Hi friends!

Who would ever have thought that a volcano in Iceland could shut down flights and create such bizarre chaos?! Strange but true!

After an amazing 2 weeks at Spring Harvest, yesterday I travelled to London Heathrow and found a totally empty and deserted airport – SO bizarre when usually it’s a hub of international travel and energy! Here are a few pictures I snapped as I walked around..

My flight is cancelled, so now I’m just one of many passengers waiting for news about when the airspace will re-open. When it does, those who’ve been waiting longest (I think flights started getting cancelled last week…so there is a back-log of people) will most likely get priority… So I’m just keeping an eye on the news and seeing what happens.

Apparently, years ago a plane flew through volcanic ash and it resulted in the plane’s engines all stopping… So now that I know that, I’m glad they are NOT flying planes through the ash cloud!

Sadly this means I’ll miss “Catalyst”, the conference I was flying to California to be part of. But my friend Carlos is going to fill in my worship set, as well as doing his own, so all will be ok!! Here’s the promo video for Catalyst West Coast… I’m praying their event goes amazingly!!

Catalyst West 2010 Promo from Catalyst on Vimeo.

Have any of you guys reading this been affected by the travel chaos? or has a friend or loved one?

How do you approach difficult situations when things are out of your hands, and you have to surrender and trust God? Is that easy or hard for you? Got any Scriptures that help you through times like that?

Love

Vicky

Hi friends!

Yesterday I spent the day in central London with a camera crew and my manager Wendy, filming a video piece to go with my new EP and album! It was bucketing down with rain, under a grey cloudy sky… so it’ll look very legitimately British! We started off inside St Mary’s Church, a beautiful, tall church built in the early 1800s near Marble Arch and Marylebone in the heart of Westminster. We filmed the stories behind the songs on the album there. Then after grabbing sandwiches we piled into Wendy’s car and drove around the city center with both camera men hanging out the windows filming the city in motion!

We parked near the River Thames and got footage of me chatting about themes on the album and about life in general. The rain didn’t stop so I pulled out my black and white polka dot umbrella! We filmed the London Eye and the Houses Of Parliament, then drove into the dark and very heart-breaking area of Soho – it has been London’s prostitution district for the past 400 years.

I got out of the car with the camera crew and we captured the explicit and devastating nature of those streets. I shared thoughts with the camera on worship and justice and my passion to see human trafficking ended. We ventured down some very dark, small alleyways lined with prostitutes and pimps. My heart was racing when we got accosted by one of them and told to stop filming as what was going on was private and not to be documented. It was scary and we felt pretty vulnerable…but I am so glad we were able to go there and let our hearts be even more deeply broken by what goes on behind closed doors. Worship and justice MUST go hand in hand – one of the songs on the new album is all about that…so my decision to shoot some film in Soho was one I’m still glad I did.

Watch out for the video! We’ll post some “Flip camera” B roll in the next week or so to give you a taste of what the full version will look like!

Not long til my 3 song EP comes out…. Feb 9th!!

Love,

Vicky

Hey!

So you know me well by now… but you have never seen any pictures of my family. They are fabulous folks… so let me introduce you!

In the photo above (taken a month or two ago when I was home for my birthday) there is…L to R:

Me, Claire (engaged to Brin), my cousin Brin, my sister Jo & Tim who have Jess, Owen and Hannah, Nanny and Grandad (Ron & Dorothy) Davies, then…Mum and Dad, cousin Lindsey, cousin Lou, cousin Libby and their parents (my uncle and aunty) Christine and Frank.

Brin’s brother Tim and their parents Dilys and Gordon aren’t in this shot, nor is my cousin Lauren, but they are part of the family too!

My Mum and Dad all dressed up for a recent wedding of some friends…

A photo I took of my sister Jo with my Nikon D80….

So now you’ve met my parents, my grandparents, my wider family… hope you enjoyed the photos!

Are you an only child? Got siblings? How many are in your wider family? When do you all get together?

Love,

Vicky

Hello from my homeland!

Having a great time… more blogging to come…but here’s a photo of me with a classic British telephone box

Got video and photos to come very soon!

Love,
Vicky

Hey friends,

I have a new author to tell you about….You know I love reading, so I thought I’d share a new discovery!

“Thomas Stearns Eliot” lived from 26 September 1888 – 4 January 1965. He was a poet, receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948. Eliot did the opposite of me – he was born in the United States, and moved to the United Kingdom in 1914 (at age 25). He said: “[My poetry] wouldn’t be what it is if I’d been born in England, and it wouldn’t be what it is if I’d stayed in America. It’s a combination of things. But in its sources, in its emotional springs, it comes from America.”

I like that he lived in both the countries that I’ve lived in, and that he found inspiration in both, as I have done. I think he and I would have had a lot to chat about over a cup of Earl Grey tea!

Anyways…  All credit for me discovering this new writer goes to Daley Hake, who shared some thoughts about Eliot’s poetry when he came to visit a few days ago. If you haven’t read Daley’s blog or seen his photography, click on his photo below and it will take you to his website…

Here are a few of the T.S.Eliot quotes I’ve found and am loving:

“All dash to and fro in motor cars,
Familiar with roads and settled nowhere” (Hmmm..I know that feeling!)

“O perpetual revolution of configured stars,
O perpetual recurrence of determined seasons,
O world of spring and autumn, birth and dying
The endless cycle of idea and action,
Endless invention, endless experiment,
Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;
Knowledge of speech, but not of silence;
Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word”

“Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?”

Pretty deep stuff!!

So I encourage you to check out his works… I’m just scraping the surface as I’ve only read a couple of quotes on Wikipedia! But I’m about to dive into one of his poems called “The Rock” and really think about how his writings apply to the church of today. Here’s my favorite Eliot quote so far:

“The Church must be forever building,
For it is forever decaying within and attacked from without”

When I hear him say that the church must “be forever building” I think he means that we can never sit down and get into a rut as the Body of Christ. We must keep asking “are we truly living out the Gospel? And do we as ‘the Church’ look anything like Jesus intended and dreamed we would?”

How can we as a generation impact and build the Church increasingly into something that reflects Jesus and His heart? What would that look like?

How do we keep the Gospel true and pure, and yet make our expression and presentation of ‘church’ accessible and relevant to the culture of today?

Is our expression of church today something that pleases God’s heart, and something that embodies the Gospel? Or have we missed the boat?

I’d love to hear your thoughts!

Love,

Vicky