Mother's Day!

Hey everyone!

It's been awhile since I last posted!
Anyway, here's a quick update on what we did during our last meeting which fell on the day before Mother's Day.

I thought it would good to have a special activity this mother's day, and to make a simple floral arrangement as a gift for our mums. Sounds like a fun idea, right? It was, except that I didn't have much experience in arranging flowers! So.... as always, my Mum came to the rescue (yes, even on Mother's Day- shows how amazing she is)!

Before we started arranging the flowers, we had a discussion and sharing about our mothers and how we've been blessed by them. The five questions I posed to everyone was:

1. Name something you admire about your Mum
2. Name something that she does for you, which you are very grateful for
3. Recall one of your favourite memories with your Mum
4. Name a few foods that your Mum cooks, that you enjoy
5. Think of something good that you inherited from your Mum

Almost everyone had more than one answer for each question, so the sharing took longer than I anticipated, but it was great to hear each girl talk about their relationship with her mother. After that activity, we made cards to go with the floral arrangement, and wrote the answers to the five questions above in the cards.

Finally, it was time to put the flowers together!


My mum arranges flowers from time to time around our home and as gifts for others, and because she's naturally creative, she knows how to put things together to make them look pretty. :) She gave us all a short "lesson" on how to put together this arrangement.

(We got this arrangement idea from the Better Homes and Gardens website)


Floral arrangement isn't as easy as it looks, but I think everyone did their best, and each arrangement was unique and special!



Busy cutting stems and positioning flowers.


l-r: Jasmine and Phoebe's arrangements and cards.

l-r: Angelyn and Maelodee's arrangements and cards.
I didn't manage to get a picture of Dawn and Sharlene's arrangements. Sorry, girls!



Everyone showing their flowers-in-a-tin.

Hope all of you enjoyed the activity~!
I certainly had fun :)

Look forward to meeting all of you again for our next meeting this Saturday (23/5/09).

Meetings 8, 9 and 10: Truthfulness!

*The long awaited updated post!*

Read on to find out what we did in our previous three meetings....

Truthfulness

It's interesting to note that the first sin in earth's history was centered around truth and deception. Truth is one of the most important foundations in order to be a Bright Light and remain strong for God. There is much to learn about truth, and being truthful... I decided to divide the "Truthfulness" meeting into 3 lessons, so that we would be able to understand the different aspects truthfulness. Here's what we covered:

Meeting 8, 21st Feb, Part 1:

• Introduction to "Having Your Pitcher Full of Living Water"
• How Rebekah is a picture of the Bride of Christ (the church)
• Knowing and speaking the truth in your heart (Wrong thoughts vs. God's truth)
• Since starting the Bright Lights group in October last year, I have realized that almost all the girls share a common interest: reading. So I decided that we should have book club! Angelyn coined it's name- "Reading for a Reason", indicating that the purpose of the book club is to read books that will encourage us in our walk with God and to be Bright Lights for Him. Philippians 4:8 is the guideline for this book club. At the end of each meeting (during teatime), we will give reviews on the books and share lessons that we have learned.
  
• Books we have in our club include:

Hopefully we will be able to post some reviews on the blog as well. :)

Meeting 9, 14th March, Part 2:

• Quiet times, reading the Bible as the source of truth
• Ways to deceive
• Guarding against hypocrisy
  

Meeting 10, 28th March, Part 3:
We had a couple of activities during this "Wrap-up" meeting.

• Review on "Ways to deceive" (because a few girls did not come for previous meeting)- We passed around a hat with slips of paper with different ways to deceive and had each girl pick one, and define and explain how to avoid practicing it.
  
• The Battle of the Mind: The girls were given a scenario (e.g.: a close friend said something mean, and hurt you) and then were divided into two groups. One group had think of lies of the enemy that would enter the mind and cause you to do the wrong thing. The 2nd group had to look for God's truth (Bible verses) to support their principles and "right thoughts". After 7 minutes, we came together to present their "solutions" to the scenario, and each group had to defend their side.
  It became like a little debate, and we all had fun! I think this activity really helped us to see how subtle lies are, and how we need to really know our Bibles to be able to counter them.

The two groups hard at work, searching for truths, and thinking of possible lies.


List of "lies"


Phoebe and Debbie


Presenting their defenses to each other.

• We agreed that reading our Bibles daily is vital for keeping our "swords" sharp and ready. Most of us, however, find it difficult to read it consistently, so I challenged the girls to a 1 month long "read your Bible everyday" accountability project. The goal of this project is to keep each other accountable to daily devotions, and to share with each other what we are learning everyday. We made a blog where we can communicate with each other on this, you can check it out at: http://www.lightontomypath.blogspot.com. Praise God we've made it through Week 1, and are in Week 2 now! :)

Snacks and tea!
l-r: Dawn, Phoebe, Jasmine, Maelodee, Debbie, Peiching, Angelyn and me (Christine)

Meeting 7: Total Dedication to God (7/2/09)

Hi there, blog readers!

We have an announcement to make ....
*drumroll*

We have completed Set 1 of the Bright Lights materials!! :D

Our 7th meeting was on the 7th of February, and to celebrate it (as well as Chinese New Year :) ) we had a lunch get together with some of the parents. During the lunch my mum and I (Christine) had the opportunity to share with them a little bit more about the vision of Bright Lights as a discipleship group for girls. I'm really grateful for the enthusiasm and support the parents have given to our Bright Lights group - for all the driving to and fro, preparation of food, encouragement, prayers, etc...!



The Bright Lights group keeps going because of their support... so thank you, Mums and Dads!


Its amazing how God never fails to bring people for the BL meetings.
While Peiching and Sharlene couldn't make it on that Saturday, we had 2 new friends join us- April and Phoebe! (Well, we already knew Phoebe, but since she lives in Singapore, it was really nice to meet her again :-) )

During the meeting, we talked about how the previous lessons were like bricks which would be part of the foundation that we lay for our lives. Total dedication to God would be equivalent to cement, in that it holds everything together. While we may not always be able to be perfectly dedicated to God because of our human nature, it is important that we always desire to be totally committed to God. He has promised that His grace is made perfect in our weaknesses!

p/s. You may have noticed that we missed a post for Meeting 5 which was "Understanding the Fear of God".
I don't have pictures for that particular meeting because I accidentally deleted some of them, and lost the rest in my dad's laptop which isn't working at the moment. Hopefully the pictures in the laptop are safe.
If they are, I'll definitely post them after the laptop is repaired.