A Week Without Me

It's been a long week this past one. Interesting, rather intense, but straight forward.

It's been hard not being able to blog, I kept having thoughts about what I could blog about, but I couldn't do it.

At the moment I'm in the internet Cafe under the cinemas in the City. I've just spent the past hour in the park lying in the sun and reading about Nelson Mandela. I think I'm only 100 or so pages from the end. This really has been a long walk to freedom. Good though. I'm getting inspired.

Love Is was good. The past week was intense because of it. The lead up was hard because evangelistic messages always weigh heavily on me. But this had the added dimentions of having a production that carried artistic and personal significance for me going along with it. Not to mention the fact that in the message I publicly discussed the general state of my love life with about 300 people, many of them I had never met before. It was good for a laugh. I was once told that it has been said that comedy is born out of anger. I think often my jokes are born out of my inadequacies. If I can't fix it, I'll joke about it. It neutralises the threat to a certain extent. But it does tend to make much of my life public property.

The things we do for the gospel. Good thing it's worth giving up a lot more than a bit of my perceived dignity for.

The show on Saturday night was good. I liked seeing it all come together. The crowd felt a little flat to begin with. Perhaps a little ambivalent to interact with the show. But I think they came around. It was great to see that the show came off. Everything worked, it all felt cohesive, and it was good fun.

Giving the message was fun. I kept thinking that I making too much noise while treading on the stage. The radio mic was fun. I had decided to do the whole thing without extensive notes. That was both a blessing and a hindrance. It was good to be free but a little scary that I could stuff up real bad. It felt a bit like rock-climbing without a rope might feel (a little less dangerous though).

After the show we had pizza and Chinese and was feeling sufficiently stuffed that 10pm felt like 1am. When everyone else had gone home Anmol and I went and cleaned the kitchen in the church before going home. I'm always the last to go.

Arriving at Church on Sunday morning and finding that we'd been robbed was a rather surreal experience. I turned up to the sound desk and Tim was in it. He pointed at an empty bracket on the roof where the projector should have been and said "Projector?". Then he pointed at the spot where the computer should have been and said "Computer?" and at the place where the DVD player normally lives and said "DVD player?" It was at this point that I realised what was happening. At first I thought someone might just have done and over-zealous tidy-up but I was disabused of that idea by the time I had comprehened the empty computer spot.

But I held on to it as a better possibility than being robbed. A few of us went and searched the church just in case someone had decided that all the most expensive stuff in the church should live in a better place than where they belong, but it was a rather pointless exercise.

We lost almost every technical thing we needed to run the show (including the DVD of the show which was in the DVD player) but the losses didn't phase me much. It was just a hurdle that needed to be gotten over. Something always has to go wrong at the last minute and this was the problem for "Love Is". I immediately started thinking about how we could replace the stuff we needed by 6:30pm. I was worried about all the stuff Tim lost though. Things owned by a person have more significance than things owned by a church.

Pretty quickly everyone pulled together to get the show back up and running. Tim was great. There wasn't really a time where we thought we couldn't run the show, it was just a question of how. And we got back with a minimum of fuss although it was hard not to feel at least a bit stressed at times.

Steve and Stephen both prayed for the people who robbed us at the beginning of the services. It was good. I was happy to see the church praying for those who have hurt us. I love seeing love in action.

Sunday's show was a different affair. The crowd felt warmer, and having got to the show after the events of the day, made it a much sweeter event.

Preaching was good again. I paced less because Helen told my to. She choreographed my preaching. I was very scared that I had my fly undone, so much so that lost my place. I thought I could read it on people's faces. I think I thought they all seemed to have a look of embarrassed horror on their faces. But perhaps they were just worried about me in general.

It felt good sleeping last night.