Getting away
It’s our church weekend away this weekend, or church camp as I prefer to call it. Last year, around this time, I wrote as my facebook status “I have a love/hate relationship with weekends away” and Sydney folks instantly assumed I was talking about church events, as though “weekend away” was a proper noun for them. When what I was intending was going away for the weekend. I do love going away for weekends, and always enjoy them when I’m there, but it’s the getting-away-on-Friday-afternoon-after-work thing, and the Monday-morning-and-I-haven’t-done-any-washing-or-cleaning thing that I hate. But I manage. In light of this, reading Mikey’s post a while back about the term 'house party' made me laugh, and recently when one of the Tasmanians came up to me at church and said ‘are you going on the church camp?’ I said ‘yes, yes, I am going on the camp’ and we saved about two seconds of our lives by not having to say ‘weekend away’.
Funny, but though I am an introvert I’m not actually bothered by crowds of people, and could be a sort of conference junky if I liked. Perhaps it’s actually because I am an introvert and don’t feed off people interaction, such that if I can’t find anyone to talk to or feel like a reject I can just go to my bunk and read a book and I am happy (not that I do this on church weekends mind you, but I just don’t feel any particular need to be the life of the party or right in the midst of everything or any other thing, so it doesn't bother me if I'm not - that and we have Saturday afternoons free, so should you need to go and escape there's always that option).
All that said, I have been out every night this week so far, so I was feeling a bit frazzled about everything sometime yesterday, but then I swung it so that I could work from home today and that has made a significant difference to the frazzness. There’s something about the physicality of being ‘home’ in there somewhere. And I can just pack my stuff and depart here at my leisure.
We have Wally Behan from Christchurch coming to speak, which should be interesting. Of course it was all planned before the disaster in Christchurch, so I expect it might be sobering to hear his account of that.