Antipolo, Birthday, and Church

Went with a few others to a restaurant near Antipolo today. The buffet was excellent, but the company was better. I think it's very good to find people to connect with, especially colleagues, in a new and unfamiliar environment such as this. Turns out the celebration was not only, as stated, for one of the people there getting into a Ph.D. program (congratulations Sam) but also for my birthday.

This is the second birthday I've had outside of the United States. The first one was my fifth, observed in Rio de Janiero when my family was vacationing there and my parents were connecting with their Brazilian counterparts in a foreign-exchange program they used to run. My only clear memory of that experience is seeing an episode of The Bionic Woman (dubbed into Portugeuese) which I had seen in the States just a few weeks prior (in English, of course). Anyway, 5 and 34 were out of the USA, but that's pretty much the end of the connection, because the occasion which made possible celebrating 34 outside the USA was of my own volition (answering the call of God and the church) and I haven't seen an episode of the original Bionic Woman series in so long that, while I would recognize it if I saw one, it would not register with me as having any kind of special connection. Besides, the TV shows coming from America, for what few I've seen, are left in English. They don't bother overdubbing them into Tagalog or Cebuano or any of the other zillion languages spoken in the archipelago.

I was also going to upload some pictures of my first experiences in Nazarene churches in the Phililppines, but of course I left my camera at home across campus. No matter. There is plenty of time. One thing that was really neat--we were at Miracle Church of the Nazarene in Angono (next town to the south from Taytay). The rains from Typhoon Feng-Suen were still beating down hard (including a waterfall-like stream coming from a leak in the roof). We were singing "Here I Am to Worship." We had just gotten through the bridge ("I'll never know how much it cost / to see my sin upon that Cross!") when the power went out. It was just like it was intentional. The music leader kept on singing, leading us more slowly through the main chorus of the song:

Here I am to worship.
Here I am to bow down.
Here I am to say that you're my God.
You're altogether lovely,
altogether worthy,
altogether wonderful to me.

And then as the pastor was praying, the lights came back on just as dramatically as they had gone out. It was a neat experience of worship. That's about it for this post.