My Heart

It's been quite a while since I've blogged about myself and my life - I've been covering other links and features from various websites, so I thought it was about time to blog a bit about myself again.  I want to share some of the things on my heart currently (those of who you know me best, know my heart is a vast ocean, so this will be but a drop!).

At the end of 2009 when I was in South Africa, I experienced, for the very first time in my life, a true desire to go to church and worship.  It was not an obligation and as soon as the Sunday service ended, all I could think about was 'when is the next service?'.  When I moved this past August, I had no idea how long I would be in the area.  I was just on term work and didn't know how much I should connect with the community.  I was also working nights during the week and so when the weekend rolled around, I slept a lot of time sleeping, trying to recover from the past week and preparing for the lack of sleep for the next week.

So it wasn't until late October that I finally went to a local church.  The reason I picked this specific one was the fact that they take out full page ads in the newspaper to promote the various programs in the church which focus on the community at large.  One example is that they fix up vehicles and basically give away cars (there are some rules, but that's the basic premise) and the people receiving the vehicles don't have to go to the church - they don't even have to be Christians.

Life has been incredibly busy, especially since I started teaching again in mid-October.  I get to the end of the week exhausted, with a pile of marking and prepping that never seems to get smaller.  A few weeks I've made the decision to get a few more hours of sleep versus going to church.  But the weeks I've decided to go have been such a blessing.  It's amazing how different it feels when the pastor at the front speaks directly (doesn't talk around an issue), and is real, to the point of sharing the messiness of his own life.  It's been a really good church for me to worship in on Sundays and now I'm hoping that I can also connect with the people in other ways in the new year.