Weekly Photo Challenge: Community

It’s easy to come up with photos for “community” as the word “community” automatically brings thoughts of “church” or “community of believers” to my mind and it’s been a pretty busy week for the Protestant Church in Oman during this 3rd week of Advent! 🙂  Here, as with each of the 4 weeks of Advent, one family from the congregation lights the previous candle(s) of Advent and then lights the next candle until the 4th is lit on Christmas week.  This ancient tradition is one way for the church to celebrate the first Advent (“Coming”) and anticipate the 2nd Advent of Christ.                                      One important aspect of community in the church is fellowship and the breaking of bread together.  This photo was during the last Tuesday night Bible study of the year.This photo was from Friday’s event known as “Christmas Joy” , which is an outreach party to give an evening of joy to female migrant workers in Muscat, Oman (next year is the men’s turn!).  This was the 7th annual Christmas Joy in Oman!  Outreach and charity are important features of any healthy church community.

I hope you enjoyed my interpretation of “community” for this photo challenge.  Finally, here’s a short video from the Children’s Nativity Play this past Friday morning in which the children and youth led us in celebration of Christmas Worship Service”: 

Weekly Photo Challenge: Let There Be Light!

A great wordpress weekly photo challenge theme for this week: “Let There Be Light!”.How’s the Burj Khalifa lit up on the very night that Dubai learned that they won the vote for Expo 2020 for a light source?! (In case you don’t know, that was last night!)  They had it lit up with this special blue lighting which made it look so “otherworldly”!

Weekly Photo Challenge: Color

After 3 months of “Photo Apps” and “Phoneography” (March’s theme), WordPress is finally back to weekly photo challenges.  This week, ”

In a new post created specifically for this challenge, share a picture in which color takes center stage.

You can post a single photograph featuring your favorite color or many colors, or take one of your images and experiment with color effects in a photo app or online photo editor (which we introduced in some of last month’s posts). For those of you up for a multi-photo challenge, play around with this theme in a gallery.”  I decided to try out one of the galleries available for pics from WordPress.  Colors of Oman!

Weekly Photo Challenge(S): Home, Unique, Love

This Week’s Challenge: “Share a picture that evokes HOME for you.   It might be the place where you live, or a more abstract representation, or something completely different.” 

                                                 Our home in the Philippines! It’s nice to have a place to call home especially as we’re expats here in Oman and have to be ready to pack up and leave at a moment’s notice.  Of course we know a home is so much more than “4 walls and a door”; it’s “where the heart is” as they say, which brings us to the photo challenge I missed 2 weeks back: LOVE.

“Love. Can you believe we’ve never done this theme? I won’t give you any hints here. Amaze us with your own interpretation of LOVE.”Simply put, LOVE=Family.  Wherever we are together is home enough for me!

And finally, last week’s challenge: “share a picture that says UNIQUE to you”.    I love this photo of our 2 sweeties.  At first glance, you can really see that they are brother and sister, can’t you? They look so similar in many ways, but the truth is that they each have their own unique character traits and habits.Our son who loves to play to the point of exhaustion.                                      Our joyful little princess!

That brings us back full circle to this week’s photo challenge HOME – where UNIQUE members of a household are united in LOVE.

Click here to check out more entries for this week’s photo challenge, HOME, at the Daily Post.

Weekly Photo Challenge: Beyond

Here’s this week’s WordPress challenge from Sara Rosso:

Do you have a photo which invites the viewer to look beyond? Are there hidden depths in the background? Is the focal point just a framing for the rest of the picture? If it’s not clear why we should look beyond, tell us! Lead us through the story in your photo.

In a new post specifically created for this challenge, share a picture which means BEYOND to you!  Here are my entries:

Here’s a pic my sister-in-law took of me at Wadi Dayqah Dam while she was here on a 9-day vacation. While the silly expression on my face may be of some entertainment value, the real story is the force of the water in the picture behind me!  Here’s another pic to show you just what kind of pressure we’re talking about:

That’s the same ladder down there that was in the previous pic!

This next and final pic is of my friend, Geoffrey, getting far too close to the edge of Oman’s highest mountain, Jabel Shams (or “Mountain of the Sun“) which is known as “The Grand Canyon of Oman“.  I would hate to think what would happen if he went just an inch or two beyond…