Aaron Vocals

Yes yes yes, it has been a while since I was doing this but I have had such a busy few months.  Our church offices have relocated to our recently completely renovated property in Edmonton, North London.  This is the place where I work as Office Manager now and even though its a pain to get to (takes about 45 minutes on a good day), the offices are beautiful and plush and all IKEA'd out to the max and so are a pleasure to work in.  I will post a blog next week with some pictures of it, I'm not there today so can't do it right now.

So what has been happening over the last few months you ask?  Well quite a lot really.  I went to Guadeloupe in June which was amazing.  It was with London Community Gospel Choir and was a bit of an adventure.  We had to fly to Charles de Gaulle (CDG) in paris and then transfer to Orly airport on the other side of Paris to catch our flight to Guadeloupe (which is in the Caribbean).  When we arrived at CDG we had to get a transfer bus.  The traffic was so bad that we ended up missing our flight to the beautiful Caribbean and Air France drove us to a hotel and put us up for one night.  Then the next day we went back to Orly airport to catch the flight.  We were so knackered when we arrived in Guadeloupe and we had missed a day which meant we were now there for only 3 days.  Well we made the most of it.  The sun was shining, we stayed in a hotel on the beach with all meals included and the food was AMAZING!  I have never had fruit so sweet.  Our concert was part of an outdoor music festival so there was lots of other acts.  The band before us decided to stay on for about an hour longer than they should have and we ended up going on really late and we were so tired anyway.  But nevertheless, we sang our hearts out and the crowd loved us.  On the last day, me and the lads and one girl from the choir went out on jet skis.  This was the highlight of my whole time there.  We had 45 minutes out at sea, were taken up and down the coast really far out, stopped to have a swim in the bright green water and did some stunts and jumps and stuff.  I slept all the way back to Paris Orly, waking up when we were descending to land.  Then the final straw of the trip was we ALMOST missed our connecting flight at Paris.  I must say that Air France are completely incompetent and know nothing about customer service.  I was quite surprised at the lack of care that their staff portrayed in all airports including the English staff at Heathrow.  I am thankful however, that I did finally get to see Guadeloupe.  It is a beautiful island and I just wished I had had more time to get around a bit.  I definitely want to go back sometime, but not with Air France.

After getting back, I left the choir.  After 7 and a half years of being a member of LCGC it did feel a bit weird, but I felt it was where God was taking me so I obeyed.  Since earlier this year, God has been revealing His plan for my life in a big way.  After leaving the choir I had been praying to get involved in more praise and worship stuff and also to be able to survive on doing more Gospel/Christian work and less secular.  It is happening.  Almost immediately I was called by a friend of mine, Nicky Brown who is the musical director at a pentecostal church I sometimes visit in South London.  He asked me to be part of a travelling praise and worship team to tour with Bishop John Francis (the leader of that church).  I am so excited about it.  We will be starting very soon and should mostly be travelling to the States as Ruach Ministries (the church) have just planted a branch in Atlanta.  Its very exciting stuff and I'm looking forward to it.  I was also asked to join another choir, which I have done.  There's a story behind this one.  Quite an amazing story.  I'll put it in another blog.  This one's getting rather lengthy.

I also have a new phone - its a Sony Ericsson W800 and it has a 2 megapixel camera.  Here is one of the pictures I took of myself standing on London Bridge...

One more thing...I am hosting a monthly Gospel Showcase night called Lime Lounge which we started in July.  It has been a great success and we have one tonight.  Its at a bar called Shebu which holds approx. 200 people and we have pretty much been at max capacity everytime.  The only thing is, being an event where mostly Christians go, the bar doesn't seem to do too well (being that most of the people come from the very traditional pentecostal background).  So its an area where we need to pray, not for people to drink themselves stupid, but just to make enough so that we're not having to fork out to the managers at the end of the night which has been happening.  We are looking at changing the venue anyway because being in West London its inaccessible to a lot of people, so we are looking at other centrally located venues.  More on this in another blog.

Thanks for listening.  I'm sure I've forgotten a few things but I'll catch up soon.