we weren’t able to chat with since the last three days; because Friday would pretty much be the end of MYC (and everyone goes *sadface* over that of course).

 

I’m running out of relevant photos so I’m just going to slap random ones for this post, which might not have been taken on Thursday.

 

Bible Study

Today we just looked through the Old Testament references that are in our passage and seeing if they help create meaning in Peter’s letter. Of course, without the passage actually being listed in our booklets, and without using a Bible for cross-referencing, we would’ve been completely useless at figuring out where to get the references from; yes, we’re not all Bible freaks who can memorize huge chunks of the Bible. We were all pretty tired today so I’m glad we had lighter work today. The passage has pretty much come together, I guess we’re all just trying to digest the whole passage and put it all together in our minds, and that takes time, hopefully one day.

 

 

Seminar

Today we spent the morning looking at the idea of “rest” which seems closely related to the “Sabbath”. Again the idea of “rest” originates from Genesis where God rests on the seventh day. And when it comes to thinking about how this “rest” applies to us, I just want to skip ahead to say that indeed the idea of “rest” is not on parallel with the tradition of the “Sabbath” where we actually rest from doing work. Resting one day a week to not do any work is not a command in the Bible that’s relevant to us today; it was a tradition earlier on in the history of the Israelites and some churches today still follow it. However, we saw that “rest” was more a state that we enter into through having peace with God.

 

In the Old Testament we looked through several examples where the king of Israel would tear down idols and turn the nation of Israel back into godly people, and the “land” enters a state of “rest”. It’s clear now that “rest” doesn’t actually mean physical rest, but it’s like being at peace with God, such that all hostility between God and His people are put to rest. In a state of rest, Israel was blessed by God and they were prosperous (it’s wrong here to think that following God leads to prosperity; this is what we call the “prosperity gospel” which is false). However, we see that the idea of being at rest with God is a good thing, because being at war with God can only mean us being crushed by Him.

 

Today, we are also at peace with God through Jesus Christ and so we too are in “rest”. Yet at the same time we are still waiting to enter that “rest” because today we obviously are still in a hostile world and things don’t obviously look like they’re in a state of rest. So, much like salvation, we count ourselves “saved” today even though physically speaking we have not been “saved” yet; but because we are assured of it, we are confident enough to call ourselves “saved” because we know it will one day happen. The same path of thinking applies to being at “rest” as well. As such, being at “rest” has absolutely nothing to do with the Sabbath today.

 

 

Free Time

Here are a couple of pictures that describe what happened in most of our free time this week:

 

 

 

I think I already explained before how this year us third years have left the culture of wanting to plays card games like Mafia, or Jungle Speed, but to use our free time to sit down and chat and catch up with people. I think it became more of a need within our faculty because we had such a large group that we all probably never got round to catching up with each other, but rather to meet new people. So we used free time to catch with one another and to chat and encourage one another, which was cool.

 

I spent this last afternoon sleeping because I was dead tired. To be honest I ended up skipping the briefing for second semester mission. I know that I won’t have time this semester to help out with that anyway so I used the opportunity to sleep; probably not the best thing I could’ve done but it really was a tiring week this week.

 

 

Evening Session

The final night’s talk was from Colossians 3:1-17 and the main takeaway point was that we as humans have been freed from slavery to sin to become slaves to righteousness. Carl talked about the idea of freedom and he briefly showed how some forms of freedom are actually not good because it allows us to go and do whatever we want, usually resulting in something that harms us. And so it was good to not be completely free, and in the context of being a Christian, we don’t actually have “freedom” in the sense of what we usually think that word means.

