Yay life!

Lately I have been getting a lot of spam in my inbox, and today was no exception. One of the e-mails was from Sarah E. So-And-So and all I read on the subject line was "Congratulations!" I thought I had "won" some "contest." But then I opened it... and VOILA!
Dear Gloria,

Congratulations! I am pleased to inform you that you have been admitted to the Arts, 4-Year Liberal Studies program in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Waterloo for the Fall 2009 term.

And I've been bouncing around ever since I opened this! :D

By the way, for those of you who don't know, I want to double major in Peace and Conflict Studies and Religious Studies. :)

Ugh.

Sometimes, the best way one can express emotion is through a grunt. That's what I think.

Right now I am standing in a gust of whirling thoughts and I'm not sure which one to grab onto and focus on.

(After much contemplation and editing...)

Today I saw my middle school crush. He was driving. I was biking. We were at an intersection. I'm pretty sure he saw me too because he looked over at me when he drove by. The experience made me smile because it made me happy seeing that I have concrete examples in my life of being able to put certain obsessions totally behind me.

I liked him for 3 years. Half that time we didn't even go to the same school anymore. For a twelve year old, that's dedication.

My crush was an awkward, Christian nerd back then. He grew up to be a gorgeous body builder though, and he writes things on his friends walls like, "Yo dawg! Let's go to the cluuuuuuuuuuub 2night! The laaaaaaaadies love me!" Personally, I liked him better when he was awkward.

The Roast Beef Miracle!

So I was weighing and packaging roast beef on wax paper, like I might do any other day at work... when I looked down and WHAM! There, starring right back at me, was a rabbit! My co-workers agreed. My boss took a picture which is going on the Facebook group for our store. It was quite exciting. If only it had been the face of the Virgin Mary... Oh well. :)

My Grand Adventure

I did it! This is how it went:

This was our shbeal: "Hi, I'm Gloria" "And I'm Michelle" "We're doing random acts of kindness today and we wondered if there was anything we could do for you! Housework, weeding...?"

We alternated taking turns speaking. It was my friend's idea to stick in the "random acts of kindness" part because that's a little more acceptable to people then "we're trying to show love to you".

At first we received a slew of rejections. Weirdly enough, a lot of people were like, "Actually, I JUST finished ALL my housecleaning now." Really? Sunday is cleaning day? Who knew!

A few people were nice but politely told us they couldn't think of anything for us to do. I suppose I understand. I don't know how I would react if someone had come to my apartment door asking me if she could do some housework for me.

One lady looked at us horrified, abruptly said, "No!" and closed the door on us. Then about 5 seconds later she opened the door again and told her little girl who was playing with the other kids to come inside. She came at the end of about 15 rejections, so even though I wasn't expecting people in general to be anything but weirded out, I was still a bit disheartened.

We went to a few more doors and were rejected a few more times.

Then we saw one Chinese lady out on her front lawn holding her baby. My friend said, "Let's go to her!" So we did. She couldn't think of anything, just like everyone else, but she asked if we were students, what we were doing this summer, where we lived, why we were doing this, etc. She then said, "Well, I can't think of anything today but I have been looking for a tutor to teach me English." Eager for SOMETHING, I said, "Okay!" She invited us in. So we came in and she chopped us up some watermelon and we talked with her for the next half hour or so! It turns out she has a phD and she's a professor at the university teaching some sort of business course. She doesn't know much about Canadian culture and especially wants to know about the culture of Canadian students! So, we arranged that every Sunday I would come for an hour and teach her about Canadian culture among young people!

AND She figured out I was a Christian from what I'm studying next year and asked what church I go to. It turns out, she's not a Christian, (she explained that most Chinese are atheists) but she's looking for a local church to visit! She said she wanted me to teach her about Christianity and that she was "open to it!" Whoah. I was NOT seeking to do that but that's SO cool!

So that was ABSOLUTELY LOVELY!

Eventually, we headed out and knocked on more doors. We had a lot more trouble with people actually answering their doors this time and we wondered if word of us got around and people just didn't want to deal with these two weirdos. Then we figured out that maybe we were starting to enter an area of the neighbourhood most occupied by absentee students, because a lot of the mailboxes were jam packed with mail.

Then we knocked on our final door. A girl about my age answered, we did our shbeal, and she couldn't think of anything at first. My friend suggested weeding. She nonchalantly was like, "Sure." We got a plastic bag from her and ecstatically started weeding - FINALLY! A job to do! The residents of the house didn't interact with us at all. At one point though, we filled the bag so I knocked on the door for another one. Some other guy answered the door and I was like, "Hi, we filled up our first bag, can we have another one?" He was like, "uhh... why are you weeding our lawn?" I explained that we were doing a random act of kindness. Apparently the first girl didn't tell anyone about us. Confused, he got us another bag and said, "uhh... thanks for doing that, eh?" That made me feel good. When he left the house a few minutes later he didn't even look at us though. I guess they didn't know what to do with these two randomers who wanted to do their weeding for them! Oh well.

So all in all it was quite an adventure. I would say that despite the many, many rejections, it was a wonderful way to spend an afternoon and I would totally do it again.

Yay for experiments!

