:Thursday Challenge - Trees

 THURSDAY CHALLENGE

"TREES" (Saplings, Gnarly Trees, Snow Covered, Bonsai, Dead Tree, Shade Tree,...)

This is a shot from our venue in our December camp meeting, a prayer garden and a conference site.  Such a lovely place of grass, trees and flowers.  A real prayer garden where serenity of the place invites meditation and prayers (as the name implies) Here we held our 4-day camp meeting fellowship and we had a very fulfilling fellowship.  We usually travel far from our place to attend our church camp meeting but first time we had it near our town in the hilly areas in Antipolo.  We'll be there again this summer for our camp meeting again.

For more of 'Trees' themed photos just click the badge above!

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Looking Forward to Sundays

I’m working a bit faster as I don’t want to sleep late. Tomorrow is our fellowship day and I want to sleep for long hours so I’ll be refreshed and full of life tomorrow. I want to offer thanks to God for giving me bountiful blessings these past few days. I’m always looking forward to Sundays because aside from being our church service day I get to be with the whole of my family with my kids, hubby, sister and MIL.

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Summer Camp Day 2–Our Last Day

Day 2 brought us more blessings spiritually starting from day dawn service at 5am among the ministers. They successfully held ‘Disciples Prayers’ which made them all feel very close to each other and to God. We all know that the distance to God is just a prayer away so prayer is really that powerful. All burdens unloaded, personal problems solved and worries gone. They prayed for the whole church and for each other’s ministry.

Morning service was flooded by testimonies from youth, elders, ministers and mothers like me. Some brought tears and most brought more encouragement to trust our life to God. I had my own testimony that happened just before the service.

Pastor asked to go to Mrs. Dominga to give the full payment for the hall that we rented. Before I even approached her she was smiling to me as she excitedly told me that it’s their first time to have 4 customers all at the same time who are all born-again Christians. She even asked me if I promoted her place to my website because there’s one customer that told her that he found the place in a website and been encouraged to rent it for fellowship service. Glad my sis Redge and my site were able to help her in our own way but the truth is God has helped them because her villa has been used as fellowship place to glorify His name.

We felt that two days fellowship service is kinda short for us. After the afternoon service we felt like we should have made this a 3-day affair and planned to make it longer next time. We’ve made reservations for December 2009 camp meeting fellowship and we’ll make sure it will be a longer period of camp meeting fellowship. We arrived home safe and very blessed. God is so good….

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Summer Camp Day1 – Communion and Feet Washing

After the morning and afternoon service we had our communion followed by feet washing. Ed led the first part of the service continued by the relevant message from our Pastor discussing vital importance of having communion and what the Christians would do before entering communion. That is – we should finish all misunderstandings with your loved ones and friends. We should have a light heart devoid of ill-feeling, hatred, worries and other thoughts and things that would make our heart heavy with burdens.

Feet washing on the other hand displays the person’s humility as washing your brethren’s feet and praying for each other can only be done if you have a humble heart.

We felt God’s presence during that special service and everyone felt renewed and light-hearted.

Bonfire and grilling barbeque followed after.

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Summer Camp Day 1

This is a late post but a very memorable activity that I don't want to miss having it in my site.

We had a perfect God-given time on our summer camp fellowship in Indang, Cavite last April 9 & 10. We held it again in Mrs. Dominga's Villa Dominga Forest Resort where fruit bearing trees and beautiful flowers surround the very spacious villa. This time the place has more flowers which are in full bloom especially the sunflowers which are just sprawled wildly beside the rows of banana trees. I reminded myself that it's summer and next month is the flower month so that explains the beautiful blooms around us.

First day was a bit busy as we have to arrange everything we have from the trunk of the car to the hall where we're supposed to stay. Tents were happily assembled by the youth and even children, my kids excitedly assembled their own :-). The ministers and the elders took charge of the pulpit and the conference hall arrangement, the most important area of our camp fellowship. Each of us has our own assignment and we did every little preparations and arrangement before 9am to get ready for our first morning service.

Morning and afternoon services were full of praising and encouraging messages, each minister assigned as exhorter or preacher has his own way of delivering prepared teaching and preaching. Our brethren have a lot of testimonies on how they tried to save money for this camp meeting, some on their trials in life before they become a Christian and now that they're serving the Lord. You can see the tears of happiness on their faces as they testify and thank God for never-ending guidance and blessing.

We had our bonfire after dinner, had some sharing and grilled chicken barbeque. I slept earlier because I want to wake up early for tomorrow's service.

Here are some pics, will post other activities on my Summer Camp Communion and Summer Camp Day 2.

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Sleeping On Tents!

Our church is always spending December holiday season and holy week on far-away camp sites far from the bustling metropolis. There we will put up tents and do our cooking on portable gas stove and some on charcoal. We usually have fellowship for three days and we bring clothing and food stock for the whole period because markets and groceries are usually very far from our chosen sites. As mommy to 3 kids I learned the technique of packing necessary things for the camp meetings because if you’re not that organized you might miss some essential things.

Camp meetings are the occasions that we really look forward to and we planned everything months before the fellowship. We’ve rented many places on our camp meetings, we’ve gone to DInalupihan Nature Center in Bataan, there’s one occasion that we’ve had it in Florida Pampanga, when I was a new baptized Christian in early 90’s I remembered our camp meeting in Rain Forest in Pasig City (not so far from us) and in Jabez camp site in Cavite.

Here’s one beautiful site that we’ve first experience sleeping on tents, it was a memorable experience for all of us so I’m sharing this to you. It was on Cerca, Brgy. Banaba, Indang,Cavite a place near Tagaytay City, a 2 hectare camping site full of fruit-bearing trees.

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