 

By being stuck in sin, we are described to be slaves to sin, meaning we are trapped in an endless cycle of sinning and we are stuck under the penalty of sin which is death. But Jesus frees us from sin, not to become free, but in fact to become slaves again, but to righteousness. I found it interesting that Carl picked up the Exodus and showed how the Israelites were freed from the slavery to Egypt, not to be free and roam the desert as they wished; but freed from the Egyptians so that they may become slaves to God. That’s a weird concept to grasp but because Carl explained why freedom isn’t exactly a good thing (for instance, it allows our society to allow gay marriages for which I am against), we ask ourselves whether slavery is a good thing. The only condition we would require for being slaves, is that we have a loving and caring master (usually not in harmony with the feeling that the word “slave” gives off). Because God is loving and caring, because his slave and servant isn’t a bad thing; we just need to be rid of the bad connotations that we normally associate “slavery” with.

 

This final talk managed to tie in everything we’ve looked at over the last four days. Because of what Jesus has accomplished, for himself, for the human race, and for us, we now find our identity in Him and we now belong to Him and are his servants. Who we are as humans then, is that we’re servants of Jesus Christ, and this is a good thing because by having peace with our master, we are not facing eternal judgement but await an inheritance of eternal life. This does put the perspective back into life; it might not directly give us guidance on how we should live in our daily lives, but it does help us work out our direction in life and help us to realign it with what God wants it to be.

 

 

Final Night

All my ideas will be going over the place from this point on. Traditionally, we have the most fun on the final night because that’s what people would naturally do on the last night of camp. So I guess it’s not really a traditional thing, but more of a natural thing. The harsh thing about it all was that the staff closed off all the meeting areas early in the night (1am is considered early if we’re talking about the final night). They closed these rooms up because everyone was being too noisy and all, and that indeed is a shameful thing to hear; we as a uni got scolded during announcements in one of the evening sessions this week and it’s sad to hear that the final night would be uneventful. Nevertheless I stayed up till 3am playing cards with some of the graduates, who, for them, it would’ve been their final night for their final MYC. This was probably how the last night of MYC should’ve been spent: just calmly relaxing and having light leisure fun with the people who won’t be back next year, and then actually sleeping because it would be a wise thing to get rest before the final day at MYC.

 

So this year, the final night was uneventful as in past years, but that’s okay; wouldn’t have wanted to face blacking out again here and there on Friday. It was a pleasant way to end the night.

Mid-Year Conference 2011 – Wednesday

Come Wednesday, people had lost a lot of sleep:

 

 

 

But then again when you only get like 4-5 hours a sleep per night you are bound to start getting exhausted; this is a fundamental factor for any camp. I think Wednesday was the start where we all gradually slept closer and closer to breakfast time, such that we were facing the possibility of not having breakfast at all in the morning. Thirty minutes more sleep in exchange for breakfast probably wasn’t the best deal, but when you’re tired, you’ll take all that you can.

 

 

Bible Study

For day three, our job was to look closer at the main themes in 1 Peter and see how Peter’s argument for those main themes progress in his letter. It was hard to draw upon the main themes and give them a title. We spent a lot of time discussing how the different ideas related to each other, and whether they can be linked by one broad topic. In the end we decided on ideas such as: suffering, being holy and outward conduct.

 

It is clear that 1 Peter talks a lot about suffering; and how it is good to suffer for doing good rather than doing evil. When we picked the theme “being holy” we more referred to the sections in the letter that talked about changing yourself from the inside; and contrasting this against “outward conduct”. That is, in the way we live as Christians, we first need to convict our own hearts that we need to change, and this first step would be like changing our attitude towards God. And we thought that only after you change your inner attitude towards God that you can start to outwardly show other people this change. Our basis for this is that it wouldn’t make sense for you to outwardly do good unless you first decided in your heart to follow God.

 

Looking at the themes and the different ideas listed under them helped us understand what the general idea of 1 Peter was. I guess then if we ever came back and had to ask ourselves what 1 Peter was about we could just list those themes. It would also help in recommending epistles to do in the future for Bible Study, or for our friends to read for devotions.

