Friday-Sunday Excellence

This weekend has been both crazy, and crazy good.

This blog entry promises to not be particularly interesting or original, so consider yourself forewarned! I’m in the midst of a insanely busy weekend, but the lunacy should end with the dawn of Monday tomorrow (I’m all about the synonyms for madness today: crazy, insanely, lunacy). I took this picture to show you how exceptionally tired I am; in total this weekend I've gotten upwards of six hours sleep, and it's definitely taken it's toll. I get quite pallid when I'm exhausted, so I need to take this as a sign to get some rest tonight (although staff parties tend to go late, so maybe I'll just sleep in tomorrow morning). Even my hair becomes frizzy when I'm frazzled (that was some super alliteration!). Essentially, I could be doing some reading, but I’m feeling quite lethargic, and would far rather spew my thoughts into my keyboard. Friday after I got back from school, I did some shopping, banking, and cleaning before going to Shine at 4:00. We went to supper at the Wendy’s/Timmy’s afterwards, where I had a delicious Frosty (mmmm!) and cheeseburger, and followed it up with bowling. My bowling game was decent, especially since it was 5-pin (I’m just miserable at 10-pin), but Sherry turned out to be an awesome bowler, and got almost double the rest of my team’s points without even trying! A group of us then went to West Ed to check out a movie, but they decided on Elizabethtown, which I’d already seen a while ago, so it was iPod listening on the Number 4 bus for me. Listening to my iPod was actually pretty embarrassing by the end of the night because I was checking out the latest Ricky Gervais (a brash British comic) podcast and was laughing excessively loud on the walk from 114th street to my house on 111th. By then, it was 12:30, so I think people passing by me totally assumed that I was drunk, but I’m horrible at suppressing my laughter, and really couldn’t help it.

Saturday I opened the café, and read a bit in the afternoon while doing a load of laundry. It was CSI night at C&C, which was quite enjoyable; there was full-fledged evidence collecting and interrogations, and it was great murder mystery style fun. It made me extremely nostalgic for all of my favourite classic detective TV series from my childhood (Murder She Wrote, Magnum PI, and the original Law and Order, Sherlock Holmes, Poirot, and Miss Marple). On another tangent, the new Miss Marple, sans cute chubby Miss Marple, is on CBC tonight, and I would highly recommend it if you’re at all an Agatha Christie fan. After snacking on some Nachos at Boston Pizza and dropping James off at Lister, Crystal came over and, while trying not to wake my family up, we did some chatting and web-surfing. So I didn’t get to bed until about 3:30, and was woken up at 6:50 by a phone call from Colleen (my fellow café-opening barista) asking if I could come in because she had an excruciating migraine. Of course, I was dead tired, but understanding the pain of migraines vicariously from my mom and sister, I had to come in and let Colleen get some rest. While at work, I had to phone almost the entire staff of our café to see if someone could come in at 9:00 so I could get to church, but Steph came through for me (shout out to Steph!).

The service this morning was excellent, as always, and the worship team had picked out some really great songs (fitting, because the sermon today focused on worship). Lyle spoke about true worship, and the worshipful sacrifice that our lives need to be to God. His sermon touched on the frequently duplicitous nature of our lives with that Sunday vs. the rest of the week contrast. Lyle illustrated this disparity with a story about his wife’s days as a waitress when the notoriously worst shift to work was after church; customers were rude, scrimped on tips, and were surely not good models of Christ’s love. A lot of my friends are aware of this hypocritical aspect of a lot of Christians, and it disturbs me that their perception of Christianity is tainted by our inconsistent actions. In the context of worship, this is most clear because we sing songs of our great love for God and gratitude for his grace, but despite singing songs about our willingness to give our lives up to Him, we act for our own benefit and don’t consider what our behaviour demonstrates about our faith to others. For me, this is where prayer is so important, because unless I pray regularly through the day, I can’t deliberately act in a way that pleases God. At least in me life, I’ve found that I need to be intentional about living out my faith and my love for God and others, otherwise I get lost in the bustle of the day and my own needs and perceived needs. Well, I’ve got a staff party to attend right now (we’re going to pig out on Chinese food and play some games) so I really must be going. Hopefully your weekends were equally fun, although maybe not so hectic as mine. Remember: it’s only one more exciting week of campaigning and struggling Liberals before we’re off to the polls!

Sayonara!