Highlights of seminar week

Last week was our last seminar week, thank God. No more studying after this. For good. What a relief. Most of the stuff they taught us in classes I already knew, thanks to Taylor University's well-rounded secular + Christian education, so I was rather bored in class, to say the least. But I did enjoy several sessions, like the ones on pop culture, sex & sexuality (I always think it's wonderfully entertaining to hear Christians speak on this topic, because they blush and fidget and twiddle their thumbs and try to avoid the entire topic they're talking about - but this pastor who spoke to us was bold and unashamed and interesting to listen to), forgiveness, breaking free, and special skills.

But more on those sessions later.

We had the '80s dance birthday party one evening, and the next we had a Girls' Night/Boys' Night. The guys played Wii Sports and ate ice cream - typical guy stuff. The Girls' Night was great fun because the training team prepared everything and totally surprised us. They decorated the conference room and made it into a beauty spa with different stations - hair curlers + straighteners, nail polish, foot massages, face masks (complete with cucumbers for eyes, which are annoyingly slippery), comfort food, and body massages. It was a wonderful pampering session, and we all totally bonded over serving each other, since we were not allowed to do anything ourselves. It was so nice just to sit and relax for a few hours and talk about girl stuff.

My red pomegranate mask makes me look sunburnt.


We got to go visit a mosque in Birmingham, and the person there gave us a tour of the place, complete with lots of information and answers to our questions. I tried to listen, but I couldn't really, because it was freezing cold inside, and I thought the guy wasn't being very honest with his answers - perhaps trying to only show us the 'good' side of his religion and cover up everything else in a typical British polite fashion. Plus I wasn't very happy about the whole 'men get the huge and nicely decorated hall while women get the ugly dim room upstairs to pray'. Oh and we had to cover up every bit of skin (except our eyes), which was a little annoying, and I got to experience a tiny bit of how the women must feel - inferior.

Everyone was tired and sleeping in the van on the way there.

We did presentations on our Empty Tomb project, where we talked about evidence for Jesus' resurrection and gave counter arguments for stupid theories such as the swoon theory that said Jesus didn't die, He simply fainted and woke up again in the tomb. It wasn't anything I didn't know before, but it was cool how different groups came up with different creative ideas for their 'documentary' on the truth of Jesus' resurrection. For my team, I naturally volunteered to write the script because I had experience with film making. Other teams had ideas like using a grandmother to tell kids the story, or using famous actors to act out the story... stuff like that.

For our special skills session, we learned first how to do magic tricks, which wasn't very helpful for me because I forget how to do the tricks 5 minutes after learning them. Then we moved on to clowning, where we got to act like fools and exaggerate our every movement. It was so hard because I'm obviously not naturally a crazy outrageous person, but it was fun seeing everyone else behave ridiculously. After that, we learned how to do mime, and we did a dance mime to this really beautiful song. The motions of the mime were so in tune with the words that I was so touched just doing it.

So it was a pretty good seminar week; very tiring, but fulfilling as well.