Several things happened tonight at church that got me extremely frustrated. I help out with the audio visual system at church. At church we seem to have people that think we can do something “on the fly” without previous testing of the system. This is what happened tonight. They wanted to show about 150 different pictures on the screen. The only problem was that the program we were using had not been tested previously on the computer system. We did not know they wanted to show these pictures until 15 minutes before services started. We were not able to view them correctly. So everyone probably thought I was stupid because I was not able to get the pictures up on the screen in time for the service. PEOPLE, PLEASE PLAN AHEAD!!!! Your lack of planning does not constitute an emergency on my part.
I also got asked if I was going to be helping out at VBS this week. Some people don’t seem to understand that I do have to earn money. Church is not my entire life. I don’t like being asked to do things at the last minute….ie the Sunday night before VBS starts.

I can’t sleep.
Earlier I made a statement about wanting to quit my job and becoming a youth minister. I’ve received some feedback about it and wanted to clarify my position. In an ideal situation youth ministry would be an ideal job. However in today’s society I don’t feel as though it is practical….ie the pay just isn’t there. I usually come back from camp in some type of dreamland wanting to save the world. Now I know that it just can’t be done. What can I do? Keep doing what I have been doing. Counselor at camps. Devotional speaker at retreats. Most of all it just means being a friend to young people. That’s all camp is. It means building friendships over a week’s time. The more friendship one has at a church, the less likely the person will be to leave it later on in life.
There is a big plywood mountain in front of my church. It was built to promote this week’s Vacation Bible School….”Climb Faith Mountain.” Obviously it is doing its job because I’ve already had 2 people who don’t go to church with me comment on the mountain. We’ve already had a few other churches ask to borrow the sign to promote their VBS.
Ah yes. VBS. That break in the summer when you’d go to church in the morning on a weekday. The first couple of days it seemed strange to be at church during such a weird time. Each day you were urged “Boost our Bible School” by bringing a friend. Eventually you’d start inviting some of your friends by the 2nd or 3rd day….and get one of those “I brought one” tags to wear proudly. Cookies and strong punch was served in the middle of Bible class. I never really got over that kick of the Hawaiian Punch they seemed to serve each year.
VBS isn’t as simple as what it once was. Gone are elementary aged classes. Now my church is doing a bunch of centers which they visit each day on a different schedule. They don’t just sit around in Bible classes all day. VBS has become bigger every year. Seems like all the churches are competing for attention, but aren’t we all?
The post office guy didn’t tell me the whole truth. He said the current rate for postcards is 23 cents. This isn’t true. It’s 21 cents. Next week it will be 23 cents. I visited the post office to mail a few things yesterday. I was also hoping to get extra postage so these 21 cent stamps wouldn’t be so useless to me. Now I figure I’ll have to either mail some postcards this week or make yet another trip to the neighborhood post office for twelve 2 cent stamps.

Last time I checked, Nortel’s stock was down to $1.17. It’s getting to where I just don’t even want to hear bad news anymore. I don’t know if we’ll ever recover. Anyways it’s not something I can control, so why worry about it.
VBS Junkies – there’s always people in the community who use Vacation Bible School as a free babysitting service. Each week they go to a different church in the community, drop their kids off at 9AM and then pick them up again at noon. This happens also at Short Mountain Bible Camp. Parents drop off their kid at bible camp on Sunday, leave them for the entire week, then pick them back up again on Friday. The kid goes home, washes clothes on Saturday, then back at bible camp for another week. The only problem is that while this kid is going to multiple bible camps throughout the summer, other kids who decided at the last minute they would like to attend a bible camp, are not able to go to even once because the camps fill up so fast.
From making these camp tapes, I’ve watched that camp video tape multiple times. I get an eerie feeling about it when the kid whom we had to send home makes statements on the video like “You don’t know what real pain is until a girl breaks up with you.” It was this “real pain” that caused him loose control and start throwing tables and making threats toward everyone. I should have seen it coming. He was pretty much obsessed with this girl. Do I think he’s a dangerous person? No. Do I think it was appropriate to send him home at that time? I’m still struggling with that decision. I feel like it might have been able to be controlled if he had been moved to a different cabin. However, everyone knows I could not have physically restrained him if he had lashed out at another person in the cabin. So in hindsight, it was probably safe to send him home. In any case, he definitely needed to be at camp last week. I’m disappointed he was unable to make it through an entire week.

“In my heart of hearts I know there’s more to life than this.”
It’s times like these where I want to quit my job and become a youth minister. However I don’t have the speaking ability nor the Biblical knowledge to be a youth minister. So it’s something that never can be. Sunday school teacher maybe, but never a youth minister.
I took a personality test last week. It showed that I was a type C personality. It basically says that I’m organized and concerned with details. By coincidence I’m a data analyst which is a perfect job for a C personality. My hobbies are photography, which is another characteristic of a C personality.
I’ll probably need to get my digital camera and video camera cleaned after summer is all overwith. There was a big flour war at camp. They put flour inside of cut up hosiery. Then they beat other people with it. Flour was pretty much everywhere.