We finally had our Home Fellowship (aka ‘The Pitstop’) today. I decided to talk about the topic ‘barriers’ and built it around a musical skit I saw on YouTube. Here’s the story:
A few days ago one of my friends Jebahar on Orkut had added a video on his profile. At the end of the video, a usual, YouTube showed related videos and a link to a video entitled “Everything by Lifehouse – a skit”. Curious, I opened it and waited patiently till it opened completely. The next 6 minutes blew my mind away and almost brought tears to my eyes. The skit with its simple message so powerfully portrayed touched me so much that I decided to use it at “The Pitstop”. I struggled to download the raw format of the video from youtube but failed to get it in the format I wanted. There were a couple of links to downloads of the original video but they were all corrupt or failed to download. After a day of trying I managed to get a WMV version of the skit and then converted it into the AVI format. I then hunted for a way to make it a VCD playable on my DVD/VCD player but realised I didn’t have any (Where’s my Nero??!!). Finally I decided to try out the AVI format as my DVD player claimed to be able to play it. After a nervous 5 minutes of burning I popped it into my DVD player and there it was …. playing on my TV!! Success?? Not exactly – the picture quality was poor and a few portions of the skit were too fuzzy. I had another version of the skit but the choreography was not as good.
Not willing to give up I looked again and then saw a link to a WMV version of it with better resolution – a file of 60 MB. I downloaded it from the site only to find that downloading it somehow corrupted the file and the download stopped halfway. I usually use an online convertor for files and when I went to media-convert.com I saw it gave an option to convert the file directly from the source URL. I tried it and got an error after 10 minutes. I persevered and finally after watching the screen intently for 10 minutes there it was – 60 MB of the AVI file ready to download! Now the next obstacle – 60 MB takes me at least 5 hours to download on my internet connection!! I decided to download it and leave the comp on, go to work and then come back. Not too complicated eh? Except that when the download started the file was racing at a speed 20 times the normal!! I realised that my ISP was testing a new feature for a few hours that allowed me a 2MBPS connection and that meant 60 MB was done in 15 minutes! I nervously burnt it and soon – a crystal clear video playing on my TV.
Now tell me – how on earth could technology become my slave exactly when I needed it? God not only controls the storms in the seas but also the data over the internet I guess!
Today I showed the video at the Pitstop – only Juliet and Ben turned up but it was a blessing to all of us.
You can see the video of the Lifehouse: Everything ; a skit here.
The points I brought out in my talk after that were these:
1. The video shows the girl dancing with Jesus and then while dancing subtly switching partners with another guy even without realising. Many times in life the first step to a sin almost seamlessly integrates with our life and we dont realise we are drifting.
2. The skit shows that each of the five sins portrayed puts one barrier between Jesus and the girl and suddenly the girl finds herself very far from Jesus and facing a barrier five times bigger! In life every little sin and temptation can take us a little away from Christ everytime and before we know it we are really far away. Does this happen to you or do you know someone you know who is slipping away?
3. The girl gets attracted by fashion and then falls into sin. Looking good or beautiful is by itself not a sin. Its when you get obsessed with it and fall into traps surrounding it that you sin. Many things in the world today may not seem sin – TV, movies, internet, work, money etc. But when these capture all your attention and effort you lose sight of God!
4. Throughout the skit when the girl is separated from Jesus, He is waving to her and asking her to come back. Even when you stray God is speaking to you and trying to get your attention so that you can come back to Him. Watch out everyday for these signals and shouts from God!
5. Only when the Girl looks back at Jesus and then tries to run back to Him does he actually come in and break the barrier. God is waiting for you to simply look at Him and want to come back to Him. He will do the rest. We can never break the barrier ourselves!
6. Even though the girl had sinned so much Christ still gave her the biggest hug! Yup – we’re never too guilty of sin that Christ will not accept us! He is just longing to hold us in His arms again!
I’ve just briefly mentioned what I spoke about. I hope the video and this blog entry blessed you! God loves you….. just as you are! Have a blessed day.
