I've been getting hints from friends that I should update my blog, some more blatant than others. I suppose it has been a month (I consider it a month anyway), and a lot has happened in that month. Where do I begin?
The Leadership Summit went really well. The talk from Bono was very interesting, and although it was the major advertizing point for the weekend, the sessions I really learned from were the ones about church development. There were two opportunities for the dozen or so of us from the Temple to get together and discuss what we had been learning. We talked a lot about vision. In the end, we mostly came to the conclusion that our vision should be passion. That may seem odd, considering that passion is generally what you use to fuel a vision, but it seems that's what our church needs. We have plenty of people who are wonderfully talented and want to be involved, but the opportunities are not... blatant. I almost feel like I'm copping out by moving to Calgary for the semester, but I know I can play my part in prayer rather than presence. In fact, I will probably do more by being here than there, considering that I would be way to busy to help out if I was having a full semester at MUN right now.
Speaking of prayer, I've been really enjoying waiting on God lately. I find that a whole lot easier to do when my schedule isn't full. My Bible reading has been slipping, though. I've been reading Daniel. The last time I read Daniel, I was working at Scotian Glen five summers ago. I was so interested in understanding Old Testament prophesy and how it applied to the New Testament and end times. I often look back on that summer as a trial by fire, but it was really a time of searching and learning fresh lessons from God. I hope next summer will be a similar experience.
Lindsay and Michael's wedding was beautiful. Lindsay, my cousin, has two Newfie parents but never lived in Newfoundland herself. Because of this, my uncle Kerry decided to screech her in... while she was wearing her wedding dress. Aunt Cheryl was so afraid that the cod she had to kiss would drip on her and the dress would be ruined. Fortunately, there were no stains and lots of pictures. The wedding cake was bright blue, four-tiered, and decorated with seashells. That's one amazing cake. It was also fun to see some old friends there and some family I haven't seen in years. We took a bunch of 'once-in-a-lifetime' pictures of groups of family that will most likely only ever be together again for weddings and funerals, if at all.
I am discovering the joys of Photo Bucket. Hopefully that will mean that I can put some photos up here soon to compliment my writing.
My family trip to Vancouver was fun. I enjoyed spending the time with my brother and my parents. Now that I have a digital camera, I was able to take some great pictures of our trip. We saw the oldest phone booth in the world, the largest tractor in the world, and a city that was destroyed by a volcano eruption in less than two minutes. We went on plenty of scenic hikes and enjoyed our last evening at the TELUS World of Science in Vancouver. I have now officially visited every TELUS World of Science location on the map. The last night, we went to a Mongolian restaurant where we payed for our food by weight. If we could guess to the cent how much our meal would cost, we got it free. If we guessed a cent off, we would get it 50% off. Timothy guessed one cent off and I guessed correctly. Timothy's feat is actually more impressive, however. I kinda cheated without realizing that I was cheating. Timothy's was a purely educated guess.
I've been reading Gulliver's Travels, which is an interesting read. I was more than four quarters of the way through before I realized that it was satire. Much of the opinions I believed the author, Jonathan Swift, held were in fact opinions he was mocking. Still, his true views on other subjects are probably unknowingly communicated, such as sexism, racism, and a complete disrespect or misunderstanding of democracy. It seems that he could only understand a society to be anarchist or monarchist, that a society must have a dictatorship in order to be saved from 'savagery'. He makes no distinction between a scientist, an artist, and a philosopher in that there are no defined lines in his writing separating general education into parts. He calls politics, medicine, and astrology all arts and sciences interchangably without making an attempt to mean something different one from the other. There is only the educated and the uneducated in his writing; the apt and the failed. He seems to think false testimony the ultimate vice and uses many words to refer to it, such as perjury and forswearing. He also writes the book on the pretense that it is possible that vast stretches of land have yet to be discovered in the world. It has been wonderful to peek into the mind of a 18th-century Englishman. The next book on my list is "The Purpose Driven Life". I want to have read it by the time I hear Rick Warren speak at Urbana.
I will end this post on a point of great excitement and vigour. Next weekend I am attending Alberta's divisional Youth Councils. There are three wonderful things about this.
1) Phil Cann, the host of Quest, is going to be the guest speaker.
2) I think I'm going to see a lot of friends there. If you're reading this and you're planning on attending, please murmur back to tell me you're going.
3) It's being held at Pine Lake! That deserves an exclamation mark. I've been wanting (and trying) to go back to Pine Lake for years. This is an answer to prayer, I can tell you.