 

 

 

Seminar

Seminar three was a heaps long seminar that tried to deal with the ideas of being “fruitful” and “multiplying”. Most of the time was spent discussing the ideas of relationships and marriage and how they fit into the context God wanted them to be in. By this, I mean that relationships and marriage have been ill-defined by society and it requires much deep thought to bring these concepts back into God’s perspective. We kept tripping over the issue of whether getting married meant needing to have kids, or whether you could marry but not have children (and thus in a sense not being “fruitful”). Rather than come up with a solution to that idea, we raised up a counter issue whereby those who don’t get married are also not being fruitful. One thing led to another and we ended up discussing all over the place with no real definitive conclusions to anything; but that’s the difficulty with wrestling with what the Bible says, and it’s clear that it isn’t easy to get it right; clearly society is way off from the truth.

 

I can’t remember what direction the discussion took towards the end but my perception of the whole thing was that the emphasis was on “producing godly offspring” (I believe a relevant verse can be found in Malachi somewhere, might look that up later). If being fruitful and all that is about having godly offspring, then wouldn’t it simply be “making disciples of Jesus”? I say it’s simple because there are a variety of ways we can do this. One such way is of course getting married and having children and raising them up as followers of Christ. Another way might be to get married but then adopting children; you are still raising godly offspring in that sense. And for those who don’t get married, you can still evangelise to people and they too would become “godly offspring” regardless of age.

 

Later in the seminar we were reminded through the New Testament that the idea of marriage is just an earthly thing and won’t really exist in heaven. But even today, the Bible says that marriage is a shadow of Christ being “married” to the church, and this sort of does not fit the picture we get when we think of marriage. But perhaps, marriage was meant to be seen in light of Christ and the church (also called the “bride”) and so human marriage is but a small point that stems from the primary concept from the perspective of Christ. So in any case, the summary of today’s seminar was to not worry too much about how marriage will work because it too is a temporary thing, but rather we should be focusing on making disciples of Jesus and being “fruitful” in that way.

 

 

 

Elective – Being a Man

I’ll come back to free time stuff in the Friday post. Anyway, Wednesday afternoon was our second elective. I picked the one regarding “manliness” and what the Bible says about that. For most of the guys, this workshop was one which reminded us of things we’ve already heard about in terms of what it means to be a godly man. But I think I should go through in more detail for those who have never read much from the Bible in regards to this topic, or for the girls, who should not have done much research on it, since it wouldn’t be as relevant for them.

 

Being a godly man stems from how men and women were created “differently” by God. From the account of creation in Genesis 1-2, we see that Adam is created first, and Eve was created out of Adam to be his helper. If the woman is to be the man’s helper, then as men it would be up to us to take the lead in things. Of course, the account of creation really only deals with a partnership between Adam and Eve as a couple, but we would apply to this to ourselves today to say that if guys ever need to work with girls in any area (this most strongly applies to church, and weakly applies to the workplace), then the guys would take the lead and the girls would act as the helper.

 

This is of course where people start raising their eyebrows and how the Bible seems to communicate the idea that women should not lead. In fact, Paul even goes as far as to say that he doesn’t permit women to teach (in the church), and other places where wives should submit to their husbands. To the non-Christian this is of course very hard to understand and accept. It’s still a challenge for most Christians today. However there are passages that remind us that at the end of the day, guys and girls are “equal” in that we all share in the same inheritance as Christians (of heaven) and that God has made the two one in marriage.

 

To continue picking out the differences, one interesting thing to note was that in the account of the fall (Genesis 3), it is Eve who deceived Adam into taking the fruit, however, it is Adam who cops the blame from God. One wrong application of this is to not listen to women because they’re deceivers; we all joke and laugh about that but we all know that the Bible isn’t telling men to ignore their wives and such. Rather, because Adam takes the blame for Eve’s mistake, it makes Adam responsible for something Eve did wrong. In their partnership, it was then Adam who was responsible for their actions as a couple. As guys then, today as we take the “lead” in the things we do, we must also be prepared to take the responsibility for when things go wrong, even if we’re not the ones who committed the wrong.

