Upcoming Events: January

A lot of things have been happening lately, and whether it's relevant or not to my dear readers, I'm going to post about it. Hmm, I think I've just discovered the true power bloggers have. It's alarming.

A young man came up to me on Wednesday and asked for forgiveness. He confessed to entering my home last July and taking my video games, which he then sold for cash. He felt terrible and wanted to make things right. His confession and apology shocked me, but what shocked me most, though, was my positive attitude. Who am I and what have I done to Shawn?! I had been bitter and upset months after the theft. After I had a pity party for myself, God reached down and let me borrow some maturity, so by the time the young man showed up, I was able to forgive him. I asked if I could help him with finances. He replied that he was doing far better and was growing in his relationship with Jesus. He asked if I wanted him to replace what he had taken. I replied that I wouldn't mind a PS3 to use as a Blu-Ray player but I wasn't concerned about getting the video games replaced. We prayed together and he ended up encouraging me more than I think I encouraged him. That young man is turning into a powerhouse of talent and energy for God, and no possession in my home is as valuable as that!

I'm in a play called "A Little Princess" and you should all come see it.

 

It's a children's play that happens to have adult roles in it. I play two characters, Monsieur Thibault and Mr. Carrisford. Monsieur Thibault is a French instructor, and he flirts with a French maid, Marie. But seeing how the young lady that plays Marie is 9 years old, we altered the script, much to my relief. I'm currently growing a mustache for the part. My pitiful little lip rug is only going to survive until January 21st, at which point I'll vigorously remove it from my face. Mr. Carrisford will undoubtedly get a mustache as well, although since he's a distinguished elderly gentleman, I'll hopefully get a large fake one for his part. (You may have gathered that our theater director, Alaynna, loves mustaches.) As if mustaches and myself weren't enough to entice you to come, my roommate Shane is in the play as well, playing the part of Lascar, Mr. Carrisford's servant from India. Now there is literally no excuse not to come.

On January 26th, we'll be having a combined-youth Christmas banquet, and I'm really really excited. This marks the first combined banquet in YEARS. The three Mennonite sister churches: Upper Deer Creek Church, Fairview Church, and Sunnyside Church, used to have combined activities all the time, but several years ago we all went our separate ways and organized our own banquets like school children that don't get along with each other. Alaynna (the theater director/White Christmas Party host) burst in and decided to change things up, for which I'm grateful. She's working from Fairview, I'm working from Sunnyside, and Victor is working from Upper to pull all the strings, gather support and attendance, and get all the three youth groups to play nice with each other. It's been so long that Sunnyside did things with the other churches, kids in my youth group confessed they don't even know ANYBODY that goes to the other churches' youth groups. I'm not worried, though. I'm looking forward to a fantastic evening, where I expect kids from my youth will meet new friends. 

When Alaynna and I decided on a banquet, we started out with the plans for a young, single adult banquet with a romantic Christmas theme. I suggested calling it the "Jingle Jingle Single Mingle." After proposing the idea to my youth group, I was met with strong opposition against a "dating" theme. Many individuals of the Sunnyside youth are nervous about sitting next to a member of the opposite gender, much less dating. So we turned it into a youth banquet with an emphasis on "making new friends" rather than "finding a life partner".  We invited young married couples to attend as well, and placed the attendance age range at 16-35. Unfortunately, this cuts out some youth that aren't quite 16 yet, but we plan to do this sort of thing regularly, so they should be able to catch the next one. (At least, we plan to do this more regularly than before. The last banquet of this type was back in 2004 or something like that.) To make sure youth groups didn't clump together, we'll be assigning seating to mix things up. The only way to guarantee a seat beside a certain person is to ask them to attend the banquet with you. We've added an additional benefit to bringing a date: single tickets are $16, two tickets are $25. Being the good, bargain-hunting Mennonites that they are, several of the guys in my youth group are hoping to find a loophole in this clause by inviting each other, but we're cracking down on that nonsense. 

While I was in Oregon, my pastor Floyd called me up to ask if I'd agree to joining the Sunday Evening Committee. Floyd called at 11am Iowa time, which was 9am Oregon time. Normally that would be perfectly fine and reasonable, but I had spent a good portion of the night awake with my niece Charlotte, holding her and rocking her to sleep. Also, I was enjoying vacation. So I awoke at 9am to grab my phone and listen to my energetic pastor talk about the exciting opportunity of planning Special Sunday Evening programs. My mind formulated a few choice questions, like "How long is the term for?" and "What duties does my position entail?" but I ended up mumbling out "uuhahhhmmmmm how long." and "ahhh whadda, er, what'm I s'posta do?" I'm not intelligible, much less eloquent, in the morning. I promptly forgot Floyd's responses and fell back asleep. I suppose if you want to relay information to me AND have me remember it, tell it to me when I'm not on vacation and I've been awake a minimum of 2 hours. Later that afternoon, I called him back and asked the questions again. Because I couldn't think of any valid excuses and realized that God's blessings sometimes show up as strange opportunities, I agreed to take the position. 

Our first meeting was last Tuesday evening. I still didn't know how long a term on the Sunday Evening Committee (SEC) was, but quickly found that I had signed away 1 1/2 years of my life. I'm on the committee with two married couples from my church that are my parents age, so I felt decidedly young and non-married. The meeting went well. We plan roughly one Sunday evening program per month, so we sketched a rough draft of plans for the next 6 months. Here I was thinking we'd meet every month and hash out details, but evidently the veterans of the SEC are very practical. If we can plan 6 months in a single evening, we can banish the need to meet every month. After 3 hours our creativity dwindled and we called the meeting adjourned. We've got awesome plans laid out for the foreseeable future, so if you happen to be plan-free on Sunday evenings, come to Sunnyside Mennonite.

That wraps up this edition of recent and upcoming events. Stay tuned for more tomfoolery, hooliganism, and haberdashery.

P.S. If you have any ideas for creative ways to honor Mothers and Fathers, let me know. I'll incorporate them into our Sunday evening services in May and June.