Faith & Fangirling

(With credit to my friend Erin Erickson for somewhat inspiring the title of this post. :)

 

 

Well, this is coming a day late, which you may or may not have noticed. I did...but I had a German test this morning, so there wasn't much I could do about it. I tried to find a chart on line to show you how darn confusing possessive pronouns are, but I couldn't even! It's so confusing even Google can't help me. :P

 

So, last Sunday, October 28 (and that weekend we were in Red Deer at a conference, but that'll be its own post when I get organized!), was Reformation Sunday, the Sunday when we celebrate Martin Luther nailing the 95 Theses to the door of the church in Wittenberg. It's also Confirmation Sunday at our church, when the youth who are around 14 years old, and who've been taking confirmation classes for two years, publicly express their faith and what they've learned, by presenting papers and essentially making a vow.



 

I don't have any photos from this year, so here's one of Trevor getting confirmed. :)

 

I've seen a lot of confirmation classes come and go, and you can usually tell from their papers which of the kids actually 'get' it, and which of them are just jumping through the hoops so they can 'graduate'. There were 14 this year, and I only knew a couple of them well, but you can tell so much about them from their papers, and even the ones I don't really know I still care about whether or not they get it. I don't really know why - maybe it's just the burden/gift God has given me (?). Anyway, there may have been a few tears, and not because I was over-tired from being at a conference all weekend. :)

 

Then the first weekend in November was our annual fall youth retreat, which I seem to have somehow and totally accidentally ended up becoming chair of. I think it's because I'm kind of bossy and I just like organizing stuff and so I sort of took over organizing meetings, which then just evolved into 'chairing' them (which I use loosely because we've been doing this for so long that we all pretty much just know what to do and how to work together - it's a great team of people!), but I'm also the registrar, which is a TON of work. Add that to homework, two weeks of being sick, and an unusually tempestuous registration process, and by the time Thursday night rolled around I was seriously questioning why I was putting myself through the agony.

 

But by Friday morning, I was fatalistically calm. If anything else went wrong, there wasn't any way to prepare for it, so it would just have to happen as it happened. Then my friend Brittni arrived to help and the kids started coming, and I got excited again. It's so much fun having a church building filled with life and excitement. Things went really well - we had some scheduling issues Saturday night, but I kept calm and changed the schedule, and it worked out well. I was proud of myself for not freaking out...a couple of years ago I wouldn't have been able to function under my schedule not proceeding as planned, but I'm getting more flexible in my old age. :P Pretty sure it's a God Thing!

 

Some of the 75-ish people at the fall youth retreat

 

By the time everyone left on Sunday, I didn't want it to end, which is how I usually feel on the last day of a retreat. You get this sense of community in a small group, living in a building all together for a weekend like that, which you don't really find anywhere else. I always feel like it's a very imperfect but tantalizing glimpse of what heaven will be like - a giant youth retreat, only without all of the logistical work. :)

 

Then on Monday I had this parcel card, so I went to the post office to pick it up. I figured that I must have forgotten to decline last month's movie club offering, and I was still thinking about the youth retreat, so I wasn't really mentally present in the post office when the clerk handed me a large bubble envelope that didn't look anything like a DVD. I stepped away from the counter and looked at the return address, and got very intrigued when I saw that it was from Shelli.

 

I didn't waste any time ripping it open, and found a recycled inter-office mail envelope. Curiouser and curiouser...and then I opened that, and found THIS:

 

 

 

I definitely said "OH MY GOSH" out loud, because I'm pretty sure the lady standing nearby turned around to look at me, but I was to busy processing to care. (For the first time, I did wish I had a smartphone so I could take a photo and post it somewhere right then and there, because fangirling shared is definitely more fun!) When I got home I had to Google the indecipherable signatures to check whose they were, and it is signed by the entire main cast of Hell on Wheels. How awesome is that? It was totally the cherry on top of an already awesome day! Thanks Shelli! I'm definitely a receptive audience! :)