Hillsongs 2010: Day One

Since I had the good sense to *not* write these blogs every day every night after every full day of conference, I'm going to write these things based on my notes, day per day. I took these notes continually during the day, so the sense of time is continually present. Here goes.

Day 1, 5/7/10

Empty station, sterile, cold, underground tunnels. Fifteen minutes after I landed on this city, the metropole hides. It's 10 degrees here, the screen says, but it feels much warmer than the 12 degrees back home. Nevertheless, it's good public transport.

It's Monday morning. Tired faces are everywhere, breaking out through their owners' attempts to hide, making them look even more tired. The buildings stand tall, somber grey, tidy, imposing, and arrogant. So depressing, so metropolis, accurate commentary and fitting company for the countless faces crawling beneath them, slaving away for their financial masters, imprisoned by their own prisons, their own inability to choose a different life for themselves. They could live cheaper elsewhere, this town is expensive to live in. But they're bound here by the invisible threads tying up their hearts, binding their soul to this city.

Sydney is like an old game. I know the story by heart, I know the bosses, mini-bosses, and and I know where the save points are. Yet, everytime I come back here I find something new. This place changes like crazy. I also change, and that makes all the difference in perception.

First thing I ate: Krispy Kreme
Then: Max Brenner

Waste no time. Wanderlust has no patience.

The tall buildings of yesteryear are no longer as impressive as I remember them to be. The giants did not fall. The grasshopper just grew up a bit. Some giants still impressed me mightily though.

Darling Harbour have changed immensely. Pictures can't do it justice. The bridge I spent hours meditating on is still impressive. This place have really turned into an event central now.

My feet are hurting. My muscles and legs are fine, only my feet are hurting like crazy. I got to the hotel nearly 9am, but check-in was 2pm. After nearly four hours of walking around, my feet are just about to kill me. I should've spared two days of doing completely nothing here. This city is amazing. It's depressing, yes, but it's amazingly depressing.

The train is an honest machine. Beyond the business-like CBD, the in-between places showed a depressing scene. Desolate graffittied walls, abandoned buildings, rubbles all over the place. Cost or result of development, we'll never know. To the average slave that dwells here, this face is probably the daily reality.

This year's conference opening is not something that I can describe. But it is something I'll remember for a long time. All musical instruments, they're not tuned to each other. There are hundreds of keys in a piano, none of them are tuned to each other. They are all tuned to the one scale fork. When I heard that, I knew this year would be special. Rather than thinking long and hard how to get along with this guy, how to work together better with that girl, how to make a team work, how to run this or that gig better etc, I should just tune in to the Fork. If the whole team tune to the same Fork, we would all be tuned just fine to each other.

The thing with momentum is, one way to lose it is by forgetting why you're moving on the first place. When you get so lost in the process that you forget what this whole mess is for, it's easy to burn out and stop. Even when you're moving fast, there is grace to momentum. Things happen when you're moving forward, some of which have nothing to do with you. Copying others doesn't work, because everybody's different and facing different situations. I have to live my own momentum, my own motions, adapting to my own problems. But I think the best news is that just because you've lost it doesn't mean you can't get it back. The force of momentum is measured by how much it takes to stop you. So the more opposition I get, the bigger the momentum. Just because you're doing everything right doesn't mean nothing bad will happen to you. Stuff happens to good people and bad people alike.

This all started with Steve's "Don't avoid the hard stuffs" from the week before. I'm sure he didn't know what Brian Houston was gonna preach on that opening evening. The puzzle is falling together here.