 

A light example of this would be the guys taking the lead in organising something, like maybe transport for a social. And then when we delegate this task to the girls, it is us guys who are still responsible, and the girls would then be the ones “helping” with the organising. In our responsibility, if the girls fail to organise transport, us guys have no right to blame them for their failures; we don’t blame ourselves either in that sense but we take responsibility and ownership of what went wrong. Of course to ever prevent things from going wrong, it would probably be wise for the guys to occasionally check up on the girls and see they’re okay with their task, and to see if we need to help them (even though initially they’re the ones helping us).

 

Onto minor issues with leading, I guess we usually define “leading” as like upfront things such as MC-ing or anything that involves speaking to a large crowd for a formal and organised event. It’s not that girls cannot do this, but rather a guy should at least accompany the girl; this is why commonly for some TV shows, they are hosted by a guy and a girl. Even the news is conducted by a male and a female news anchor. In the church, this would be about the same. I don’t want to deal too much with the whole leading thing as there is quite a lot of debate over it, and there are many more issues to think about before we can establish some concrete framework of how to do things.

 

Towards the end of the seminar we dealt with what it means to be responsible; that is, we should be standing for what is right and godly, because that is how we are to serve and obey God and it is then up to the guys to make sure that they are following God most strictly as we encourage the people around us to do the same. An implication of this and the above is that it is up to the guys to help lead the girls into godliness, not that they can’t be godly by their own accords, but it is our responsibility to make sure that they are presented holy in God’s sight too, be it outside of a marriage context.

 

Today, as we relate to our sisters in Christ, we should treat them as sisters (and treat ones older than us as mothers), by showing them love and respect and desiring to help them grow in Christ. For me, this workshop was more a reminder that how I relate to people of the opposite gender is important too, and that I have a responsibility to look after my sisters in Christ as well, so I should watch my conduct such that it is one that will edify them to be more like Christ. If you know me personally, you would know that I don’t have much motive to step up and lead more at church or at CBS, I have way too many of these responsibilities at the moment in my life.

 

 

Evening Session

The Wednesday night talk was based on Romans 6:1-11. It was pretty much about how we try to define ourselves in various “worldly ways” such as being a university student and such. This naturally leads us to seeking being the best of whatever we defined ourselves to be and it’s quite true in that if we dare to define ourselves merely as university students, then we would aspire for intellectual success which later then turns into financial success in the job that results from our education. By defining ourselves this way, we not only give ourselves the wrong attitude in life but we also fail to see who we really are; this was the gist of tonight’s talk.

 

However, we are told to define ourselves through Jesus and what He has done for us. By seeing how Jesus, as the true human, was able to free us from the slavery of sin and from the punishment that we justly deserved, we see that we are now defined as humans through Jesus. It’s strange because this is an inescapable fact; you can’t really choose not to be defined through Jesus because according to what He has done for us, we are automatically linked to Jesus, regardless of whether we choose Him or not.

 

But being linked to Jesus like that is a very compelling thing, and Carl took us through Acts 2 (the account of Pentacost) to show how people responded to the gospel. I guess tonight’s talk wasn’t an especially awe-inspiring talk. I think most of us know that we have value in God’s eyes and what truly matters for us from a Christian perspective is whether or not we belong to Jesus, everything is pretty much nothing compared to that. But again seeing how Jesus ties into all of this just shows how important Jesus is to everything that we are as followers of Christ. It was good seeing again how Jesus is the centre of everything and being reminded of how great He is, and how blessed we are to be able to relate to Him.

Mid-Year Conference 2011 – Tuesday

If you haven’t read Monday’s post, please do, because I’m just going to move straight into things without giving another introduction.

 

I forgot to mention cabins in the last post. So this year, our MYC was really full so some of us had to upgrade from the normal cabins to the ensuite rooms (with a surcharge of course). This year I upgraded to an ensuite (to help free up spots in the normal cabins for other people) and it was a really pleasant experience. The ensuites aren’t the most luxurious of rooms of course but the attractive features for me were that:

1. Non-communal bathrooms. It just felt nice not having to be using a shower or toilet that 50 other people would be using throughout the week as well. Each ensuite held 3 people.
2. Fewer people means fewer snorers, which means better sleep. I’m a really light sleeper and I detest snorers (in a friendly way). So having fewer people snoring definitely helps me get to sleep easier.
3. Better beds allows for comfortable sleeping.
4. Better D&Ms. Fewer people allow for more bromance haha.

