…and stuff

So I’ve just had the best weekend I’ve had in so long. Unfortunately, like (almost) all good things, it has come to an end.

Firstly there was the CYC finale on Friday night – the usual song and praise evening. Since the year has been themed on David, the finale was also themed on David. David Mansfield gave an excellent talk about praise in David’s life, particularly in regards to the Psalms. Then there was the singing, and some interesting meditations about praise etc. The singing was just magical, particularly the vocal group – that was the very definition of music.

We had a friend (more specifically, a close friend of Sharon’s) from up north stay with us for the weekend, who came down for the finale – Johanna. So that was fun too. Then on the Saturday night was prize night – the little kids were so cute with their play about the lost coin. Dinner was great too – pizza, ice cream, coca cola – my three favourite food groups.

And then there was the photography. I was, I guess you could say, the main photographer for the evening. Unfortunately that meant that the parts of the evening I was involved in – the two choral items, and the ‘senior kids’ play, had no photos taken with a real camera, although I’m sure others took some photos with their little dinky P & S cameras. I’m still working on the post processing, although it’s rather limited. I’ve not really got the hang of the whole curves thing in photoshop, so the majority of the post processing is limited to auto colour, auto contrast, auto levels, and the occasional cropping. It’s also pretty amazing how many photos I took – 373 to be exact, although I’ve been sorting through them in iPhoto, discarding the not-so-good photos. I’m down to 114 now.

Finally, there was Sunday. We (Sharon, Jonners and I) drove Johanna back home. We went to the Watagans ecclesia for the meeting, where James Mansfield gave an excellent exhortation on women in the Bible, and how Jesus treated them as at least equals, if not more important, than men in his ministry. He demonstrated rather convincingly the thorough knowledge Jesus had of day to day activities women would usually perform, and talked about how women were closely involved in supporting Jesus throughout his ministry more completely than providing food etc. Indeed, it was to the women that he first appeared after his resurrection. It was the women that stood by him while he was crucified – the men had all fled for their lives. He also gave the example of Mary and Martha. The exhortation was rather fitting, given his (eldest?) daughter had just been baptised that week.

After the meeting we all had a great bbq lunch at the home of someone whose name escapes me. The time in the middle was somewhat dramatic though – on the way to the bbq a car with 2 girls in it had swerved to miss on oncoming car (those roads were unbelievably narrow – little more than one lane in width) and had rolled their car, upside down, into a ditch beside the road. Quite fortunately, neither of them were hurt, but it was a sobering experience.

So the bbq lunch was great – caught up with some people I don’t know all that well. Had a bit of a chat with Hannah and her sister – not sure of her name. And then it was time to come home. That was the not-so fun bit – the traffic on the F3 was pretty awful. And now a nice quiet peaceful evening in front of the computer, before Monday morning, work, tiredness, frustration, coffee, and all that comes with a busy week.