Superchurch Dot Org

My 100 churches experiment hasn’t really gotten underway yet, due to my aforementioned obligatory piano playing. However, I’ve managed to tick another church off my list, without even having to get off my vast acreage and go anywhere. “How could this be possible?” I hear you gasp in awe. Quite simple, really. I remembered another one I’ve already attended. Superchurch Dot Org.

I went there with a friend a few weeks ago, but not for the first time. After the last time, I didn’t think I’d be going again. I kind of likened it to one of those Chickenfeed Christmas crackers you get. They look pretty spiffy, all wrapped up in pretty paper with gold dangly bits on them. But then you pull on them, and they don’t go “bang”. So you have to get the strip of “bang” paper out, and practically burn your fingers off trying to get it to go. Then you look inside and realise there’s no toy. Or if there is a toy, it’s one of those little hoppy frogs, or a keyring token, or something just as gay. You put the hat on (if there is a hat), and it falls down around your neck. And the jokes (if there are any jokes) are the lamest dad-jokes you’ve ever heard. But that’s all Christmas crackers, really. Where the hell was I going with this analogy? Oh yeah. It had all the appearances of something really great, but when it came down to it, there wasn’t really much substance. Unfortunately, this time was no different.

• The service reminded me of television. Before you had time to get bored with one thing, something else was dancing in front of you, commanding your attention. First, there’s an upbeat song to get us all in the mood. Next, a multimedia presentation. Then another song. Then the announcements. Then a drama. Then another song. All in quick succession. I mean, we’d hate for people to actually have five seconds worth of headspace to themselves to contemplate any of the things they’re seeing or hearing. Perhaps they’re catering for the growing population of people who’ve “got that ADHD”. Who knows. What I ‘got out of it’ (it’s about getting, after all) were two distinct impressions: this church values excellence, and they value prosperity. Everything that was done was done to a very professional standard, with little expense spared.
• Of course there was the ubiquitous ‘connection time’ – five painful minutes of either awkward shuffling and forced small talk, or sitting and watching members of the various cliques eagerly catching up with each other. If you were new, you could draw further attention to yourself and wave your arms around to get a voucher for a free coffee at the café after the service. Up until this point, I had ignorantly held the misconception that all coffee was free at church. Boy, was I stupid.
• The sermon was given by a slightly panic-stricken church leader, and the gist of it was something like, “Don’t leave! We’re losing numbers! It’s God’s will for you to keep coming here! Please don’t go!” Of course, those actual words weren’t uttered, but they may as well have been. The guy brought out three chairs – one office chair, one dining room chair, and one that was a smaller version of the ones the audience… err… sorry, congregation were sitting on. The office chair was to represent work, the dining chair home, and the church chair, well, church. A parallel was then drawn between the amount of time the average Christian spent sitting on each chair. Cue forty five minute guilt trip. For fuxake, you think I want to spend the majority of my waking hours at work? Besides being annoyed about that, it was strongly insinuated that the only one of these chairs that would enable you to be with God was the church chair. That really pissed me off, because that’s pretty much the opposite of how I’ve found it to be. Then he said that even being five or ten minutes late for church would make God angry. Damn. I’m totally screwed.
• I was ever so slightly cheered by the announcement that we’d be hearing not one, but three testimonies tonight. I love testimonies. Most likely it’s due to my secret voyeuristic tendencies, but I like to think it’s because they’re real. A well articulated, honest testimony is worth a thousand sermons. So I listened to the testimonies, and they were pretty real at first. But they all ended as soon as the conversion experience was described. “I had this shit life, and all this stuff happened [insert watered-down version of stuff]. Then I came to know God, and I lived happily ever after”. So… that’s it? That’s the sum total of life? And you’re happy with that? What are you going to do with yourself now that your life has reached its zenith at the ripe old age of thirty two? Sit around and wait to be taken up to glory? Meh. I guess I’m the only one who still has shit stuff happen, who still gets depressed, who still wonders what the point of it all is.

What is the point of it all, anyway?