Of course having said that, there was still one person my room who snored, but it wasn’t as bad as other people I’ve shared a cabin with. So for once this year, I actually got decent sleep (even though the hours weren’t any better) and so I had a bit more energy for MYC this year, than in my previous two years.

 

Waking up in the morning to the countryside is much different than waking up at home; it provides a different feel and it helps clear your mind from your daily routine, so that you can focus on learning about God for the rest of the week:

 

Okay so not my best photo ever but whatever.

 

 

Bible Study

Again we broke off into Bible Study groups after breakfast. Actually it was a bit annoying each morning for us who were in ensuites. We would have to wake up, walk all the way down to the auditorium for breakfast (and it’s a bit of a walk), and afterwards walk back up to our conference room, which is next to our ensuites. So there was a lot of trekking up and down the hill each day. Anyhow, day two was to break up 1 Peter into segments so we could separate and organise the different ideas that Peter raises in his letter. We went really slow here this morning, because we discussed a bit too deep into the first couple of segments (discussing about which sentence belongs with which segment and where it cuts off, etc). Even though we were a bit slow getting through the whole letter, the discussion showed that we were struggling to understand the passage; and that’s good, otherwise there would be no fun in studying an easy passage. A lot of groups didn’t finish today either but after two days, 1 Peter was starting to take shape in my mind, and its overall message a little more clearer.

 

 

Seminar

Again the sheer number of people just overwhelms me:

 

 

Our second seminar led us into thinking about what God’s purpose for man is, as outlined in Genesis. That’s really hard to compare with us today, because we live in a time much much different to what Adam was in; drawing the parallels would not be easy. We moved onto a section where we had to draw a diagram to list the relationship between the various elements in God’s creation. The question was something like: “How do man, woman, offspring, God, animals, plants and ground relate to each other in creation.” One table drew this for an answer:

 

 

I think that captures creation quite perfectly haha. Jokes.

 

But although there was some kind of order in creation, we saw that in Genesis 3, that order gets completely overturned when the serpent holds influence over Eve to eat the fruit, Eve convinces Adam to eat the fruit, and Adam thought it best to listen to Eve rather than God. As such, things in creation were broken because of that one incident, which is bad news for all of us. So then we moved onto Jesus and drew parallels between him and Adam. Jesus was a man who lived completely obedient to God, unlike Adam, and the major difference between these two people is that Adam brought about death through sin for the rest of mankind, but Jesus brought life through his obedient death to the cross. As such, what Adam failed to do, Jesus was able to fulfil, and so we gain hope through Jesus because He is like our representative before God.

 

The last thing we talked about in the morning seminar was what our “work” was. Adam had to work in the garden of Eden, and we have to “work” in similar ways. There was quite a lot of discussion about labouring, like being employed in a normal job through a degree in university. And there was the other side where our work as Christians is to make disciples of Jesus. And though we could see two different types of work here, there were still more questions to ask about how to balance these two types of work. We didn’t reach a conclusion in the end, due to time, but these are things we are just going to have to continue wrestling with in the future.

 

 

Free Time

Free time came after lunch. There really isn’t much to talk about free time because we didn’t do anything interesting. It’s quite strange, in my first two years of MYC we would just use our free time to play card/board games and such. This year, us third years just sat and chat most of the time. I guess we were too tired (or are boring people) to get up and actually “do”stuff. Just sitting and chatting sufficed. I took the chance to catch up with people I hadn’t talked to in a while, mostly people from other faculties since I would’ve seen them the least. It was really good to get the chance to catch up with friends from primary school and high school and it was quite encouraging to share and learn from each other how our Christian lives have been since the time we last saw each other. Having said that, it was quite daunting at how many people I needed to catch up with over the five days at camp. And even then, when would there ever be time to catch up with them again? Yes, I slightly worry about that, but God makes time for us, this week at MYC was but one opportunity He gave to us.

