Recently a bunch of wasps decided to make their nest under the overhang of our front door. Now, we've had wasps on our garage door before, but then the nest was visible, so it was easier to deal with, and besides, it's kind of freaky to see swarms of wasps above your head when you walk up to the door (whereas you could easily avoid the wasps' corner of the garage door).
They're mostly dead now, since my dad sprayed them pretty well. You'd think they'd see the bodies of their "fallen comrades" and know better than to come around our door again, but apparently not.
That's about it on that subject, onto the next!
Reflections on Softball
Well, the softball season finally ended last night! What a relief! Not that I disliked it and was waiting for it to end, or anything, but it has been a long season, and it was quite a bit of work, so I'm glad to have a break from it for a while. There are lots of ideas floating around in my head for next year, though, and I definitely want to keep helping out with it next year!
There was a brief time when I wasn't so sure. Committee communication was at an all-time low (or so it seemed to me), we had a fairly big event coming up, and all I was hearing were criticisms: people didn't like this, or they thought that was a bad idea, but they didn't offer any alternative suggestions!
It all hit me like a ton of bricks. I felt so burdened and discouraged I just wanted to sit down and cry. Looking back I realize that things really weren't all that bad. The committee wasn't talking enough to reassure me, but things were getting done, and, admittedly, I'm a bit of a control freak (majorly gold personality, for those familiar with "True Colours"), and I stress way more than necessary if I don't know for certain that every single detail is being covered, and who's covering it. Then too I was getting physically worn out by sleeping late and waking early to go to work. I slept late because I felt like I had to take some time for myself, reading, websurfing, etc. and late night was the only time available because I tried to do all my softball stuff right when I got home and after dinner. Basically it was a bunch of little stuff just coming together at once.
But now that I've had time to stop and think, I can see that I really accomplished my personal goal for softball. Even though the committee wasn't altogether organized and things were pretty last minute, I remember now that I didn't want to help out in softball to turn it into a perfect, efficient organization, I wanted people to be able to come to me with questions about softball, and I wanted to be able to answer them. And they did, and I could--well, mostly.
There are lots of things that, looking back, I know we could, and probably should have done differently, but the only thing that I regret is that I allowed myself to become so anal retentive and detail/task-oriented that I didn't take as much time to enjoy softball as I should have. Sure things weren't perfect, but God does great things with imperfect vehicles, so I should have trusted that he was already working before we started, and that he continued working even when things didn't go as planned.
Take the banquet, for example. The entire atmosphere was a great deal more somber than previous years, and was totally not what I expected. Our speaker's message, especially was a shock to me. It was very hard hitting, definite and challenging--not the "soft" evangelism approach at all. At first I was just like "ohmygoodness, what will people think?" but then I thought a bit more and saw the potential benefits to this very different style of message.
In my opinion, teens and younger people tend to take the subtle (for lack of a better way) approach to sharing the gospel. While we try to get people to think, we're very "nice" about it, and try to avoid making a lot of definite, no-arguments-brooked statements. We're afraid to alienate people by giving them the impression that we're closeminded, and we definitely don't want to take anything even remotely resembling the hellfire and brimstone approach. Now I believe that has it's place, but I think that the type of message that we had at the banquet was the type, if people really listened to it, that would force you to seriously think about what you believe, and how your actions reflect those beliefs.
Gah. I'm not explaining myself very well, but basically the point that I'm trying to make is that sometimes messages can be easily tuned out when you hear them presented in the same way often enough, so hearing it put in a totally different and unexpected way might help to make you think more about it than you normally would otherwise. Ew. Still jumbled.
Anyway, apologies to those of you who probably haven't a clue as to what I'm talking about. I strongly suspect that if you haven't been involved with this particular softball league, you won't be able to understand me at all. Hopefully my next post will be a bit less specific to things that are only going on around here. That reminds me, I'll be going to see the Lion King show/musical after work tomorrow, so I probably won't have time to post! I'll be ready on Wednesday with something, though!
