Make War for Love

I know that sounds like a weird title compared to the popular slogan "Make Love not War", but when we think about this from a Christian perspective the title really is more what we should be aiming for not the world's slogan. It may seem like a contradictory statement, but it's not.
Ephesians makes it really clear that we are in a spiritual battle. "For our battle is not against flesh and blood, but against principalities against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world.  Against spiritual wickedness in high places."
As Christians we also know that Satan is "like a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour", meaning he is not our ally, but our sworn enemy. And we also know that this war is not for land, not for wealth, or even reputation, but for souls. So, when we look at our main purpose as Christians we can see is that we are to bring Him Glory. That's what we were made for and we do this, through our praise, our worship, our thanks, and by the way we live our lives.
I'm learning in my Brit Lit course about King Arthur and his knights.The main purpose for the codes of chivalry were not to be outstanding knights for the sake of being an outstanding knight, but because the way in which a knight conducts himself reflected upon his king. It's the same in our battle, but with a little more at stake. Not only do we reflect our Lord through our actions, but also our actions, the way we prepare, equip or carry out our duty can determine how we can respond in the future. If we don't stay in constant pray and in the Word so that we may be ready for battle "in the evil day, and having done all to stand". We will fall, and we will fall in such a way that can hinder us for a long time after wards. We will not be defeated, but because of our mistake, because we did not take care of our responsiblity, we let opportunities that we could have done God's work pass us by. And because of this sometimes, a person can miss their last opportunity for someone to reach out to them, or their sufferings can be prolonged, because we did not do what the Lord had for us to do. Sometimes, He simply gives the priveledge and honor to someone else, and we miss out on the blessing of living our faith and seeing the fruits of our labor.
This is what I find myself thinking, contemplating and praying over. I don't want to miss the opportunities that the Lord has for me. I have already missed so many, and I don't want to get to heaven someday and know that there should have been thousands more, hundreds, tens or even one person who could have been their if I had taken care of the responsiblity that was entrusted to me.
This kinda reminds me of the parable of the talents. Jesus gave different servants a different number of talents, but at the end the one who didn't do anything to multiply his wealth was rebuked and his privilege was given to another. I don't want to be that lazy servant who does nothing with what the Lord has blessed me with. I want to be the good servant that the Lord keeps pouring out His privilege to, who God pours out His blessing to. The one on the day I see Him that He says to, "Well, done my good and faithful servant."
That's the one I want to be. I want to know that I made the most of this precious life that He's given me. So, in turn I will make War against the evils of this world, the evil one and all his followers, so that those who do not know the Lord can have many opportunities to see His face, feel His love and know His healing. 
I will make war that they may one day feel His love.
I will make war through my prayers.
I will make war through the standard at which I conduct my life.
I will make war by the words that I speak in gentleness and truth.
I will make war by the way I love.
I will Make War for Love.
the Love of a Father,
Saviour,
Comforter,
Friend,
King,
and Lord.
I will make war for the one who made war for me, and who can give you the Love you've been to afraid to ask for and have only dreamt of.
I will make War for Love.

True Fellowship!

So, it's been a little while since I've written on here. Mainly because school has just begun and volleyball has commenced taking up my computer time so I will now write on here on the weekends. That's when I'll write about whatever happened over the previous week or any particular strikes of inspiration.