 

Today we just jammed and played cards (I’m not in this photo, or this game either):

 

 

 

Elective – Honouring Parents

After free time we had our first elective of two (one on Tuesday, the other on Wednesday). There were many different topics we could choose from, but we could only choose one of them. I decided to go with the one regarding how we relate to our non-Christian parents, so I’m going to spend some time fleshing this topic out since not everyone went to this elective.

 

Alan led this seminar, and he pretty much told us exactly what we expected to hear (though not what we had hoped to hear). For all Christians, the Bible does indeed challenge us to be faithful and obedient to God to the point where it might even mean being disobedient to our parents. And that’s really hard to hear, when Jesus says He came to divide families and turn people against one another (Matthew 10:34-36). As a Christian who has non-Christian parents, obeying God over my parents is sometimes the easiest decision to make at times in my life. But it can’t be as simple as that can it? There are parts of the Bible where it clearly tells us to listen to our parents. How do we reconcile the two contrasting viewpoints of the Bible to obey and to disobey our parents?

 

This seminar pretty much told us to stand firm in our faith and to go against what our parents say if necessary. And we hear this knowing that it’s the thing that we’re already do; but we struggle because we want to be challenged to obey our parents, even if they aren’t Christian and don’t have godly values. Not hearing this challenge in the seminar makes me wonder whether it indeed is alright to ignore our parents’ wishes and just live with only God in our hearts and minds. Alan’s direction in this topic was to turn to Deuteronomy, and see that God wanted the Israelite parents to teach their kids to obey Him. In doing so, the Israelites would prosper and find favour in God’s eyes; otherwise, they would face God’s judgement (eventually being conquered and taken into exile). The point made was that God desires parents to raise godly children; and so us as children so aspire to be godly, even if our parents are not raising and teaching us that way. In this sense, it would be fighting against our parents and raising ourselves to be godly, rather than being raised in whatever way our parents want us to be.

 

This is a fair point but one which seems difficult to carry out in everyday life. There must be some degree of obedience and disobedience such that families which aren’t Christian, are not completely torn apart because half the family follows God and the other doesn’t. The rest of the seminar didn’t seem to clear, but from what I gather, we are to obey our parents and honour them as best as we can; but when there’s conflict between their values and godly values (ie, when they don’t agree with God’s commandments in a sense) then we must choose God over our parents. Having said that, it would seem that the overall attitude is to do our best obeying God and our parents and only choose God over our parents when we must make a choice. That’s still not easy to do, but really, if we had Christian parents, we wouldn’t have this problem in the first place; something we should aspire to have when we grow up.

 

 

Evening Session

Tuesday night’s talk came from Romans 5. In trying to live as humans, we fail to live life the way we ought to. The way we live as people can be summed up in two men: Adam and Jesus. Adam was a man who failed to obey God and brought sin and death into the world because he was not responsible in leading his wife Eve to obey God. On the other hand, Jesus was a man who lived in perfect obedience to God and in perfect faith in Him. For us to live in Adam means we reckon we know what’s best for our lives and we’ll decide or ourselves what we should or should not do. In Adam, we find sin and death and we see in Romans 1 that God just gave those people over to their sins; and they were pretty much stuck in an inescapable pit. But Jesus brings about the start of a new humanity, and through the way He lived and died, we may no longer taste death through Adam, but find life through Christ.

 

It’s pretty cool to see that Jesus is the perfect representative for humanity, and though it seems unfair that we face death because of one man’s sin, we also can find life through one man’s death. So to add to the idea of “humanity”, Jesus is the true human that we should follow and turn to if we want to find out who we are and what we are to do with our lives. After just two days, we’ve developed a fair picture of humanity but even with all the detail we’ve managed to cover, there was still so much more to add to our picture. Most people get overwhelmed from the first night, and especially the second but that’s the challenge of everything at MYC.

 

Tuesday’s post is quite long so I think I’ll leave it there.