MY LIFE… (10:07AM 10/02/2012 LOCAL TIME)
It is officially cold out. -20° with enough of a wind chill factor to make it feel like -40° is just enough to make me scared out of my pants to even open the front door. Not running the risk of getting stuck with some incurable cold for the next week.
That’s another tidbit that should be mentioned: I’ve officially been out here for a week! It doesn’t seem like that long, but this marks the halfway point in my journey through Manitoba. I guess I can’t really say journey though, since we’ve generally been staying in the same place for most of the time here, and just making different trips out to the various places we’d minister.
We’re planning on going… somewhere else at…. some point today… There are very few details that are open to the public about our travels right now. Not because we aren’t allowed to know, but because nobody really knows until just about the last second. Plans change really fast with these people, which is fine because I just about never know what’s going on until the last second anyways. Now everyone else is on the same page as me.
MY SPIRITUAL JOURNEY (AND ALL ELSE THAT INSPIRES IT INTO A DEEPER EXISTENCE)
Robert Mclean has planted 34 churches. 34. That right there is a hack of a lot of church planting! Like, seriously, Oh my gosh. It’s been crazy just listening to him tell stories on the way to and back from the different meetings we’ve been doing. He’s like a super missionary or something. Here is just a tidbit of one of his astonishing adventures:
Robert and his colleagues had just finished building a church big enough to seat almost twice the population of the town it was built in. Some people weren’t too happy about this new church, or the way Robert was now teaching about God in this church. One man was particularly hateful towards Robert; so much that one day after church he threatened Robert outside the auditorium. He grabbed Robert by his shirt and said that if Robert didn’t get out of town right away, he would dismantle Roberts face to the extent that it would not be recognizable again. Robert just looked back kindly with a smile on his face and said
“God put me here to do his work, and I’m not going to go until God tells me to”
The man was furious. He tried to restrain himself, but his hatred was just too much. He let his fist fly into the side of Robert’s truck, nearly shattering one of the windows into Robert’s children’s faces.
Robert continued teaching after that, and a short time later was threatened a second time. This time the man said
“If I see you on the pulpit preaching next week, I’m going to pull you right off the stage and beat you limb from limb!”.
Robert had originally planned to have a guest speaker preaching next week, but after this confrontation, he decided to cancel it and preach himself. What a boss.
That next week, Robert did teach. I guess the guy who hated Robert so much had a “bark bigger than his bite” because he didn’t, in fact, pull Robert off the stage mid-sermon, but after the meeting the man happened to run into some of his own kind of “bite” when he decided to meet up with one of his friends.
That same night, another man got completely wasted and thought it might be a good idea to set up his hi-powered rifle against the door and shoot whoever decided to walk through it, because that’s just how drunk people have fun up here I guess. I guess I can see the entertainment value in that, but personally I prefer to get out my trigger finger attitude in a good ol’ fashioned game of Halo. It tends to be a little more safe… and legal.
Anyway, the man who just happened to be the lucky winner of “don’t-open-my-door-or-I’ll-shoot-you- roulette” was none other than Mr. “I-hate-Robert-Mclean” himself. Describing how gruesome it was would be a chore for Shakespeare, but I will use the same adjective to describe the remains of the man’s face as he had used to describe what he planned to do to Robert’s: “Unrecognizable”.
This story is kind of sad, yes, yet also poetic. It really makes you think about that verse in the Bible where God is talking to the Abram in Genesis and he says something like “Anyone blesses you, I’ll bless. Anyone who curses you, I’ll curse”. Trust me; you do not want to end up getting cursed by God.
MY STUFF THINGS
The montage as promised:
If you liked the one with Whit (From Adventures in Odyssey) saying "Right!" You can download the whole thing here - http://www.truploader.com/uploads/2_6_2012/619988Whit%5c'sDrop.mp3
-20° below! Wow.
ReplyDeleteAs far as grammar goes: the oh in "Oh my gosh" shouldn't be capitalized as it follows a coma. I'm not exactly sure if the dialogue should be broken up like that or not. For example: “Robert just looked back kindly with a smile on his face and said, “God put me here to do his work, and I’m not going to go until God tells me to”,” maybe that should have been a paragraph by itself, but dialogue formatting is often subjective and a thing of personal preference.
Syntax-wise: “…when he decided to meet up with one of his friends,” you made a new paragraph, so I just assumed you were leaving the “bite” up to the imagination of the audience. But then you say, “That same night” and describe the guy with the gun doing what he did to Robert’s attacker – the aforementioned “bite” – which connected Drunk Guy to Attacker Guy. So it took me a moment to connect the “bite” that Attacker Guy ran into with his friends with Drunk Guy. It might reduce confusion if there was more of a segue to introduce those two thoughts. Or am I overanalyzing this?
Either way, good post!
Not at all! Thanks for the help, I'll go through and edit it when I have a few minutes. I have very little online time right now since the place I'm staying at has no internet, so I'll just have to see when I have time.
DeleteThat's awesome! In one way.
ReplyDelete