We had church tonight instead of tomorrow to give everyone a chance to be with their families on Christmas Eve. Basically, we sang for like 10 minutes, someone read a scripture, and John talked about what an awesome thing it is for the entire world to be talking about Christ and his birth at this time every year.
Then we had a prayer and everyone brought food, so we all sat around socializing and just talking to one another. I got caught up talking to this woman I met on Sunday named Elaine. She's one of those people who doesn't stop once she gets started. And she's also one of those who doesn't have a filter--she says whatever comes into her mind but tells it in such a vivid way, you can almost see the motion picture behind her eyes. People like that fascinate me, so I just sat and listened to her and she began telling me how God's taught her the hard lesson of having no other gods before him. She told of how her sister had been her rock and then she died. Well, just shortly after, she said the man she worked for filled that void her sister left by becoming someone Elaine could lean on--he was now her rock. Only, he died too.
It was kind of weird how that happened. But she made her point that God should have been her "one and only" the whole time and that it took a lot of pain to figure that out. She then segued into a whole story about the man she worked for, which somehow took another tangent into her teen years when she worked for a woman who paid her $5 a week back in the 70s to baby-sit her children and later accused her of sleeping with her husband (to which Elaine vowed that she hadn't).
She went on and on, and I feel like I got quite a glimpse into this woman's life, just in the half hour she talked. Afterward, I guess I just started thinking about how many people there are who need to talk and be listened to. She's kind of crazy--this lady--but I really enjoyed listening to her. We laughed a lot. She said the oddest things, but I do love odd people. After that, I didn't get to have any in-depth conversations with any other church members, but I chatted briefly with a few, and I just love them all.
An absurd but true statement needs to be inserted here: people are cool. I was just in such a state of elation all the way home. I love my family. And the world is a good place because of them.
Avenues to Cloud 9 and Neverland are there in the dirt if you just look for them.
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1 comments:
Thank you for writing this. It really makes me stop and think about the short (but probably should be longer) conversations I have everyday. Hope you are having a good break. When do you find out about where you are going and such?
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