Three Shades of Awesome

So today was actually a pretty dang good sabbath for me. Which is good, I’ve needed one. My boss lately has taken to making me work Sundays which is frustrating since I’m often up late Saturday nights finishing various graphic brain storms for Sunday. Though she’s thankfully taken the hint from our last conversation and is working at scheduling things differently. So this one was a nice good one where I could relax.

I woke up this morning at a good time to get to Church just a lil bit before it started. Got there in time to chat with a few people before the service started. Overall the service today was probably like, I don’t know it was just about everything that I really like about my Church. In general everyone seemed to be in a good mood, our pastor kinda did a redo of his last week’s sermon which is good cause this time it came out a lot more clear and easily understood.

Marc lead worship this week which I always enjoy. Not because Marc’s a good musician (though he is) but because he’s a really gifted worship leader. His approach to it feels in some ways a bit like how Spurgeon used to preach. He was said to go out and preach, and then go back to his little rectory and gravely consider if he preached what was right. Now I don’t think Marc ends each week by going off stage and shaking violently (For however brilliant he was Spurgeon like Luther and other awesome Christian could be a little damned nutty!) but you can tell the whole thing is very intentional and dare I say “pregnant” with meaning, much of which isn’t even always picked up by the people singing along.

Anyway, but yah, Brent was on slides and did a good job of everything. (Though he did zone out at one point until I leaned over and shouted to move to the next song haha!) and just all around everything was nice.

After Church I got to chat with one of the people on leadership who I’ve always kinda really liked but never really gotten a chance to talk to. I was really surprised cause apparently I’m the first openly gay person he’s ever met. Which is kinda crazy since he’s not exactly young (He’s got a married son my age) but even with that where most people if you’re the first gay people they meet they say a lot of really kinda unintentionally rude things (or sometimes intentionally rude things) he was super cool and respectful and you’d swear he’d gone to like some sort of welcoming and affirming workshop.

Anyway, I left this Sunday just feeling really great. I also threw together a logo last night which was universally accepted by everyone that matters (IE myself, the head of the media team and the woman who isn’t the head of the communications team but does all the work and is taking care of the website.)

I’ve got a few ideas that I’m gonna get a go ahead on and then push forward with them.

Firstly, I want to start a sort of “Email your photos to this address to get them into the background slides” I got the idea from a video/photo montage I recently did for the Outreach team where the woman in charge had someone take a bunch of Photos. I thought about how there were parts of the village this person took that totally weren’t what I thought of when I thought of the village. So I’m gonna make up a gmail addy that will auto forward to my addy that will let people email in photos they take for me to draw. I don’t know if anyone will actually use it but perhaps we’ll see. Brent suggested I not hold my breath on people actually deciding to do it (which makes sense people are less likely to think about actually doing it though who knows somebody might decide they love the idea.)

The other idea that I need to look into and I think this one is more big… is to come out with “Branded Clothing” I want to talk to a couple shops in the village that I know do custom clothing, and then find out what the costs would look like to get them to put together some stuff for us. I’m mostly thinking tshirts with cool designs that say stuff like, “Ask me about the Table” or perhaps some interesting things like we did with those Adullam posters years ago. Probably nothing so bold as “God loves boys who love boys” but perhaps something like “Church of the drop outs the losers the sinners the failures and the fools” and then have a church logo at the bottom or something. Granted we’re totally stealing a line from switchfoot there but I doubt they’d care

Anyway that’s my idea. We’d also be able to come up with custom designs for different people. Was even thinking of having that sorta thing and then running it a bit above cost as a revenue driver for the Church. IE charge 25 for the shirt if it costs 15 to make and have the extra 10 go toward church costs. Sure it wouldn’t help us out that much financially but every bit helps.

Best part is the whole thing would tie in with various out reach things they want to have happening. I know Jennifer wants to get some prayer walks happening, and I think she’d be excited to have tshirts that did the talking for her, and Brent was saying we could even have them out at the music nights we’ve been putting on and stuff like that.

But yah I wanna see about helping get the word out about this little church since I really do think what we’re trying to do is pretty killer, and I’d much rather see a Church like this take hold than some of the other ones out there.

So, I finally had lunch with the guy from my Church who I’d told you I was gonna get together with earlier. I don’t want to so much report back (because really it’s between him and me so… really…) but over all lunch went really well. It was funny getting to know him the last little while, in a lot of ways our personalities are alike. There’s obvious differences, but we come from the same sort of Christian background. The kind where right is right, and wrong is wrong, and you better be able to tell the difference in a split second, preferably with a bible verse to back you up or we might need to have some church discipline. Now granted I’m not really like that any more, but I know teenage me would have probably looked up to him like nobody’s business.

We both kinda have that, we’ll say what we want to say, and everyone else really just needs to deal with it and not get so uptight about things. Now granted I think we were both reigning that in a lot today but yah. All in all it was a really great lunch.

We got to talk about a few things, one of the most important things I wanted to get across is that people who welcome gay people into the Church, and gay people who still choose to pursue zealous lives with God don’t have to throw out Scripture to believe what they do. In fact we both have the same sort of reverence for Scripture. I think that was something that caught him off guard a bit. I know one of the most awful things that Dobson and his ilk have done is convince a lot of good bible believing Christians, that they are profoundly different than people like me.

