In Quiet Time today we thought about parts of our lives that we haven't yet trusted God with. Then we moved in to our weekly "Prayer for the nations" time, where our group is praying for India each week. Obviously now this has even more of an impact in my life, as I am going there in mid December for two months! I had been asked to organise this prayer session. We started off with a prayer for the hour, then moved in to a time of sung worship, and a couple of us shared Bible verses we thought of in that time. I shared Ephesians 6:10-24. In this time of persecution, it is important to remember that all the Christians have to do there is stand, and God will do the rest. We then prayed more, and finished with another song.
After a quick break we resumed our teaching on The Holy Spirit, which focused on His many gifts, which are there to build up the church. I think one great thing that was brought up today, which really helped to make things clear, was said by another student: each of the gifts is like an aspect of God's character. He is a healer, teacher, encourager etc, and those are some of the gifts of the Holy Spirit too.
After lunch (mmm, curry again!) we performed our usual Community Care duties, then I read the newspaper for a while. It seems the rest of the world is in a bit of a state at the moment! It is odd being slightly disconnected from it all - especially the financial situation, as my job before coming here was in the financial industry. I hope everyone back in the office is ok! I then went out to play volleyball at 4pm, as pre-arranged with the rest of the base, but no one else turned up, so I threw the ball in the air as high as I could and tried to catch it for a while. Then another student and one of the children who live here at Holmsted Manor turned up, and we played some throwing/catching games for a while.
I had my one to one session today. This was a good chance to catch up with thoughts on life and my time here. My one to one leader really helped me think about events in the past week, and helped me put them in context. It was a good time.
In the evening we had a time of sung worship (where I got to display the song words on the projector - a job I used to do a lot at church), and then we practiced spiritual gifts, such as speaking in tongues, prophecy and words of knowledge. This was a great session which ended with another student giving me message which may well have been from God (which was encouraging for her too, as she wasn't confident about it at all), and me doing the same for her. It is good to know that the gifts of the Spirit are encouraged and practiced here. We thought about what the world would be like if the Holy Spirit was not here in our teaching this week. Life would be so dry. The church would be just another social club. With the power of the Holy Spirit, God can change lives, speak encouragement to others, bring healing and blessing to people and a whole lot more.
It's been a good day. I can't believe it is almost the weekend already though! Please feel free to comment on this, or any other blog entry.
