Brianfest Day 3

Eran was back from the dead, which was great! James made this comment on his blog about my drumming, "Mark did a perfect job by playing well while making us miss our regular drummer." Is that actually a compliment? Not sure!! The services were great this morning, and Asha absolutely nailed the female vocal lead on "Come now is the time to worship". It was just as if Kathryn Scott was in the room.

Brian shared some thoughts from the 23rd Psalm, and really got me thinking about change and transition. He was speaking about how a shepherd moves the sheep on to new pastures. It's the shepherd's job to discern when a field is about to become over-grazed, and then he must find a new place for the sheep to eat. The problem is that sheep don't like change - they'd much rather stay put, and risk dying of starvation than moving on, and the journey to the new pasture can be through some dangerous territory.

The band stuck around for the first half of our Africa Live service and then we went up to Murray's house for some food. I had to run over to the park a couple of times to meet people and show them where to put things for the concert, such as the stage :-) and then we packed Terry and James and Peter into the metro for a trip to the Khan el Khalili (the biggest souq/bazaar in the Middle East) while the other guys chilled out at home.

Felicity and I went to the farewell party for some good friends, Don and Mary Butler. Don was the chair of our church council, and has a great tenor voice - we'll really miss him on the worship teams, and we'll really miss them as friends too. He was the CEO of General Motors here and has been whisked back to Detroit to fix something important.

At about 9:30 I went over to the field again and stuff was beginning to arrive. No stage yet though. We kept waiting, and by 10:30 it still hadn't turned up. We got a call to say it was held up at the police checkpoint on the edge of Maadi because the driver didn't have the correct permit. We had some people working on it, liaising with the police and the national security. In the end, I had to go down to the police station in person and smile at and shake hands with an officer before any wheels were set in motion. It did the trick though, and ten minutes later the stage had arrived. Well, actually, a huge pile of wood arrived.

Within an hour they had most of it nailed together, and when I left at 1:20am most of the sound and light equipment had also arrived and was unloaded.