I read a friend's blog yesterday and it moved me. The circumstances, well the happenstance of the music that was playing while I read it was absolutely miraculous. If you haven't checked out my friend Haley on Youtube go look her up. Type Haley&Delaney or the channel name thehaleyshaw. She's one of the most amzing people I have ever met. The particular song I'm talking about is called "Te amo". It's one of the best songs I've ever heard. It always moves me. Anyway I was reading my friend's blog, and as I read it I was moved almost to tears. Because the words I was reading corresponded to the heartfelt lyrics of the song, but the part that really got me was when my friend happened to mention me. She didn't say my name, but she mentioned a conversation that we had had. The realization was incredible. Here was my friend, my "dear friend" pouring out her heart in a blog about what the Lord has done for her, and she counted me as one of her many blessings. I can't help but be moved. In ways I haven't even imagined God has used me. Ways that I don't even recognize. He has used me even in all my state. God is AMAZING!!! It really is amazing the power of just loving someone in one converstion, in one word, in one hug (=]) in one moment. I thank god for putting me in her life, and hers in mine. For almost a year I went to my church, despite angry/disapproving parents, all alone, and then He gave me one of the best friends I've ever had. It's amazing. I almost can't remember going there without her. All the saddness, all the grief, all the pain, all the memories of the lonely hours all alone in that huge building or the tears I cried almost every week having to leave it without anyone to share my joy have all faded away. God gave me her to help me cope with all this parental drama, and to encourage me. AND boy is she an encouragement! She has helped to tear down the rest of my own "Berlin Walls" in my life. She has helped me (even if she can't believe it) to open up more to people. Maybe not in speech or in deed, but in relationships. She was the first person I didn't torture at the start of our friendship. My anger, my rage and all that other baggage was subsided when God put her in my life, and all with one phrase, "Hello, love!"
She may not say that anymore, but that one term of endearment disarmed me and her gentle loving spirit helped to mend things in my life that, even I (the over annalytical one who can figure out the deepest meanings of life and circumstance...hahaha!) until now hadn't realized.
She is an amazing person! God has brought her so far even just in the last 7 months. I can't even belive its only been that long since our friendship started to bloom. I can't imagine not standing side by side with her in the presence of the Almighty lifting our voices in songs of praise and worship! I can't!
I thank Him for every shy, intreverted (though, it is no longer!), hurting, aching, loving, compassionate, kind, gentle, incredibly human part of her because even with all her weaknesses and all of mine, even with all our wonderful God-given strengths, even with all our baggage from our broken or disfunctional families and all our doubts, worries, fears and sadness God has changed us! He has Loved us, and He will USE us! I know now, without a shadow of a doubt and I want to make it known to her and the world (because I don't think I've told her yet) that I love her and I would die for her! I love ya Jessica!
This 7 months of friendship has been some of the sweetest moments of my twisted traumatic wonderfully broken life, and i thank God for you!

x-week

So, the past 3 days at my church have been what's called X-week. It was amazing! I had such a great time! and not just the whole spending time with my friends. I loved just being with people who were worshiping God all at the same time. The energy was amazing! Usually, i feel like i'm on display during our worship, so i usually don't raise my hands. i don't want to attract attention to myself and take away from someone else's worship, but when I was there the past few days I felt like I was completely alone with God. I was surrounded by over a hundred people, but I felt completely alone with my Creator. It was a marvelous feeling. The intimacy, the closeness, the utter nakedness (not literally, that would be weird) of it all. It was like nothing I have ever experienced. It was absolutely miraculous. I felt completely free to pray, to sing, to clap, to dance, to raise my hands, to cry, to scream, to do anything that I needed to commune with my Father. Even after the worship was over the message was so powerful. It was about just being Still and knowing He is God. On Thursday after the first service on Wednesday, I found myself craving that closeness with God. I found small times throughout the day just to talk to Him, just to be like, "Hey, You're God! and You're Amazing! You give me breathe, you give me sight, legs to walk on, you make me whole."
What was even more interesting, I was sitting next to my best friends, and a guy who I wish could be a close friend, and It was like they weren't there, but we were somehow connected. Not just them, but all the believers in that room. I could feel the presence of God, just like when He spoke to me in that room just a little over a year and a half ago. The same intimacy. It was AMAZING! I hope all of you who read this feels the presence of God like that at least once in your life. If you do, You'll never want to be separate from Him ever again!

