home....

it feels like i have never left. i drive through the streets and its as if i was there yesterday. i am very excited to be home though, to be able to sit in my kitchen and look out on a landscape of a valley with a river, plains and mountains in the background. and when the sun sets and the clouds are cooperating, it is something to experience. and it is something that i have had the privilege of experiencing for the past 13 years. Im not trying to talk down on BC or anywhere else. it just seems like i have been in perpetual shade for the past 3 months living at Qwanoes and coming home i realize how fortunate i am to have been blessed with a love and attachment to the landscape outside my window. But i am home, and the ability to physically hold my sister is something that i have wanted to do for so long as the news kept roller coasting up and down. and now as christmas has come around, the coaster has been temporarily stopped to allow a false sense of "normal". except is it truly normal to have a, what we think of as, a normal life? no hardships, the occasional death but that death is usually an old age relative. as i have been coming to realize that if you have a life that doesn`t include some or more of the following; Death, Broken Families, substance abuse, physical abuse, sexual assault, cancer. Etc. you do not live a normal life. your life has been blessed because it shows that Gods hand for some reason chooses to cover some families more than others for protection. An thats where your life becomes abnormal . But what would life be without some excitement and near death experiences thrown your way. Throughout my Walk with God my favourite aspect of him i have come to adore i his sense of humour. i find it everywhere in creation, especially the sky. thats probably why i enjoy where i live because there is always something happening with the clouds and the sun. both combined to make shapes and portraits that i can follow with my eyes and discuss with others and how the earth feels sometimes as if it were a giant playground that i can run, leap and create forts and my imagination tends to run away on me usually all the time whenever I'm idle. Although i have come to a point where i am very in-tune with his humour side, i have begun to get a grasp on how serious he is when it comes to a point when someone has to turn there heart back to God. there comes a point in our life where i hope we all come to that we can look back and see with clear eyes of all our wrong and the destruction we have caused by carrying a negative attitude and sharp words. However God is not normal, but nor should he be not-normal. he Just is. Just is God. and just now realizing how gifted we are to have the ability to be blessed emotions. the emotion of Anger, Joy, sorrow. God feels as we feel but what we feel is only a sliver of what it was truly meant to be. this Christmas i am going to feel a lot of these feelings and it is not going to feel normal because it hasn't ever been this way. but in reality this is the norm of our world. we are marked by brokenness. but at his discretion we are being filled and mended.

I miss watching lost....

Shhh…..SHHHHHHH… if you are in a church with the chromosomes XX… No Talking for you! Haha jokes. But those have been flying around somewhat for the past few days. Can you guess what our latest paper is about? Oh you guessed it! WOMEN IN THE CHURCH! And on another not Kaleo has been cutting students loose and now our numbers are down to nine. Well we have been that way since last Thursday and there is one word for that absence of 70% of the population missing… silence.. and maybe a bit of relaxation thrown in and you got yourself a wild weekend! As soon as everybody left Bob, Tim and myself tracked down Marissa and using our manly brute strength fended off 4 females and tied her up in the stairwell leading to the girl’s dorms. It was a glorious victory and the chaos ensued as the morals and serenity of Kaleo drove away…well we still had morals, they just dropped down a notch or five.
But I’m going to have to back up a day to Tuesday. Tree hunting!! For a, guess? A CHRISTMAS TREE! YEAH! But it wasn’t the tree hunting that I had fun with. It was the ____________(two year story…or at least a month) that I did with Bob and John. After a successful mission of “hunt the tree” we came back to camp to have a Christmas dinner with Qwanoes staff and all of Kaleo. We all had to dress up and look our best for this meal because it was Christmas dinner. I dressed up pretty good…some may say “greasy” or “dirty” but I literally thought I looked good and is a look I’m looking forward to busting out in the future to cap off the evening was a talent show featuring dances, Alexisonfire covers featuring the “smash the drums so loud you think your ears are bleeding and cant hear anything else the band is playing” solo artist, and songs from females which for the guys create an awkward tension in the room for no apparent reason but they sound good none the less…. That’s how I would describe the talent show. It was fun. The past couple days have been warm/sunny and clear and the nights have been not warm or sunny but cold and clear for the stars to shine through. Sadly though we have quite the abundance of homework to keep us indoors and outside of the sun and I am currently stuck indoors punching out words.
Within the days of being alone I have been roommate-less and most of the people dear to my heart have been gone and I am finding myself missing them all the time and missing simply there company. I don’t know how Christmas break is going to be with them gone and all hanging in Ontario (well at least 50% of them) and I am probably not going to see any of them until January. Currently I am at peace with them and not really feeling left out because my longing to be home is soo strong that frankly I don’t give a rip. But when I’m at home it may be a different story.
At youth this week I got a chance to meet with the major prospect to be our new youth pastor at Bethel Tabernacle. He seems he has got the job since they did fly him out from Ontario, but couldn’t help but cringe when he spoke about love for his message. It wasn’t a bad topic and it is something that should be talked about all the time. But I can’t help but see love as a bucket. Something that is a simple idea. Portable. Light. Easy to carry once you got a hang of it and the right instruction. But when we try to look inside that bucket and grasp the bottom it is so deep that we can never fully explain or see its reality in this lifetime. And for the talk I felt like it was very, very surface level and I am hoping that in the future the messages get deeper for these students because they are hungry.
Well im signing off for now and next time you hear me speak on the
inter-web-data-base a.k.a. “the internet” ill be in Alberta! Yeah! I’m so excited because I see Alberta as the top dog province. Hearing about BC’s and Ontarios lame bylaws and taxes I have come to appreciate Alberta so much and probably will never move away. Unless I find a home in New Zealand when I go there in the summer.