Actually, come to think of it, I quite like the hoppy frogs in Christmas crackers. They’re kind of cool in an unpredictable sort of way. If I can land a hoppy frog into the drink of an annoying relative next Christmas, it’ll make the whole damn thing worthwhile.

Christmas Day

Venue 1

Me: Hi Dad
Dad: Hello! Good to see you. Would you like a drink? What do you fancy? Gee, your hair looks nice that colour. And I like your shirt. What have you guys been up to this morning? Have a seat! Lunch won’t be far away.

Venue 2

Me: Hi Mum
Mum: Hello! Mwah! I came to the carols the other night. I heard that little glitch in your voice during your solo… hahaha! You must have been SO embarrassed! I certainly would have been, if it had happened to me. But you kept going, even under the circumstances. Oh how horrible! I’ve got the whole thing recorded on my mobile phone! Hahahaha! (walks off laughing.)

Heed His Call

Here is something I read in a newsletter at church recently that made me chuckle to myself:

“It is the intention of [this church] to make an advance group booking for next year’s Hillsong Conference. Please pray for the Lord’s leading in your lives, and that He may call upon you to attend the conference in 2009, and that you will heed His call and make this important commitment to the Lord.”

Now, it’s not the conference itself that I’m laughing at – I’m sure they’re just swell. It’s the fact that there’s obviously no doubt in the author’s mind that it is indeed God’s will for, well, pretty much everyone to go to the next conference. It’s just a matter of whether you are in communion with Him enough to recognise this. It’s like one of those questionnaires that asks a yes/no question, then assumes that you’ve answered a particular way by the way it asks the next question:

Q1. Do you like turnips? Yes/No
Q2. Why don’t you like turnips?

I mean, why pray for the Lord’s leading in your lives about the conference when the very next prayer is going to be to ask him that he may call upon you to attend it? And to cap it all off, then you’re going to pray that you will ‘heed his call’? Why not just ‘heed his call’ to begin with, and save the effort of praying about it, if you’re so sure that’s what he’d want? Fer cryin out loud!

Hehe. “Heed His call”. I mean, who talks like that any more? Hehehe.

Firefox Rox

For some reason, up until yesterday, this blog was only working in Firefox. No doubt it was because of my inferior HTML skills, but I preferred to think that it was because Internet Explorer is shit. That was my reason and I was sticking to it. Besides having a blog that only worked in Firefox was like writing it in invisible ink. Only cool people who used the same browser as me would be able to read it. It was like so Famous Five.

Anyway, it started to irritate me that I couldn’t fix whatever the problem was, and I threw a mini tantrum and cried to K, and he spent hours looking at my el-crappo code, and he found the problem and fixed it!

That’s why I love him. Not just because he fixed it, but because he fixed it even though I sooked about it. What a guy.

Gardening

Since uni has finished for the year, I’ve been spending quite a bit of my spare time gardening. I’ve finally gotten around to planting a veggie garden. I’m so proud of myself. The only spot that seemed suitable was right next to the house in the backyard. It looked like it had been used as a veggie plot before, because when we moved in it was just a patch of dirt that had been enclosed with rocks. Then some weeds grew. Then they grew even bigger. So when I finally got around to doing something about it, it took ages. Plus, there were all these rocks and half bricks and busted bottles etc in the dirt. It was like landfill. Then I had to possum-proof it. That took ages too, but planting the garden would have been pointless otherwise. I hate possums, and they’re everywhere around here. I planted snow peas, tomatoes, zucchinis, cucumbers, capsicums, spinach, lettuces and parsley. Oh, and I put some mushroom compost in crates.

That was a couple of weeks ago now, and I just went up to have a look at how things were going. Much to my surprise, my plants are growing! They aren’t dead! I really think I was expecting them to be, which disturbs me a bit. But they aren’t! I tried something, and it worked! I’m glad it worked, because if it hadn’t, I wouldn’t have bothered trying again.