Mission Camp Video: Behind the Scenes

Alright this is the behind the scenes of the Mission Camp video I made for my church. So if you don't like all the editing/idea making process you probably should read this.
Okay, first off I got the idea after hearing all the wonderful stories/testimonies from the people who went on this particular mission trip to New Orleans. They spent a life-changing week amongst the squalor still left behind 4 years after this devastating Hurricane. I began just looking at the pictures on my friends' facebooks, but as i looked at these pictures I got kinda bored so I opened up my windows music player and began listening to the new CDs I got for my birthday. The first one up was Addison Road. The very first track on the album was a song called "This Could Be Our Day". I began again flipping through the hundreds of pictures on countless profiles, and as I continued I started noticing some of the pictures went with the song. What I like to call beautiful gems that film editors LOVE! Then, the idea hit me. I could make a video for them!
My original plan was to finish it in the first week, but even though there was literally hundreds of photos, there wasn't enough to put together a decent video. So over the next two weeks, i kept my eyes peeled for new uploads. I think the final count was around 500 to 600 photos in total. Maybe a hundred photos of all these were used, but ALL of them were carefully edited, cropped, and/or straightened. There was so much red eye that needed to be removed it wasn't even funny. Any way after all the photos were complete, I embarked on the first leg of my actual mission. Editing the video.

