One More Day Out in the Canyon

Ah, the days are flying by. I'm really tired and the week has just started, but I feel like I need to connect. So I blog because it's already past midnight in Missouri and I can't call anyone.

My days off were blissfully leisurely as usual. I did literally nothing. As you'll remember from the last post, I had several goals that I wished to accomplish this weekend. I'm happy to report that I did get the sleeping and reading goals done and even managed to watch 6 episodes of Grey's Anatomy in order to be fully caught up with this season. Unfortunately, I did not get to cleaning my room or finishing unpacking from my trip to Missouri. Also, the Grey's Anatomy episodes I watched had Chinese subtitles. Because I live in the middle of nowhere and, while we do have internet, it is sketchy at best and the full episodes on abc.com rarely work. So I found this website that puts the episodes up with Chinese subtitles which works much better. You gotta do what you gotta do.

Needless to say, it was a very relaxing weekend. One bummer is that it doesn't look like I'm going to get to go to LA for Thanksgiving because we now have to fly and it's just too expensive. But I think a bunch of us are going to go to Dan's house in Bend and I think it will be really fun and help this place to feel more like home. A lot of the staff will stay in the Canyon for Thanksgiving, so it should be a relaxing and fun 6 days off. (That's right, 6 days. YL is such a rocking organization to work for!)

Today was back to work. Thursdays tend to be really long days because there is just a lot going on. And I ended up staying up really late last night talking to Lacey, so I was kind of dragging this morning. We had the weekly staff meeting at 8:00 which was fun as always and from there we headed to Geronimo. We spent the morning cleaning the perif buildings and then we had ops lunch.

This weekend we have 2 groups. The large group is our Fall Work and Worship. We have 2 Work and Worship weekends during the year and they are just a chance for people to come, hang out, worship together, and do every crazy odd job we need done. We are so blessed to have people with such talent coming to do everything from plumbing and electric in the MCL to literally scraping the sludge out from the pond. They do all the extra things that we can't do. There are about 150 people coming. We get more done in these weekends then our staff can do in months. It's great.

There's a 2nd group here as well, which is a men's group from a church in Madras. There's only about 40 of them and they're staying in the finished side of the MCL. They're only here for 24 hours and they're making their own food in the Orchard Inn, so we probably won't really see them. But that did mean that we had to make up rooms for them and clean the MCL today.

We spent the afternoon doing a ton of random things. Jen and Erin always have a lot of meetings on Thursdays, so we get left by ourselves a lot. It continues to be hard to live and work together as little beefs from home come to work and vice versa. We're all hard-headed and positive that we're right and so we have definitely been feeling some tension. But I have been really encouraged because I feel like we're learning every day how to better handle potentially destructive situations. We have started bringing stuff up instead of just letting it fester and are all learning more and more how to deal with each other. But it is definitely a long and hard process and we could use a lot of prayer.

One a lighter note, I got to jump into the foam pit today and it was awesome. Also, I almost tripped over the same doorstop that caused me to fall last month again. That would have been really bad.

After work, we had half an hour to chill before we had to be at Pam's for small group. Small group was really good. Jen shared her life story and we discussed good old Celebration of Discipline, which I am having a love-hate relationship with right now. We take turns kind of co-leading the discussion and this chapter is my turn. Planning for it last night made me realize how much I miss Campaigners. I just keep realizing that I learn better by teaching which may sound backwards. But I dive so much deeper into something if I know I'm responsible for teaching it. So I really enjoyed this chapter because I felt like I took the time to really test it.

After small group, we had staff worship which was awesome this week. Judy ran it. Judy may be my favorite person here. She's kind of crazy, extremely peppy, hugs a lot and has a perpetually positive outlook on life. She was jamming out on her piano at worship tonight and managed to make every song upbeat. She just reminded me of every children's choir director I've ever seen. And she has invited us to tea next week. She's awesome.

After worship, we headed back to our house to have a continuation of small group because some people had some issues in the house that they wanted to air. I think it was a really good, really productive time and I hope to see a turn in our house because of it. We're all continuing to learn how to communicate best with one another. It's such a weird situation to be in, to move in with complete strangers whom you also work with and worship with and do absolutely everything with. We're working it out and I'm excited to see where we end up.

And now I'm very tired. And there's Morning Mud tomorrow. And even though it was awesome last week, I again don't want to go. Yet I promised. So I will awaken and go to Morning Mud.

I love you all and I continue to miss you like crazy and talk about you all the time. The first person to come visit wins a prize! It's gonna be something good! It could be all yours! Come visit!