Some More Poetry

So last night, slightly ironically during a worship session and during a talk, I felt inspired and decided to write a couple of poems... and I thought I'd share them here. 

One World

How we take things...

All things, for granted.

We're here, sitting, living;

While there are others out there

Who struggle to put a roof above their heads.

We can sing hymns of praise freely to You

Without being persecuted.

Yet there are others out there who can't even

Pray to You out of fear of condemnation...

And being bruised, beaten and battered.

It's hypocritical that we live in a world

Overall praised for its liberal values, and freedom;

While there are those out there

Whose such values are not even respected.

Yet, Lord, I know and believe that You -

You, Lord - will call us one day to be part

Of Your world, Your one world.

You will not leave one soul behind,

Not one soul who has prayed, asked for forgiveness,

Or worshipped You,

Will be forgotten by You.

We will all be part of Your Paradise.

Till then, however, we're stuck here,

In this, our one world,

Shrouded in anything but the harmony that You possess.

And we'll continue taking all things for granted.

Yes, we will.

---------

Who Cares?

When you sit there, alone, desolate, hopeless -

The first thing that might come to mind is

Who cares?

You don't want to be a burden to society,

To your friends, to your parents, to everyone.

So yeah, you say and say again

Who cares?

When there's nothing to cling onto

And you believe there's no hope left,

Time and time again, you say

Who cares?

But lest do you know that there is someone

Right out there

Who does indeed care.

He's not a phone call away, nor a flight to

The next country away,

But He's there, right beside you,

Here, there, everywhere, tomorrow and today.

So before you say and ask who cares again,

Take the time to realise

That Jesus cares.

He will pick you up from the bottom of bottoms,

The pits of pits,

And restore you, just because He cares.

His unconditional love for us - Yes,

Jesus cares.

God Bless You all!

Matti

And that Time has come Again...

Please note that this blog might indeed not make sense. It isn't being written to do so. It's being written to vent, as a form of frustration, as a means of wanting to cry.

It's August 11. Tomorrow morning, as I'm waking up at 7.25, preparing for work, I should in reality be at the airport awaiting a flight to England. Indeed though, I'm not. It's that time of year where Soul Survivor is back upon us. It's that time of year where this website will nearly celebrate its one year anniversary - this blog was created post-SS so that I could relate to how pepped up and how charged with God's energy I came back from Shepton Mallet last year. Alas though, as I said, this year... it's just not to be.

And boy oh boy does the night before the majority of your friends going up to feeling that whole amazingness of God stink. Granted, not being with a lot of my friends for a week is something hard to cope with, but one that I'll get over as I'm that kind of person. I can live by myself, without any qualms. It's the fact that God's incredible power is felt so much at SS and that I won't be able to be part of it and feel it in the same manner that I did last year that is the real let down. At first, I was living with it, I was coping with it, I felt I could manage to conceal it in the same way that I conceal a lot of the other things that go on in my life. In a nutshell, I managed to tolerate it. At the pre-SS party, I was starting to get a bit nostalgic about it all, but still managing - perhaps admirably - to fend off any emotion. But now, I just can't any longer. Seriously. It's like I'm a time bomb that has just exploded.

But you know, there is a positive to all this. It really shows how much closer I've become to God over the last year or so. I don't think I would have ever even envisaged writing such a piece one and a half years ago, and yet, look at me today. I believe that this shows that I cannot do without being close to God; without God. And you know, this whole issue might just make me pray more over the course of the week and make me all the stronger by the end of it all.

So bye to all those going up tomorrow morning - Mark, Jeremy, Lanfranco, Mike, Matt, Bettina, Achie, Krissie, Becky, Nicola... all of you, insomma - and really place your energy and your prayers, especially for the first-timers, into getting further close to God. It's something that works and something that is seriously irreplaceable. And while you're there, pray that I don't melt in the sweltering heat that one of my buildings at work possesses because fuses randomly go off in the middle of the day, leaving the place devoid of electricity.

God Bless You all!
Matti

Community, in Every Sense of the Word

Good morning, everyone.

On the drive home last night, I realised that sometimes there is nothing better than having a one-to-one conversation with the sole passenger in your car. Which, naturally, I duly did when I took Ivan home after hanging out, yet again (though less successfully than last week, if you catch my drift!) at Surfside. Now, while generally our conversations border on the utterly ridiculous, mimicking one another over Concrete, Fluid Mechanics, Structures, Commercial Law and Administrative Law, among other crazy topics, this time we actually decided to talk serious. We decided to talk about the Pentecost Vigil that we had both attended at St. Paul's Bay earlier on in the evening.

We both agreed wholeheartedly that it was probably one of the most boring things that we had ever attended, as a community, in our lives. It isn't inaccurate to say that the Vigil was dragging in nature, more dragging than that that we expected, to be quite honest. The nature of the whole ceremony made many a person, ourselves included, incredibly impatient and frustrated. And it was the same kind of frustration that the general public would feel whenever Mourinho would give some sort of a speech, so that definitely wasn't good at all. We also both agreed that maybe we shouldn't have gone to the Vigil because of these reasons.