My first predicament was that I needed an intro to the video. How would I do it? The beginning of the song is thrust straight into the chorus, and then the second verse and there lied the problem. I didn't want to scare people straight out of the gate because the beginning is so dynamic, also I didn't want them to miss the first few words of the song. So, I devised a way to fix this problem. I would simply explain the need the church had gone to fulfill. So as you see in the end product the into is a history of the Hurricane Katrina. I used a black back ground so that the colored pictures would stand out more. I also chose a more vertical font, so that it would look better on the ease in and outs. I also used a few pictures of the Hurricane Katrina whether pictures to add some menacing effects, because Hurricane Katrina was so incredibly massive. I remember looking up "Hurricane Katrina devastation" and other similar searches to find these pictures. I think I saved in all about 50 pictures, but in the end I only used 3 or 4 for timing purposes. I also tripled the size of the word "struck" and ease in really hard and slowed it down for emphasis ( I almost put "stuck" in the video, but upon inspection near the end of the editing process I realized my mistake and thankfully fixed it). I think it took me 2 days to finally finish the intro. I was so excited, but i didn't realize i still had two weeks of editing left. (the music in the intro is a clip from the beginning of "Go Light Your World" by Chris Rice)
The actual video started off with the song "This Could Be Our Day" as I mentioned earlier. I was actually considering a few other songs, but do to their context I finally chose this one instead.
I decided to put the title of the song in it, so that it could tie the lyrics to the song. The reason I chose the pictures of the city was because I wanted a very real sense of them going in to the city, although i don't know if the city in these pictures are actually New Orleans. I put New Orleans in there because I wanted my audience to know that it was in fact New Orleans my church went to and not another Hurricane Katrina site. I chose the pictures of the kids in the buses because i wanted chronology to be a big factor in this video. I used a few group photos as an overall them throughout the video. If you notice all the group photos appear when the part of the song says "This Could Be Our Day", but i think towards the end I used Duos instead.
Upon reaching 24 or 25 seconds in I reached a problem. The first long music solo before the first verse. I didn't know how I was going to fill it, because I didn't want to use photos of people in the midst of the a long extended music. so thankfully I had come up with this idea during the editing process. I was messing around with the Contrast and Shadowing of one of the photos of the posters the kids made, and as I did so I like the effect of it progressively changing. The only way I was to accomplish this was to slowly create individual copies of the same picture with different effects. I had made another video about a year before this one called "The Many Faces of Frank" where I used similiar photos of this guy I knew, sped them up together and it made it look like he was moving, so I used the same idea here, but on a higher and more organized scale. So the 5 seconds of transition you see in the video is made up of approximately 40 to 50 separately edited and treated photos put together and sped up to make it look like the photo is progressively changing. Yes, it took a really long time to do, but I am extremely happy I stuck it out, and finished.
Also, during the photo editing craze, I came across some really beautiful scenic pictures of the places the kids visited. So I darkened a photos that one of the girls had taken of her and her friends in front of a massive church to make it look like it was at sunset, and then I used a wonderful photo that looked like a crime caught on film to go with the lyrics "Clearly it's time to make a change". Then I used the one photo of the people that went sitting down relaxing for the next lyric. I used the pixilation transition a few times throughout the video to signify a change that was made. First for the waiting, and another time from praying to actually moving. As we made our way back into the chorus I showed pictures of just the kids that the youth worked with to show the reason why they were there. The second time were in the chorus I used mainly the activities that were done. Like the puppet show, and worship. It was to show the two worlds meeting. The kids who are used to having everything and the kids who just love what ever they have left. You see the expressions on the NeO kids faces where there just full of pure joy and how it reflects onto the visiting youth. You really get a glimpse of this incredible tranisiton on the mission campers side in what is my favorite part of the video. When I saw these two photos I knew it would be perfect!
About 1:56-1:59 you see a HUGE change in the mission campers lives. They go from standing defensive with their arms crossed to raising their hands without shame. I absolutely love that part of the video.
You have no idea how hard it was to find a picture without the kids smiling in it, but I managed to find one for the lyric "heal the broken ones". The photo at 2:05-2:06 is one of my favorite of all of them I saw. It shows a great deal about the kids that went. They're all just bowed heads and prayer to our Heavenly Father and it truly is one of the best photos I've seen.
As we go into the 3rd chorus part I show them in the construction part of the trip. I know there we're a few more group projects of different things, but there weren't enough photos of those projects to be able to create it's own part in the chorus. I kinda stuck a photo in there for my own personal laugh, and if you really want to know I'll tell ya, but I don't think it's worth putting in this little commentary. I still think i coulda done this part of the video better, and there are a few parts throughout that grate on my nerves for not fixing it, but what's done is done.
After the end of the 3rd chorus we go into the bridge. The lyric "This Could Be Our Day" is repeated a few times, and I used a fade transition and alternated the ease in and outs on the photos to give a push and pull effect, as well as, a building up to climax.
2:48-2:50 is one of my favorite moments not only because of the lyrics, but also because of the visual comparision. You see a little girl upside down doing a handstand, and then you see two of the mission campers upside down, and in a way it unites them both. It gives them a sense of "giving themselves away" like the song says. I also used a picture of one of the little girls close up for the lines, "something beautiful" because they weren't there to make a house or renovate things although they did that, they were there to make a differnce in the lives of God's beautiful creation. The picture at 3:02 is one of my favorites because it is so visually interesting. You have kids on the otherside of the gate who seem like they can't get to the other side, and one of the little boys is trying to help but can't get it open then comes one of the campers, called to make a difference in these kids lives, and opens it for them.
The next few photos before the final chorus are cued specifically to the music. When we get to the part that says "I'm giving myself away" again, I use a fade in to black fade out to black transitions in order to make it sounds choppy like with the drums sound in the music. Then when the music slows down almost to a stop you see one of my favorite pictures at 3:29 with no effects just straight up picture, and then you almost like get hit between the eyes with the next one and the expressions on the faces of the girls. I intentionally kept a lot of the pictures at the beginning from being to happy or smiley so that it would be more rewarding to see all of it come together at the end of the trip. So in the last few pictures in the chorus you see a LOT of duos and groups of the campers with the kids smiling and having a great time so you can really see the change that's taken place in both of their lives. After the last chorus we get into what I call the "ooo's". It was really hard in coming up with an ending because I loved all the happiness and I wanted it to continue I had 40-50 more photos that I loved and wanted to put in, but I didn't have time to put them in. I had maybe 30 to 45 sec of song left and I needed to finish it out. So I ended it with a few pictures of the dorms and them packing up, or unpacking I'm not sure which, and them sleeping in the car. Most of these pictures probably occurred before they actually got to New Orleans, but it makes it a good ending to see the campers exhausted after a long roller coaster of a week emotions. So I closed this video off with a few reminescent photos of worship and New Orleans and the last thing you see is the "Mission Camp 2009" logo.
Well, I hope you enjoyed this commentary of my video. If you made it all the way to the end don't forget to tell me. I hope you enjoyed the insight into the joys and struggles of making this video. =]