Sunday, April 23, 2006

Crazy ...Crazy...Crazy

It's been almost a month since my last post. Sorry, this life thing, or more correctly a lack thereof, got way out of hand.

I taught on a Sunday morning. We are discussing the book of 1 John. The series is called Experiencing God. My weekend was called Experiencing God: In Worship. I struggled to put it together but after all was said and done I received pretty positive feedback.

I have done a ton of video editing. We held our last club, our high school outreach, for the school year. I know, a little a early, but we are switching to Ultimate Frisbee for the spring/summer. But I digress. Our last club has become senior night. So for our seniors, I took the last 7 years of video footage from meetings, trips, retreats and hanging out and condensed it to a 20 minute highlight reel. I burned it ( a 12 hour nightmare which culminated with a support tech at apple reading to me from an iDVD manual...ugh!!!) and all the videos from their Student Ministry experience with us into a 2-disc set. The end result was worth it, all the seniors really appreciated it.

We had a drama planned for Palm Sunday which got turned into a video. After the video was shot and edited it got the kai-bash because it didn't express what we were trying to get across. Only to get replaced with another video....more editing.

Both of my sons came down with pneumonia. The four year old, who I have been referring lately to as Crab Man, because his afro is starting to look like the character of the same name from the show, my name is Earl, had only a mild case and was out of commission for a couple of days. The older guy was out of the game for a good ten days, I mean out.

I was asked to read scripture at a local Evangelical Free church at their annual Good Friday service. It's actually six half-hour services that clergy from all over the area lead. It's like a 35 year tradition or something like that. I read at the 12:30 and my boss, Rich, spoke at the 1:00. Jacket and Tie, Platform, really traditional hymns, I felt like a fish out of water. It was good though, to see the body of Christ come together across denominational and traditional lines to celebrate the sacrifice of Good Friday.

That night we held a healing service at Crossroads. There has been a group of 15-20 of us gathering each week to pray, no agenda, just pray for whatever God seems to be leading us to pray for. About half of that group is between the ages of 15-21. Those folks, young people, whatever you want to call them, volunteered to pray for people at this healing service. God worked in huge ways in and through all of us who were there that night.

Family came in for Easter. I had lamb on the menu only to learn my sister and her boyfriend had become vegetarians. So I added a roasted veggie stack and angel hair pasta with pesto to the day's fare. A couple of friends from church stopped by and we spent to afternoon eating and talking.

I was inexplicably overcome with the urge to listen to Carol King. I had this song in my head from elementary school called Really Rosie, from the children's animated movie. I found it online as well as some classics, like, So far away and It's too late. I actually shocked Gail when the sounds of Carol started emanating from my laptop. It's good to know I can still shock my wife.

We went to Boston for two days to visit family and check out the Star Wars exhibit at the Museum of Science. I took some pictures of the life sized annakin and Han solo mannequins. I can't wait to Photoshop my boys faces onto anni and Han. If they turn out okay I'll post them here.

Somewhere along the line, I imploded. I was tired, way over-tired. I was doing stupid stuff like drinking energy drinks to stay up until 3:00am working, only to get up at 6:00 am with my sick kids. My implosions manifest themselves in anger. I'm short with the people closest to me. I live on the edge during these times feeling like I'm always one step away from blowing up. I am in the process of the cleaning up the mess I had let myself fall into and trying to reconnect with my family.

I'm not sure if this post has any other value than for me to see in black and white the ridiculous pace I kept for the last month and maybe try to do something about it....either that or go buy more energy drinks.

1 comment:

Greg said...

Sounds like things got crazy for a little while. Thank goodness for mid-stream corrections and forgiveness.

A well timed energy drink is a key tool for me in the early evening if I am dragging. But probably more often than not I need to forego the coffee and go to bed early (I need to get better about this) and wake up refreshed instead of dragging.

Hope things ease up for you on the schedule!