However, Ivan then brought up a very valid point. He said that at Y4J, we tend to put the fun into worshipping God, and that's a big reason why people continue to come back and worship, and subsequently build a relationship with God. Which is fine, naturally, because it's as if you're "killing two birds with one stone". After doing it for the first time, however, and getting used to it, it practically becomes easy to do this. He continued by saying that this can be fully contrasted to the ceremony that we just attended, which was drab, dragging and boring to say the least. Due to our popular notion of praising God in a 'cool way', we tend to forget that there are other ways of praising God and indeed being in His presence as well, such as this. The reality is that the Church, in Malta at least, isn't like Y4J or Community, with live worship to indeed help people feel God's presence, but is totally different and sticks to more traditional notions; notions which us, as youths and teenagers, seem to commonly forget. As a result, if we don't integrate ourselves into the Church, then we will simply remain a bubble extraneous to it, so maybe in that sense, we do need to change.

Continuing on the notion of the Church, I then commented that the Church in Malta however does not have a mentality worthy of the year 2009, but one that is 30 to 40 years in the past. There is no sense of modernisation or reform happening in the Church in order to keep up with the times, it is essentially just stuck in the times when Vatican II emerged, i.e. the times when John XXIII was Pope. Granted, this is a massive improvement from hearing Mass in Latin (God forbid!) and priests not facing the crowd when saying their homilies, to quote Ivan, but these are reforms that happened donkeys years ago now. Sometimes, I believe that the Mass, albeit extremely significant, is intangible and incommunicable with the current times. And unfortunately, such reform cannot simply start from the priests themselves, or from the people - although they must all play a part - but from the Pope. There seems to be a drastic need for a Vatican III to emerge; something which, however, both Ivan and I were of the belief that it might have happened under John Paul II, God bless his soul, but will definitely not happen under Benedict XVI.

The Church really has to be the ultimate meeting point for a community, in every sense of the word. At the moment, while it is trying to promote this notion, I believe that it is unfortunately failing at this and is actually driving away more people from the Church instead of drawing them towards this.

I hope you understood my points outlined above; I'm sorry if they're slightly incoherent but I needed to get this off my chest and placed in writing before I forget it upon waking up tomorrow morning and not even having time to blog due to studies.

God Bless You all!
Matti

Nous sommes Francais, et nous buvons trop ce soir.

What better way to spend your evening on a beach, with one too many guitars playing away, in the midst of exam time just before summer?

Well, post-Y4J, that's what we did last night. And while I was seeing both this and my pizza from Surfside, which cost me the best part of a tasteless €7.50, as slightly extra at around 11pm, I can now safely look back and say that you should have no regrets about what you do in life. Whether you sing to your heart's content, whether you die swimming with sharks, whether you kill someone in a car accident... ok, yes, maybe you should live to regret the latter. But you get my point, it turned out being one quite enjoyable night by the end of it all.

It's a pity that some people weren't there, as they missed the humorous bit of it all. After the majority left, to the extent that we were a group of around 12 people, we had an adoring audience looking down at us from the Tower Road promenade above. They were French. And while we initially thought that they would just peer and move on, like many other people did, these decided to come down and listen to us play and sing away. And poor Matt just had to get the worst bit of it all, with these three French women all looking on in awe at him. Poor chap, I actually pitied him - if they were somewhat attractive, I don't think I'd be writing in this manner, but calling him one lucky chap instead.

Well, naturally, for them not to be disappointed, and to be at least slightly courteous on our behalf, we tried seeing which songs we could either play or sing along to that they also knew about. In their alcohol-induced state. Obviously, what with the difference in cultures, finding common ground was about as common as finding a pothole in our roads. Two, three, possibly four songs later - we had exhausted our list and them seemingly theirs - we just resorted to playing our own thing, and went to worship songs. And this was after we played Mike's 'wildcard' song, James Blunt's "Beautiful", to them as well. Anyhow, while this makes us people - me excluded - dance sometimes out of the grace of God, this actually started to make some of them dance as if there were dancing to some form of tango. Weird.

The worst bit though was that the more we wanted them to leave - which they finally did, at around 1am - the more they actually stayed on (adoring Matt and staring at the stars in awe)! This, we could see, was interspersed with the occasional cigarette, drink, and piss further down the beach for a couple of this group. How touching. The cherry on the cake is when they finally left though, and they thought that we were performing for them, as they asked poor Mike now (yes, poor Mike) for his mobile number so that they find out when we would next be on the beach. (I'm sorry, I still can't resist the laughs right now!) Yes, of course, any number was taken down out of common courtesy, but I'm 150% sure that we aren't giving these people a call before our next "gig".

The motto of this story? "Nous sommes Francais, et nous buvons trop ce soir."

Au revoir, and God Bless You all!
Matti