I mean, it’s not like he’s gonna be marching in next year’s Pride Parade. (actually I don’t even know if I’ll bother to show) But I think a lot of the adversarial stuff was actually pushed out of the way which is really nice. We’ve even tentatively agreed to have a time to actually talk about the scriptural stuff which we didn’t really get into today. Which is one of my most favourite things to do.

We also talked about perhaps having a day when some people from Church could get together and watch a documentary called “For the Bible Tells Me So” which for anyone who’s seen it, it’s brilliantly done and presents “The other side” better than almost any resource I’ve ever seen. I’m gonna run that by our pastor and see what he thinks about it. We’ll have to see. I think more than anything he wants to treat it like a non-issue. IE you can think whatever you want, but let’s just focus on Christ. Which is really how I’d prefer things but really everything’s been framed as an argument of sides, so I’m not really sure how well we’ll be able to agree to disagree until everyone understands that you really can think very deeply about this sort of thing and still not come to the same answers.

So… yah, that’s my little update on that, over all it was really good. I think we found a lot of common ground, and it’s always best to focus on how we’re similar than it is to focus on how we’re different.

Well I’m exhausted now, I ddnt fall asleep till some time around 5 last night I was working on a video of nature shots my pastor had asked me to put together. I’d planned on getting it all done Friday but my boss asked me to take a shift for someone else Friday night. I shoulda just told her no but I’m always up for helping apparently, even if it means in always taken for granted… Need to work on that actually.

Anyway, so I got home from work last night totally zonked, then worked on the slideshow/video for an hour or so, that wasn’t what took all the time though. What took the time was waiting for iMovie to mix it down, and tricking the ghetto media shout software the church uses into playing the mpeg4 file. After I installed iTunes and Quicktime it worked though due to the fact that the sound card onboard the laptop doesn’t work I wasn’t able to do a run through on another video project I had worked on so in the middle of the service I found out that media shout does not like mpeg4 audio so there was this annoying clipping sound. I just about died when I heard it.

The nice thing is that the church was practically empty since everyone was away for turkey day things not that many people got to see my lil flub haha.

Apparently everyone enjoyed the media stuff since I got a bunch of positive feedback… Which is really good considering I forgot to go through a read through with one of the worship leaders so one song was totally out of order, and another was all over the place too. It just slipped my mind to make sure that was working cause I ha the other two things I was worried about having working.

Either way though it was good. I’m really glad I’m able to contribute at a church right now. In a lot of ways I feel like things between me and God are kind of fuzzy, slash it’s hard after everything that’s happened to trust Him. I think everyone gives Israel a hard time about not going into the promised land, but to be honest I cab kinda understand the hesitation. So it’s good that I have something that keeps me connected even if a lot of times prayer doesn’t feel as natural as it used to.

I do confess though sometimes at night I still think way too much about that day with the shouting match at church. I was thinking last night about how many people had talked to our pastor about the fact that there were gay people aka me, at church now. I mean you don’t publically address the whole congregation if it’s just one person. Part of me really wants to hang in and wait things out, but another part keeps remembering how hurtful church drama can be. I mean, I don’t think that will happen, especially since it seems the majority of people with sway in the church lean in a more accepting direction. I just have a lot of trouble being hopeful.

But anyway, yah, Im sleep as all get out, and thankfully will be getting off the bus shortly so I can go home and sleep.

So yah, happy turkey day all

So I should have blogged about this a while ago, but I’m all moved in! Well by all moved in I mean I have things in the building. I actually had that five days ago. Aside from that not much has changed. Things keep interrupting me. Yesterday I was gonna unpack things after a nap instead I went over to my parent’s place to fix my mom’s copy of Office which apparently had corrupted it’s own database and needed the user to run a program to fix it’s database (Is it just me or when you detect that your database is not fixed, shouldn’t you just launch a program to fix the database instead of prompting the user to launch the program?) That took a while just to get there and back and have dinner, and by the time I got home I was tired and went to bed.

My new place is pretty cool, doesn’t really feel like home though, I keep waking up feeling like I’m in somebody else’s house. It’s kind of an old heritage building. I’m paying more for it than I did my last place, but we realized that the living room does have a door, so I’m heavily leaning toward getting a room mate for the bedroom (which is smaller) charging about 300 for them in rent, and then saving my monies for college next year. Seems like a good plot.

In other news, I still haven’t started paying for internet here yet. I’m just mooching a weak WiFi signal off a neighbour. I figure if I get a roomie we’ll each pay 20 a month for a good shaw connection. Until then though I’m gonna keep mooching as long as I can. I don’t wanna go with MTS internet again since it’s all laggy and stuff but Shaw is kinda expensive.

In other news, hmmm wait I have other news? I don’t know that I really for sure have other news. Hmmm. The big thing was moving in. Other than that, not a lot, some drama at work but that’s not really worth blogging about. In general I’m doing pretty good, fairly happy, fairly content. Which is a good place to be… even if your apartment is filled with boxes and nothing’s in it’s right place and you can’t really even use the kitchen…