If I were reading this on someone else’s blog, I would have stopped reading by now. I’d have scanned through the entry, thought, “bah! Gardening! Booo-riiing!” and clicked the next link by now. But I don’t care. Gardening is boring, and reading about someone else gardening – even more so. But when I think of anything else that people my age do, I realise that I’m not interested in any of it. I don’t have an all-consuming career. I don’t want kids. I don’t go out partying. But I don’t have any other pursuit that defines me either – I know what I don’t like, but I’m not really sure what I do.

But I do like gardening. Gardening is normal.

I like something that is normal. A part of me is normal. I am normal.

Worker

I consider myself a somewhat creative person. Probably not as creative as some might think I am, seeing as I rarely have ideas of my own. Most of the artistic stuff I’ve done over the years has been a copy of something I’ve already seen or heard someone else do. But I guess I do have some level of artistic ability, as the ‘copies’ I have attempted have ranged from “not bad” to “pretty darned accurate”. I remember when I was growing up hardly a day would pass when I wasn’t making some crafty thing, drawing a picture, designing, building, envisioning. I’d wake up on a weekend with an idea burning inside that I would just have to try out.

Occasionally I still get split second glimpses of that creative desire. But only glimpses. Enough to remember what it used to be like. And I know why it’s gone. I’m a worker now.

Working (almost) full time requires a great percentage of my waking hours, a lot of my attention, thoughts and energy. Monday and Tuesday I work. Usually Wednesdays are reserved for studying. Thursday and Friday I work. Weekends are for winding down, or housework, or social occasions, or obligatory activities. Then the cycle starts all over again.

At first, when one of those split second glimpses of creativity would flash into my mind, I would do my utmost to grab a hold of it. I’d summon up any leftover dregs of energy and force myself to focus on one of the many activities I used to love – playing music, drawing, writing, sewing, etc. But as the glimpse faded, so did my motivation. I’d end up hating the project I’d begun, struggling through to the end. Or worse, not finishing it at all.

I’ve come to realise that in order for the creativity of yesteryear to dwell in me again, I need time. I need more than a day, or two days rest from work. By the end of the two weeks of holidays that I had recently, I was motivated. Raring to go. Lots of projects were flying through my mind. Where to start? Nowhere, that’s where. It was time to go back to work. Batteries recharged, I had to spend my renewed energy, concentration and motivation on my job. Going back to work, where bit by bit the life gets sapped out of me again, while I look forward to my next lot of holidays to recover from it.

Is it worth it? I have a lovely place to live, nice possessions, and we never go without. I am sacrificing my time and energy, and that small creative part of me along with it, for financial comfort. For possessions that I never have the time to enjoy. Our house is lovely and sunny, but I’m never home during the day to enjoy it. We have a deck, a hammock and outdoor areas, but lack the leisure time that the enjoyment of these things requires. When I do have a Wednesday off, or a weekend, I spend it staring vacantly into space, zombified by work, trying to get work out of my head so that I can concentrate on something worthwhile. I can’t decide what to focus my precious spare time on. I wander here and there, not really satisfactorily finishing any one thing. All I can think about is how little time I have before I have to go back to work. I no longer have the mental clarity I used to. My mind is a fog. I forget things. I have no concentration span. I don’t care about anything.

I know, boo hoo. Everyone else has the same dilemma. And it’s not that there’s anything wrong with my job. I get paid a pretty reasonable wage for doing things that require not much effort on my part. The work isn’t hard. It isn’t strenuous, and it’s not really boring. It’s just constant. It’s like a dripping tap. One drip isn’t really a lot of water, but if you put a bucket under it, then by the end of the day that bucket would hold more than you realise. That’s what it feels like to me – I look at that bucket of water and think, “did all that come out of me? I didn’t realise I had that much water to give. Imagine all the other things I could have used that for”. Instead, I used it explaining people’s accounts to them, and taking their credit card numbers.

I don’t think I can take much more before I completely lose the person I am. But I’m trapped. I can quit work and have nowhere to live and no means to be creative even if I wanted to be. Or I can keep working for another twenty years until the mortgage is paid off, by which time I’ll be fifty and my young adulthood will be behind me.

Some fucking choice.