Colour and Album Recording

Well, Colour Conference is now done. Like I thought, I would have been lucky to get 6 hours of sleep per night. Wednesday was an easy day, leaving at 7AM and being done my part around 2PM (home just before 3) while the choir stayed to practice in the evening. Thursday was 6AM to 12:00AM, Friday and Saturday were 6 to 12:30, then Sunday was “easier” again leaving home at 7:15, getting almost an hour at home between church and album recording, and then getting home just before 1AM. I spent somewhere between 14 and 17 hours per day on my feet. It’s definitely tough but knowing that almost 17,000 women were impacted at the conference and millions of people will be impacted by the album that’s coming out; it’s worth it. It felt good to sleep in as long as my body would allow this morning – waking up for the day after a long 7 hour night. Hopefully, I can get to bed earlier tonight and possibly even take a nap.

I spent most of my time at the conference doing venue control (similar to security but without the legal rights and liabilities of security people) outside the lounge where all the key speakers, pastors, and their guests went to relax – making sure that only a select few get in while the rest are turned away graciously. It’s the same thing I do for the weekend services at church. As you can well imagine, dealing with people who are known by millions around the world and keeping them free from disturbance and distraction during their breaks can be quite delicate. To make things clearer and easier to enforce, most people allowed into this area have a special pass. Yea, MOST of them – not all.

Even the best of us make mistake in this area. One person on my team asked one of the key speakers for a pass shortly after she got off stage; some of the pastors that are around the church every weekend were asked for passes; and I even had an interesting one. A young lady wanted to come into the lounge with a friend of hers. She had the appropriate pass but he did not so I explained this to her and she graciously told me it was alright for him to be there with her. This being a common line that I receive, I told her that I had orders from my leaders that meant I could not let him in. She kindly informed me that her mother was the person running the conference and the person with her was her boyfriend. Upon asking who her mother was, I realized she had a lot more pull than I do. Brian and Bobbie Houston’s daughter can take anyone she wants into any area of the building at almost any time. Oops. She was very good about it and my colleagues had a good laugh at me telling them about this. Despite this little error, I was greatly honoured when my team leader said he was going to specifically ask for me to be on his team in this position for Hillsong conference in July.

There were a few interesting experiences during the conference. One lady told me at one point “There’s too many women around here!” Excuse me, were you expecting something different at a women’s conference? I mentioned this to one of the girls on my team and she just looked at me with indifferent eyes and informed me that she had said the same thing only 5 minutes earlier.

We also had one man causing a minor disturbance outside the door so our paid security man came over to help out. This guy is a few inches taller than I am and built like a rock. He’s one of biggest men I’ve ever met but also one of the most gentle. Within 5 minutes, the man was sharing his life story on his way back to his car.

I’ll leave you with a few pictures of the event…



The conference started with a grand opening which was truly grand. I was able to catch part of it including some dancers on stage and swinging gracefully through the air above stage. A few people (including me) commented that the only thing we had ever seen that was comparable was the Olympic games opening ceremonies. Here's a shot of one part. A woman started singing in an absolutely heavenly voice and continued as her platform rose about 30 feet up and the audience joined in singing.



This is what almost 17,000 women in one place looks like. Amazing! The largest indoor facility in Sydney was filled with women focused on God!







Another team member and me at our post.









There was quite a rush for seats for the album recording. Here's the line-up 1 1/2 hours before it started.







I was only able to get into the auditorium for a few minutes of the album recording, but here's one picture of it. My guess is between 15,000 and 16,000 people were there. I was able to hear much of what happened inside and I can tell you there are some amazing songs coming out on this album.