Leaving it Behind

still Tuesday, August 5
Sunday was a close second to Saturday. Mel decided to ditch choir (more incriminating circumstances) and stayed the night with us again. We got up not so early and the 4 of us went to Palm beach. They were having a longboard competition so we hung around and watched them surf while we ate the lunches we had packed and talked. At one point a bunch of dolphins came up to the beach and started surfing in the waves. It was so rad to see. We also went out climbing on the rocks for a bit which was fun and reminiscent of home. We toof off in the early afternoon, hung around the house a bit then headed off to church for rehearsal at four...

Things at the rehearsal went well and having someone on piano helped fill us in. I had decided that morning that I was going to sing Remember Surrender by Sara Groves at church that night because Leah had asked me to sing something... Worship went well; the congregation wasn't going off but we weren't getting blank stares either. After worship Fiona started her message on wisdom and preached for a bit. Midway through she asked if anyone wanted to give an offering, and I ended p starting things off with the song... After that a girl got up and shared some prayer requests, one of which was for her non-Christian mom. A couple people prayed with her, then Fiona asked if anyone else wanted prayer for their family. Hand after hand went up, eventually including mine... Mel, Leah, and I prayed together which was so rad, and such a cool and powerful reminder of God's faithfulness and persistence in chasing people...

After a lot of praying, Brian (keyboard player) shared a song, then Fiona gave the second half of her message. It eventually worked its way into trust and discipline, and was such a cool message. Then we did a couple more worship songs again - I See the Lord and Trading My Sorrows. This time they went off... Eventually we all headed out to get Thai for dinner. Everyone from the house went, and we had a good time and some more laughs and the food was seriously good.

After we came home the four of us watched Moulin Rouge for my sake because I was the only one that hadn't seen it. Leah fell asleep midway through or was at least very close... After the movie we all went to bed because it was about 12:30. I switched beds with Al because she has sleep apnia and would keep Leah up and my legs were too long for the couch. I slept pretty poorly that night anyway...
The next morning we got a really decent (early) start guitar shopping. We drove out pretty far to the place where Leah and Al bought Al's guitar. Everything there seemed too expensive though and anything that was nice was way out of her price range. So we drove to another place in the city that was even more expensive and had crap guitars. So then we decided as a last resort to go to this place in the city that I saw with them on Saturday. It was a nice place but the employees were serious jerks. We walked in and right off the guy who helped us was being a complete idiot and not taking us seriously at all... After trying three guitars Leah ended up with an Epiphone Les Paul anniversary model, black with gold hardware. She also got a sweet Marshall amp with four different FXs on clean and overdrive (I don't know if anyone cares about this beside me. Oh well.)...

Eventually Leah had to leave for work, so Al took off with Mel and I. Unfortunately what should have been a 2 hour trip turned into a 5 hour ordeal. First of all, Mel had left her stuff in Leah's boot (trunk) so we had to track her down where she was working which took for-ev-er. Then Al wanted to go to Penrith to get Krispy Kremes. It took forever to get there as well. We had some cool conversations in the car, but they stopped once we needed directions off the map to get places.

Finally we got back to Mels, and I was pretty glad to get on our way back. Too much time in the car. It was a really pleasant ride. We didn't get lost, and we had a seriously cool conversation about all sorts of things... I love it when you first meet someone and you feel comfortable enough to share a pretty substantial amount of information with them, and they'll do the same. I love hearing people's stories and finding point where I can relate and learning from the points where I can't.

When we got home Leah was really tired and went to bed pretty quick. Al and I stayed up and made a bit of dinner then headed for bed.