COSB

COSB is a local independent charismatic church.

But till recently, I never wondered what "local" means.

The first answer that comes to mind means a church that serves a body of believers in a certain locality.

Which made sense until I thought, "what on earth is Syl Vyn and Pastor Mark doing in Church of Singapore BALESTIER"! Isn't it a little.. out of the way? =p

I propose another idea to myself, which made more sense.

Local is used in distinction of Catholic (or Universal) Church. That is, there is the Universal Church, which all believers are part of. This is the church that Jesus was referring to when he talks about "On this rock will I build my Church". It is also this church that Paul was talking about when he talks about "One Body".

But there are also churches of particular locality, a church that serves not all believers, but some believers, in distinction with other churches. Which is why Paul writes to the church in Rome, the church in Philipi, and so on. And also why Jesus wrote to the 7 churches in the book of Revelation. 7 churches. Distinct churches. Or in a sense, local churches. Run by their own people.

So, just perhaps, this is what the "local" refers to



Lol. Don't know if that is the true reason though =p This is pure guess work =p

Reading Habits..

Stolen from Wan Ru, who allergely stole it from Audrey =p

The BBC allegedly believes most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here.

How do your reading habits stack up? Bold those books you've read in their entirety, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish. Abridged versions count as well in this case =p

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien (Quite a challenge, the thick thick trilogy)
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee (Loved it when I read it, but can't remember much of it now..)
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell (Never got round to finding this book)
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell (Also never got round to finding this)
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams (And this too)
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll (Not memorable either..)
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis (Oh man.. what do you think? Narnia fan! =p)
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell (Its good)
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown (Controversial, but a good read)
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley (Also never got round to finding this)
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett (I liked this!)
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens (I think I read this, but can't really remember)
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White (My sis has this book, its her lit text I think, but I never got round to reading it..)
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom (Read this in Taiwan, stole it from my friend for a few hours, and finished it there and then. But in my opinion, it was a little of a disappointment..)
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton (Oh man.. Enid Blyton is my childhood author!)
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery (Liked it!)
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl (I love Roald Dahl! Pity he writes so few books..)
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

21 total.. Hmmm.. I don't seem to have any that I started but never completed though.. Then again, some of them are cheats, because I read the much simplier version =p

Rhythm

The rhythm feels wrong.. I somewhat feel out of sync.. I don't mean with people, but rather, with everything else..

30th Anniversary

Happy 30th Birthday COSB! And if I may say, it was wonderful to see the entire history of COSB in a video!

PS: My respect for projectionists had just increased threefolds.. Thank you all of you!!

PPS: Welcome back all the old friends too!!

Shake

If even the Heavens are shaken.. Really, what can remain?

Tell the World..

Today, during worship / communion, I was actually also thinking about the pre-believers. I was thinking about Real Pleasures and the pseudo ones (see previous posts for explanation), and how they might pass over the Real one for the Shadows.. I was also thinking about an illustration from Narnia, The Last Battle. In that scene, the dwarfs were inside the stable, as well as the children and Aslan. The children could see the expansive Hills and sunlight and everything. It was a beautiful place. But the Dwarfs in their insistence not to be taken in could only see what was normally in a stable, the grass, darkness, hay... Aslan provided them with a feast. But again, they were unable to taste the rich wine and meat, only tasting water and hay..

Isn't it sad? There are just so much richness, but people can't see it, can't taste it, can't feel it! The entire sorrow of hell can probably be contained in a grain of sand in heaven! Yet so many are forever stuck within that grain of sand even on earth..

Dear Friends, there must be so much more than these.. There is so much more than this... Come to the Father, though your gift is small..

Vision

I think that the vision to excel beyond all odds as one family is too small a vision.

Seriously

My own aim is not to excel, but to win over people's Heart. Not heart as in emotions, but the innermost part of being that we are made up of. Today's world might like to call it the soul more than the heart.

Do that, and you may or may not in the end achieve the vision to excel. But it is sure more lasting.

Happy weekend!

greetings beloved!

hope you enjoyed yourselves over the weekend! i think it was great that AWTY had almost full attendance! well done!

it's great that we continue to give our full support and encouragement to whatever event that is organised by church.

hopefully we will have more opportunities to invite friends and more chances for them to hear more about our Saviour King!

keep sowing seeds into the lives of the people around you, keep praying for God's blessing to be upon your classmates, friends, camp mates!

pray even for your sch - that more will come to know Christ; for your camps - that Christians there be willing to set an example; for your workplace - that God's way prevail and not man's way!

Be blessed! because that's what you are in Christ Jesus! GREATLY BLESSED & HIGHLY FAVOURED!

Random

Welcome to all who started / resumed posting =p

Sigh, sent off another of my friend last Friday. I suspect next year would have a couple more..

I wonder how people live overseas for such a long period of time. I won't want to be apart from everything that is familiar..

That aside, Field camp is over :) It was a strangely exhausting one, even on our part. The weather was excellent though :)

My diary is a little neglected this week though..

Random rambling =p

By the way, C.S. Lewis Rocks to the max! You know right, I had already read The Screwtape Letters for so so many times already, but each time I read it, either new insights hit me, or old insights that I had forgotten, or things which I had not fully understood hits me.. Love it man..

Here is a short extract about Real Pleasure and Substitute Pleasure. The perspective is from that of a senior demon advising his Nephew how to go about tempting a person.

"... you were trying to damn your patient by the World, that is by palming off vanity, bustle, irony and expensive tedium as pleasures. How can you have failed to see that a real pleasure was the last thing you ought to have let him meet? Didn't you forsee that it would just kill by contrast all the trumpery which you have been so laboriously teaching him to value? And that the sort of pleasure which the book and the walk gave him was the most dangerous of all?"

Hmmm.. I realised that it has some more difficult words.. But no worries, just let it flow over you like music or water, and it will be fine ;)

Just a pity he didn't write even more books =p

I've never posted a post in this blog so here I am since I'm having my holidays!(:
Apparently, I'm have a love-hate relationship with my precious holidays.

Because my holiday has fallen on the months when most people would be busy studying/working, I feel bored and lonely....it seems so hard to get someone to just chill with me in the afternoons...but but but, I have tons of things to do, and they are rather important things like preparing for my FYP [My team and I are going to culture coral reefs in an artificial environment, so I should be getting on to do sufficient research], getting my laptop fixed[apparently, I'm lazy lazy lazy to find my warranty card and travel down to funan to fix my baby]..etc.

But OH I enjoy my holidays because I'm given the chance to do the things I wanna do.
So, it's good.

Please remind me not to waste my time away!
If not...........I'm doomed.(:

Many more fulfilling days to everyone!

Love,
Rochelle.