Taiwan Missionary Fellowship Ladies' Retreat '07

This past weekend I went to the TMF Ladies' Retreat here in Taipei. TMF is made up of all the missionaries on the island, not just the Team Expansion people so it's a fun time to catch up with some of the ladies that we don't normally see. As I mentioned earlier in another post I was the worship leader for the weekend. My coworkers Alicia (in the picture to the left) and Cherry (at the piano) agreed to help out. I was pretty excited about the opportunity to lead at the ladies retreat because all those ladies (whether married or single) are ready to get out of the house for the weekend and have a good time! It's a pretty easy crowd because they come ready to sing and worship God so pretty much all you need to do is stand up and sing!

Well, even though I wasn't too worried about leading and felt that we were prepared I still had a little nervous energy on Thursday night. When I get a little nervous I have a tendency to get silly so I was trying to breathe and focus on the reason I was there. One song that I was really excited about teaching the ladies is called "At the foot of the cross". It's an amazing song. The chorus goes like this:

"Now I can trade these ashes in for beauty, and wear forgiveness like a crown. Coming to kiss the feet of mercy I lay every burden down at the foot of the cross."

I included the above picture because it was taken about 5 seconds before all my calm and focus almost came crashing down around me. I think it was the second time through the chorus when Alicia accidentally sang "coming to taste the feet of mercy" instead of "kiss the feet of mercy". I simultaneously had an image of someone licking a pair of feet enter my head and a huge bubble of laughter expand in my chest. My cheeks were shaking because my mouth was trying to laugh and the rest of my face was saying "NO!!! hold it together!!". I could hardly sing because my voice was shaking so badly from suppressed laughter. I was praying so hard that I could stop laughing, I even tried picturing sad things like Jesus dying on the cross. Finally I got it under control a little bit but every time I would even see Alicia out of the corner of my eye that bubble of laughter would come back. Finally I got it together and we finished the song. But the funniest thing is that we did the song again on the last day and Alicia sang it wrong again! This time she started laughing and I was just too tired at that point to fight it. I just put my arm around Alicia and we stood there laughing together for a moment. Alicia let the ladies in on the joke by saying "Make sure you don't sing 'taste the feet of mercy' like I did!" And we all had a good laugh together. It was a nice moment. I think God was there laughing with us, and possibly at us...

Below is a picture of a game we played later that night. Each group got an interesting food item from Taiwan and a well known song and had to come up with a commercial about the item using the song. My group had asparagus juice--yes it's almost as nasty as it sounds-- and "He's got the whole world in His hands" in this picture we are singing "He's got the big and little asparagus in His hands, He's got the big and little asparagus in His hands....He's got the whole asparagus in his hands."



And here is a picture with my lovely co-workers. From left to right are Karen Thompson (my teammate), Cherry Messimer, ME, Alicia Edwards, Brenda Atkin (who works down in Taichung) Angie Pagel, and her sister Cindy Dagnan--who was our speaker for the weekend. Two of our coworkers, Molly Bell and Cheryl Dunn weren't able to be there. I love these ladies so much and am so blessed to work with all of them! By the way, Cherry and her sister Molly made the cool banners on the side.