Connect group

I had my connect group over for a meal yesterday. We joined with another group and had a casual evening together. Initially, the other leaders (my housemate Stephen and another friend Kathy) and I were planning to prepare a meal for the group but then I had a thought and ran with it. It turned out wonderfully and we had a great evening together.

We started out the evening with some chips and dip, chocolate, and punch for everyone as they arrived and chatted with each other but soon got on to the main course...




A good friend of mine, James, is a chef so my great idea was to have him prepare the food for us. Here he is putting on the finishing touches.







People were starting to get hungry when they smelled the food and much more so when they saw it. As you can tell, people were quite impressed. On second thought, "in awe" might be a more accurate way of putting it. The guy who isn't in awe is my housemate Stephen and he's seen James cook before. He was just proud to be able to put this on for his group.




Here's the finished product of an incredible chef. He made a great meal for 20 of us (plus one dish for himself)








The group was provided with pens and paper and encouraged to write notes of encouragement for other people in the group to take home with them. It was a great opportunity to build people up and the group took advantage of it.






We had a great evening and as reflected later, I was really hit with the thought of how great these people are and how honoured I am to be able to lead this group. On a night designed to bless them, I got at least as much blessing. Isn't it great how God works!!!

Beach Day

So I went to the beach the other day and on the way we stopped for what turned out to be a rather interesting lunch experience. We walked in the door to the back of a line consisting of about eight people. There were three employees slowly meandering around the kitchen area, one “manager,” and one taking orders. As we waited our turn, one customer decided to develop a bit of an attitude because her order was taking too long. She had pre-ordered 80 pieces of chicken to be ready when she got there and it had not been started by the time she arrived. The people at the other end, waiting for their lunch, finally called her to see what was taking so long and she explained in quite colourful language (or maybe it wasn’t so colourful considering the extensive use of one particular word) what had happened. Well, this now required the attention of the manager, one full time kitchen person, and half the time of the one taking orders – all to start arguing about what should have happened and to call someone on the phone and argue some more. 15 minutes waiting and we’ve now progressed from 8 to 3 people in front of us in line (not counting the big order lady). We started questioning the wisdom of coming to this restaurant but stayed. Well, over the next 10 minutes, the other 3 people got their single meal orders and our turn arrived. One by one, we placed an order, waited for it to be filled, then placed the next order – no such thing as taking the second order while the first one was being filled by the kitchen staff. Just as we were finishing, the manager came out to tell everyone that they were closing. We get our food and one person asked for a fork but to no avail “We don’t have any” was the response. This is a branch of a worldwide chain of restaurants, many of their meals are better eaten with a fork, and they don’t have any. Maybe that’s why their closing during the lunch rush. So we exited the building and ate our food outside. After explaining to many potential customers that they were closed, we watched as someone pulled up in a taxi and rather angrily entered the store, ripped down the closed sign and had choice words with the staff who apparently had called him to help with their dilemma.

What happened after that remains a mystery, but this I know; I got in the water for the first time since my operation, I got a little colour on my skin, and I was really tired and sore from 2 ½ hours cramped into the back seat of a small car. All in all, it was a good day.

Mom, I'm bored...what can I do for fun???

I'm sure that subject line will put a smile on my mother's face - could someone please show it to her??? Thanks.

Now I'm not really bored - yet. I finished my last exam yesterday, came home, and felt lost. What do I do now? I've got no assignments to do and no exams to study for. Well, I just wasted the afternoon away then went out for the evening. We've got stuff happening at school for the next two weeks yet but when I come home from school, there's no homework to do. Yay!!! Now it's time to catch up on housework, phone calls, finances, etc. It's also time to start thinking about what I'll be doing the next number of months as far as church involvement and other volunteer activities. I've got a number of options and need to decide what to do with them.

Time to rest - kindof

I'm glad to report that I have some free time!!! Actually, I'm much more than glad about that. I've been pretty stressed with assignments this week and they are now done.

For some reason, most of the assignments for the term are set with a due date in the same week near the end of the semester; so I had two oral presentations, two in class evaluations (counselling type scenarios) and seven written assessments all due this week. Thankfully, two exams that were scheduled for this week were changed to next week. Now for someone who plans ahead, this normally doesn't present a large problem; but for various reasons, most of the assignments cannot be started much before the due date.

My other problem with it this time around was that I was pretty much out of commission in the weeks leading up to assignment time. Between lack of sleep due to pain and discomfort in my new knee (and maybe one or two other reasons) and lack of brain power due to lack of sleep and excess chemicals in my brain from the pain killers, it was really hard to get things done. A few people suggested I get an extension for some of the assignments, but I wanted to be done so I pushed through and got the last one done 12 1/2 hours before it was due!

On other fronts, I'm sure (or hoping people care enough for this anyways) that you want to know where my knee is at... well it's roughly half way between my foot and the top of my leg :) OK, that was bad... I'm taking less pain killers and feeling less pain. I have about 90% of the proper mobility (70% pain free) but strength is lacking. The other day I was working on the strength and the machine I was on could measure up to 500. With my left leg, I hit around 270 and with my right leg, I almost got above zero. I've got a ways to go.

Men's conference

Just have to write something really quick here... Hillsong Men's Conference just finished and I have to tell some people about it. There's the usual stuff like we had great speakers, great messages, great stories of old men hitting on young women who were helping out at conference (oops, did I say that publicly?) but what I want to highlight is something that will be news to people and some of my friends and family and friends at home will be quite excited about. No, I wasn't one of those old men - although I almost bought a coffee for one of the ladies working out in the rain and only 15 minutes after I decided not to did I realize how it could have come across. Whew, was I glad I hadn't done it.

So what I'm excited about is there's a new Mercy Ministries home starting in Lima, Peru. Now, I know that many people knew there were plans of one, but it's now one major step closer to reality. Some people have been working towards it for a while and they have trained staff ready to go who have actually been working with women in their own homes - doing what they can until the home can be purchased. Well, a couple of our pastors went over there in the last couple of weeks and checked out the place. What they didn't tell the pastor out there was the plans for us to give them the money to buy it. We took an offering at the men's conference to pass along to them to help with the home and after the offering was received, a phone call was made to the pastor heading up the plans in Peru and they were told they now have all the finances in place to buy the home. The offering was enough to cover the purchase and likely the furnishing of the home. What a blessing to be a part of. Needless to say, that pastor was quite ecstatic!

I really believe it's time for those of us in the wealthier nations of the world to give more money to qualified people in poorer nations to do God's work in their own home instead of spending our money sending people from our home to theirs. Now I fully realize there is a place for us to send people too, but I believe we have focused on that too much and spent too little helping people in those nations do the work that they can do better in their own homeland than we ever could.

What's new

Quickly, before I move on to other things I need to do...

I just got home from seeing the physiotherapist and doctor. To give you an idea of how physio operates, when the knee specialist was checking my knee, he got to around 110 degrees (estimated by him) of movement before I winced in pain and he stopped. Only an hour earlier, my physiotherapist pushed it to 133 degrees (measured). The extra 23 degrees...well lets just say the word I hear most out of her is "Sorry." She's not heartless. The doctor is happy with how well I'm doing so I'll try to go with his report instead of mine since I'm not happy with the progress until I'm completely better.

This weekend is Men's conference once again so I'm looking forward to that.

I've now got only two weeks of classes left. I've also got a bunch of assignments coming due in the next week so it will be a crazy week of spending a lot of time with my computer and trying to get my brain in gear. I think I may check into the possibility of having Gloria Jean's (kind of like the Aussie version of Tim Hortons or Starbucks - only 15 times better) coffee delivered :-)