Not so functional yet

Functional programming still seems an elusive concept to me -- something that I am trying to pick up but can't yet apply anywhere. The big boost came from the SICP lectures by Sussman and Abelson which I started watching from sometime in the middle of the year. Now, as the year is about to end, I have watched only till lecture 4A. And I cannot think of any way to apply what I have learned. A few days ago I was watching a talk called the 'The Feel of Scala' and I felt Scala was nothing but Java with a powerful front-end which does a lot of rewrites. Nevertheless it was clear that the features provided were for functional programming. Yesterday I downloaded Scala and tried to get the basic control structures and syntax. But again, I hit a wall when I started thinking -- where do I use these features? I know Scala is giving me immutable lists but so what about that? Maybe I'll have answers after I finish the SICP lecture series.