Aaron Vocals

As promised here are the photos of our new offices

Pic 1) The front of the building @ 85 Bounces Road, Edmonton, London N9 8LD

Pic 2&3) Ground Floor - Phoenix Academy which is our secondary school which teaches ACE (Accelerated Christian Education) Curriculum.  Each student gets their own "office" with computer.  In Pic 2 you can see the windows but the metal shutters are down as it was the end of the day.  Behind those shutters is the school yard.

Pic 4) 1st Floor Conference Room

Pic 5) The main office on the 1st floor which is where I work.  The screen which you can see the back of in the foreground is mine.  That's where I sit folks.

Pic 6) This is the office which is to the right of where I am taking the picture from in Pic 5.

We have now been working here since May and are only really just getting settled.  The whole computer network took quite a while for people to get used to but it is just about running smoothly.  In my next post, I'll explain about what goes on in these offices, because its quite complex and I'm a little tired, and me and a couple of the office workers are going to the pub for some food...mmmmmm.....foooooood.

... or is Comic Sans the ugliest font ever to be invented?  On Sunday I was in Borders bookshop (actually I was having a coffee in the Starbucks on the 3rd floor).  When they threw us out of the coffee sit-downy bit - due to closing - I stumbled upon the children's book section and to much dismay, ALL the titles of the sections were done in Comic Sans.  I found it quite awful.  I think Comic Sans is one of the biggest design faults this century.  There is even a website dedicated to its demise HERE. I have worked in companies where they started doing everything in Comic Sans, even memos!  Maybe that's why I dislike it so much.  The fact that its been shoved in my face over the last 5 or 6 years.  Or maybe I'm just a moany whinger who hasn't got better things to do with my time...erm...I'm sure I had a paperclip to unfold...somewhere....

I just got in from the Breaking Forth Conference which is put on by Bethesda Ministries over this weekend.  Guests include Tonex (a singer), Dorinda Clark-Cole (another singer), Pastor Marvin Winans, Pastor Jackie McCullough to name a few.  Saw Tonex sing tonight - I have been a fan of his for a few years now.  Also, Jackie McCullough preached a most awesome word.  So I feel very empowered.  Just thought I would share this with you.  Have to go bed now as I am up at 5:30.  I am singing on CDUK with Liberty X tomorrow morning.  Hope you catch it.

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.

Sorry this is late. I've had a manic week. Our church offices are moving and I have been in charge of a lot of projects including ordering 17 new PC's and a server from Dell (which is taking longer than I had planned).

Anyway, as for my escapades in sunny Spain:

We got to Luton (I hate that airport) just in time for our flight (there had been an accident on the M1, we tried to take an alternative route through the small townships of Bedfordshire but it seemed that everybody else travelling to Luton that day had decided to try the same). After finally boarding the Ryanair flight I let our a sigh and waited for take-off. We rumbled down the runway and took off for Girona (near Barcelona).

After 2 hours pretty smooth flight we touched down in Girona and were met by the tour promoters and taken out to eat. An experience to say the least. Although the food was edible, my mate Matthew found a beetle walking about on his plate of food halfway through eating. Of course this put everyone else off. We were then taken to our hotel - a pretty basic but nice Campanile hotel. Reminded me of those American motels because the entrance doors to the rooms were on the outside.

The next day we were taken to the beach (we were on a tight schedule and were told that we could only spend about 15 minutes there!) and then to a TV studio where we were to perform on a programme a little bit like a youthful version of Parkinson. It was good fun.

That evening I called for a time of devotion and prayer (even though it was about 12am I felt strongly that we needed it). It was a good turn out with about 10-12 of us crammed into mine and Matthew's room. We started by singing some praise and worship songs and then went into prayer and I read from Romans 12 (KJV and The Message versions). I felt that we needed to pray for people individually and find out what was on their mind and what they wanted praying for. The Holy Spirit moved in such an amazing way, bringing healing and deliverance to some and just increasing his blessing on others. We finished at 4am!

The following day we were taken to Barcelona centre to look around and do a bit of shopping. I just bought a baseball cap for 3 euros (about £2) and a Starbucks coffee (which cost about the same as the cap). Our concert was that evening in a sort of sports hall type venue in Girona. It went well and the people loved it. Spain is a very religious country being mainly Roman Catholic so its quite hard to get people to come along to a gospel concert, but they did come and they enjoyed themselves - we actually had 2 encores!

We then went to Zaragoza the next day which took around 3 hours drive. We didn't get to see much of the city but the concert venue was a beautiful big modern theatre. It was about half to three-quarters full. Concert was great.

All in all I enjoyed the trip and am exicted to go back to the 30 degree temperatures!!! Visit back for SPAIN TRIP #2!!!!

See ya and have a great weekend.
Aaron