The Leadership Summit went really well. The talk from Bono was very interesting, and although it was the major advertizing point for the weekend, the sessions I really learned from were the ones about church development. There were two opportunities for the dozen or so of us from the Temple to get together and discuss what we had been learning. We talked a lot about vision. In the end, we mostly came to the conclusion that our vision should be passion. That may seem odd, considering that passion is generally what you use to fuel a vision, but it seems that's what our church needs. We have plenty of people who are wonderfully talented and want to be involved, but the opportunities are not... blatant. I almost feel like I'm copping out by moving to Calgary for the semester, but I know I can play my part in prayer rather than presence. In fact, I will probably do more by being here than there, considering that I would be way to busy to help out if I was having a full semester at MUN right now.
Speaking of prayer, I've been really enjoying waiting on God lately. I find that a whole lot easier to do when my schedule isn't full. My Bible reading has been slipping, though. I've been reading Daniel. The last time I read Daniel, I was working at Scotian Glen five summers ago. I was so interested in understanding Old Testament prophesy and how it applied to the New Testament and end times. I often look back on that summer as a trial by fire, but it was really a time of searching and learning fresh lessons from God. I hope next summer will be a similar experience.
Lindsay and Michael's wedding was beautiful. Lindsay, my cousin, has two Newfie parents but never lived in Newfoundland herself. Because of this, my uncle Kerry decided to screech her in... while she was wearing her wedding dress. Aunt Cheryl was so afraid that the cod she had to kiss would drip on her and the dress would be ruined. Fortunately, there were no stains and lots of pictures. The wedding cake was bright blue, four-tiered, and decorated with seashells. That's one amazing cake. It was also fun to see some old friends there and some family I haven't seen in years. We took a bunch of 'once-in-a-lifetime' pictures of groups of family that will most likely only ever be together again for weddings and funerals, if at all.
I am discovering the joys of Photo Bucket. Hopefully that will mean that I can put some photos up here soon to compliment my writing.
My family trip to Vancouver was fun. I enjoyed spending the time with my brother and my parents. Now that I have a digital camera, I was able to take some great pictures of our trip. We saw the oldest phone booth in the world, the largest tractor in the world, and a city that was destroyed by a volcano eruption in less than two minutes. We went on plenty of scenic hikes and enjoyed our last evening at the TELUS World of Science in Vancouver. I have now officially visited every TELUS World of Science location on the map. The last night, we went to a Mongolian restaurant where we payed for our food by weight. If we could guess to the cent how much our meal would cost, we got it free. If we guessed a cent off, we would get it 50% off. Timothy guessed one cent off and I guessed correctly. Timothy's feat is actually more impressive, however. I kinda cheated without realizing that I was cheating. Timothy's was a purely educated guess.
I've been reading Gulliver's Travels, which is an interesting read. I was more than four quarters of the way through before I realized that it was satire. Much of the opinions I believed the author, Jonathan Swift, held were in fact opinions he was mocking. Still, his true views on other subjects are probably unknowingly communicated, such as sexism, racism, and a complete disrespect or misunderstanding of democracy. It seems that he could only understand a society to be anarchist or monarchist, that a society must have a dictatorship in order to be saved from 'savagery'. He makes no distinction between a scientist, an artist, and a philosopher in that there are no defined lines in his writing separating general education into parts. He calls politics, medicine, and astrology all arts and sciences interchangably without making an attempt to mean something different one from the other. There is only the educated and the uneducated in his writing; the apt and the failed. He seems to think false testimony the ultimate vice and uses many words to refer to it, such as perjury and forswearing. He also writes the book on the pretense that it is possible that vast stretches of land have yet to be discovered in the world. It has been wonderful to peek into the mind of a 18th-century Englishman. The next book on my list is "The Purpose Driven Life". I want to have read it by the time I hear Rick Warren speak at Urbana.
I will end this post on a point of great excitement and vigour. Next weekend I am attending Alberta's divisional Youth Councils. There are three wonderful things about this.
1) Phil Cann, the host of Quest, is going to be the guest speaker.
2) I think I'm going to see a lot of friends there. If you're reading this and you're planning on attending, please murmur back to tell me you're going.
3) It's being held at Pine Lake! That deserves an exclamation mark. I've been wanting (and trying) to go back to Pine Lake for years. This is an answer to prayer, I can tell you.
