This year I went back to my roots, by passing Toowoomba and the Australian Gospel Music Festival and instead heading up Tamborine Mt for the Easter Keswick Convention.
Keswick’s ‘Convention Statement’ is “ALL ONE IN CHRIST JESUS” – and this weekend I really felt we lived up to that, it was the best time I’ve had in a long time socially, as well as some awesome teaching from two great preachers.
Eis Van Dijk from Austria (originally Dutch though) and Ray Andrews from Coffs Harbour (originally Irish) were the speakers. Simply – they were awesome! The messages were focused on Jesus, wanting to be part of our world, Easter was a great backdrop to these messages for the obvious reason of it being the time when he did actually become part of our world physically and totally change it forever!
Eis and Ray never compared notes, they’d come from opposite sides of the earth, yet their messages followed on from each others like a single sermon series – it was truly amazing, and God inspired! I think Ray missed his calling as a stand up comedian, because he had us all rolling off our seats in fits of laughter – his mannerisms, quick whit and funny accent (Irish :-p) were enough to make everyone in the meetings laugh till they cried. Eis was a funny bloke too – and the routine of them paying each other out became a bit of a highlight of the weekend.
To be honest my most enjoyable moments of the camp weren’t the speaking (though it was great), but just a real chance to catch up with a heap of people I don’t usually spend a lot of time with, and meeting a whole heap of new people. I didn’t go to bed before midnight all weekend – we stayed up singing bad 80’s songs and playing guitar, or playing Monopoly – or on the last night sitting up at the Beacon and being a part of the greatest prank I’ve ever seen!!!
A group of us had decided to go up to the Beacon (a lookout off over the inland plains of the Gold Coast and Beenleigh), a mate got there a little before myself and another guy – he was able to make the most awful animal in pain sort of noise I’ve ever heard. He had David and I for a moment before he showed himself and we had a good laugh – then we heard the group of girls coming along so decided to try the prank again on them. It worked a treat – mainly because of Grant’s commitment to the prank he stayed in the bush for over an hour, throwing his voice to sound further away and spending about 30 minutes in silence to make the girls think the ‘scary animal’ had gone away.
It all ended with a loud cry, rustling leaves and Grant running out towards us… and 4 terrified girls running up the road in panic. 20 minutes later these girls still had the shakes and Grant, David and I still had the giggles. It was AWESOME!
Anyway that aside – lots of fun was had, we led the youth in a Songs of Praise chorus night with old Sunday School favourites like "Father Abraham”, “Be Bold”, “Blind Man” and some other golden oldies – as well as some modern choruses like “My Redeemer Lives”.
Nothing like those old time praise songs though, sitting round singing those with a whole heap of old and new friends was better than any of the music AGMF could have offered me :-)
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