Guidepost - Evening 4

Tonight was incredibly thought provoking and so poignant.

I headed with Milly and Mylie, who had been around my house during the time between the day and the night, to the evening activity which we had been told would be a usual speaker and then a performance by the Rise theatre company.

We got there and hung around for a while, we had been told to get there too early but it didn't matter because there was a group of us. We decided to have a little photoshoot because the evening setting sun was working for us and creating good lighting. However every time we tried to take a picture of someone, someone else would photobomb it, making some incredible and hilarious shots. My favourite is when two girls were doing the titanic pose, so I decided to be the boat and Milly was the waves crashing against the boat. Mylie then assumed the position of the iceberg, and the genuine look of fear on her face when we all ran at her is quite priceless!

We then headed into the main tent and heard from the speaker that evening, who was another local priest who had been drafted in to talk to us. He said that he always thought that he was a bad Christian because he wasn't very good at reading the bible and he was quite ashamed of this. But then he learnt that you can be a Christian and still be you, in fact that is exactly what God wants. He doesn't want you to change yourself completely to be a Christian, he just wants you to be the best version of yourself when you are a Christian. I thought that this was quite an interesting way of looking at it.

The Rise theatre group then took to the stage, and they were absolutely amazing. The started by performing a 15 minute sketch called The Carpenter, and this was my personal favourite of the evening. It's quite hard to explain, but basically they had this huge backdrop of white paper and some buckets and trays of paint all around. These two characters who had all sinned a lot were invited there and when 'the carpenter' (aka Jesus) tried to help them, they pushed him away. In the end they kept pushing him away, until he was against the white backdrop and they painted a cross around him. Then, when Jesus was resurrected, he came to them and washed their hands and feet to show that he had taken their sin and forgiven them, and then together they got some more paint and turned the painting of the cross into a large painting of a tree. I thought that this was just incredible, and I loved the way that it was done, with hardly any dialogue, just music, movement and paint. It also showed the message really clearly - Jesus died so that we could have a new life, be forgiven and have a rebirth.

The next thing they did was one of the actors came out and gave us a short talk about him and his faith, and how and why he became a Christian and when it has helped him.

One of the other actors then came out and played her guitar and sang a song that she had written called Echo, and it was just completely beautiful and lovely to listen to.

Last of all, they performed one slightly shorter sketch called To-do List, which is about us, in todays society, seeing all of those terrible things happening all over the world and not doing anything about it. It was based on the mustard seed theory, that a small change or a tiny bit of help can do a lot of difference, the way the smallest seed can grow into the largest tree. Again, there was absolutely no dialogue, it was just done with music and a PowerPoint presentation.

If you ever get to see Rise theatre, I would strongly recommend that you do because they are an absolutely fabulous Christian theatre company who are all immensely talented and I have seen them a couple of times now, and I just think they are amazing with the messages they send and the way they do it.