Peace is The Opposite of Security

- Dietrich Bonhoeffer

It has been occurring to me lately that safety is not something I'm supposed to be concerned about because concern for my security is what often keeps me from living biblically and loving the way Jesus loved. Jesus himself seems to have little regard for safety, fasting for 40 days, not giving a defence for himself at his trial, speaking out against powerful figures, eating with the lowest of the low, and being homeless. His instructions to his disciples mirror this tendency.

Since high school, a prominent question on my heart has been, "What is the difference between those who follow Jesus and those who do not?" Honestly, most of the "differences" I have come across have been unsubstantial and inconsistent - certainly nothing to get too excited over.

I'm thinking maybe the difference is supposed to be that, just like in the Bible, with Jesus, his apostles and the prophets, God really does want us to risk our lives - figuratively AND physically. I'm thinking maybe true faith is supposed to be dangerous in its experimentation, that its ab0ut more than attempting to be a decently nice person in your day to day life and having a cosmic shoulder to cry on.

I don't mean to say that I'm going to try to kill myself. I do mean to say that I'm going to experiment with this idea of loving with literal abandonment of my self to the point where I don't let my own safety stop me from embracing my opporunities to love. I'm going to trust that God will protect me as He sees fit.

Project #1: Going door to door with a couple of friends in my city's poorest neighbourhood to ask if there is any house or yard work we can do for them for the afternoon for free. If nobody in the whole neighbourhood wants give us something to do, we'll pick up garbage off their streets.

I like this idea because its simple, it doesn't cost me any money, its relational and I find it terrifying. At the same time I'm not being entirely irrational (God DID give us brains...) - I won't be alone in this adventure (yay for crazy friends!) and my city's poorest neighbourhood is hardly the slums of India. From what I understand, this neighbourhood consists mostly of people on welfare, new immigrant families with young children and university students. That's not too much to handle for a first time experiment I think. We shall see.

My Brother is Awesome

My brother is in New Zealand right now, doing his university co-op.

He comes from a family of quiet, reserved people. Thus, I am so VERY proud of him for stepping outside our family's box and taking some risks! I am so proud, in fact, that I am going to show him off on my blog. Here are three of his documented adventures:

1) Sky-Diving

2) Bungee Jumping

3) Super Extreme Bungee Jumping

Yay Jon!

"Charity" Friendship - A Case Study in My Need for an Attitude Adjustment

The other week a friend of mine said, "I hope I'm not somebody's 'that friend', that awkward friend people keep around because they feel its their Christian duty." All of us agreed that that would be horrible. We all had examples of "that friend" in our own lives and we all assured each other that none of us was "that friend" to each other.

I admit I am currently ignoring a "we should keep in touch" e-mail from my present "that friend." Throughout the year, I have tried to keep up a friendly facade to his face. I feel guilty for ignoring him now but its gotten to the point where the mere sight of him exhausts me and I cannot keep up the act anymore. And because school is over, I no longer have to.

I've been thinking a lot about this. He is certainly not my first "that friend." But this is a case study so I'll focus on him. This is what I think I've figured out:

At first, I genuinely did think he was great. A little awkward and idiosyncratic, but seriously, who isn't? I myself am awkward and idiosyncratic. So whatever. I feel like this is important. I didn't ALWAYS see him as a "charity case".

Then I invited him to a Halloween party. At the party, we all played "The Story Game" where everyone writes a paragraph to begin a story. Then they pass the page along until everyone has had a chance to contribute their own paragraphs to the story. He was the only guy there. The rest were conservative females. He chose to write about things like rape, violence and incest. People were discusted and I was embarrassed. Despite this I never talked to him about it and I think I even thanked him for for his addition of testosterone to the party. I think it was more or less at this point when my real friendship turned into a charity friendship.

Then it began to creep me out that he always seemed to know what was going on on my Facebook wall. He would say things in class like, "I liked your status about the hippo!" when I had only changed my status to being about the hippo a few minutes before our class started. I was uncomfortable but I never talked to him about that either.

Then it really began to annoy me that he talked incessantly and never asked my opinion. In fact, he doesn't know who I am at all, because he didn't ask, or if he did, he didn't give me more than a few seconds to respond before interrupting. I felt used, like I wasn't a person but something for him to deposit his thoughts at. This has been my biggest cause for resentment. But I have never said a word about it.

I know I am one of his few friends, so I've tried to be "nice" to him. But you know, there's a reason people like that don't have many friends. Its because they don't know that what they do annoys people. And that's because those of us who are "ohhh-so-sacrificial" in putting up with them in the first place are all a bunch of non-confrontational fraidy-cats who don't actually care enough about these people to open up and just be honest! Or at least I am.

I'm not doing him a favor by silently enduring him. I'm just protecting myself from a potentially messy confrontation and encouraging his maladaptive social patterns! And that's really selfish of me.

How I reacted to him was wrong, stressful for me, and entirely unnecessary. I probably could have fixed things from the beginning if I had cared enough. I know I would never, ever want to be silently endured by someone I thought was my friend. I would not want to be someone's reason to feel like a superior good person because they have the patient stamina to put up with me long term. I would rather they just stopped being my friend.

Lesson: For the sake of other potential "those friends'" future friendships with other people and for my sanity so that I no longer ever have to have another "that friend" again, I resolve to get some balls.

But truly, this is often an issue I feel over my head in, so if you have something to add or point out to me, please do.