a tired but refreshing weekend

Last month, when Ollie Sebastian from Paradise emailed me and asked if I could play for him for an Assemblies of God Singapore worship conference, I said yes thinking in my heart that it'll never happen. But it actually did happen and what an awesome conference it was over the weekend. It was totally great to play with the Paradise folks again, really brought back memories of my 2 years in Paradise Community Church. Come to think of it, it's been exactly a year since I left Adelaide and what a great way to mark my 1 year being away by having a chance to play with Ollie, Anna and the gang. It certainly was a piece of Adelaide that came to me.

The Conference is named Saturate Conference and it's in its third installment. This year's theme was "UNDONE, reduced, ruined, REVIVED"

This year's conference featured Jared Ming as the main speaker and Paradise as the guest band. When I first heard the name Jared Ming I thought he was some unheard of chinese guy coming to speak. Turns out he's American and is quite a big name fella. He's the one that mentored people like Lincoln Brewster to the great song leader he is today. Jared Ming himself is an accomplished song leader in his own rights having recorded for a few albums with Vineyard Music. I was asked to be part of the support band to play for Jared as it is his style to start with some songs before he starts to preach. Playing for Jared was an experience of all kind in itself, his style of worship is totally of a different sort from all that I've experience. The minute he touches the keyboard, you can feel a sense of anointing falling into the auditorium. It was great playing old time gospel songs again.

Jared brought along his 12 year old daughter, Macie Ming and you sure can see that worship is flows in his family. He got his daughter to come and help him lead in some songs and she too carried that same anoiting the father had. This is really what i call leading with anoiting. When Macy sang "When I Think About His Love", tears just flowed down my eyes, as she sang you could just feel the love of God surround you. I was so touch that when the band had to come in I totally missed the queue because I've been so engulf in the love of God.

I went to this conference thinking I was just "part of the paradise band" and expecting nothing, but boy was I wrong. This is one conference I so glad that I went to and the opportunity God opened for me to be part of it.Initially, i have to admit that I was a bit reluctant to be part of the "Jared Ming band" because it called for extra practice and time was already so packed and I was also displeased that they didn't like asked me if i could play the organisers just said "Mark come for practice for Jared Ming...", I was honestly not happy with that sort of treatment and even Ollie asked me to stand my ground to them and not let them take advantage but something in me pushed me to do it anyway and now I am glad that I just kept quiet and went ahead because I was so bless. Playing with the Paradise band was great but playing for Jared Ming was WOW!!!! I can see now Lincoln Brewster became the song leader he is today because of such a great mentor. Jared is super encouraging even after the amount of mistakes I made for his set. He even asked if I could follow him for his Sunday engagement in another church but it was just too bad that I had already committed to following Ollie to another church service.

I have to admit that Singapore has a lot of talented musicians that I was wondering why did they ask a "cha pe lang" bassist like me to play for Jared when there was so many other better ones around. Almost everyone in the conference were accomplish musicians in their own rights, even the girls and boys who took care of the stalls selling CDs and food were accomplished musicians. It's really such sense of servant hood from everyone in the conference.

It was a tiring 3 days, everyday the day began at 7:30am and ended at 1:30am, but it was really spiritually refreshing. So happy that I had the change to attend and be part of such a great conference for free.