I got my buddy Vinesh to come over and help me paint on saturday night. Only problem with painting at night is that it is hard to paint correctly (the right number of layers) because of the shadowing. So his painting was okay, went through the bathroom after church today to fix it up.
Almost slipped, becuase I threw quik-n-brite on the floor and didn’t really clean it up that great.
That paint bunny suit he was wearing uscked, becuase paint made it through and ruined the batman t-shirt. =(
Then I treated him to dinner at fuddruckers (I just think of the scene from the movie idiocracy where the name of the restaurant keeps on getting worse and worse).
While I was eating, I guess I walked by my sister’s friend. I met him once so I didn’t recognize him, but my sister said “hey, my friend John saw you last night as you were leaving fuddruckers”. Hahah, I guess he is better at remembering who I was then I was of him.
Here was the funny joke I heard from yesterday. Ben was looking at my ‘Warner Brothers’ keychain and went “Hey, have you heard that joke?”, and I went “What is the joke”.
‘If you see a cop, Warn a Brotha” ahahahahahahahah
Finally, I guess I must be pretty straight forward (simple thinking sometimes). I try not to overthink anything, or think “maybe that person has an alternative motive for asking me to doing something”.
It seems to me to be normal requests, becuase if you know how I think. I sometimes come up with random things, so it all seems to make sense =) It is a good thing, that I don’t really carry grudges either because when I find out, it doesn’t really make me too mad.
What I found funny about my thinking is that if I don’t really like something, and it really irks me, I really say things straight up without sugarcoating.
I was thinking about how I tried to help out at Awana, and no one told me what do to. They had just said “show up and love on the kids”. So I show up, and there are kids running everywhere, and they are all sitting down in their groups. The bell rings and they go everywhere, and I have no idea where I’m suppose to go. One of the people helping comes up to me and bluntly says “You just have to take charge, go find a spot, and do it. For games, you just need to stand out there and cheer for the kids”.
“Okay” I’m thinking, “so that is how I love on the kids? just stand around and go “yah, yah, yah”.”. I didn’t really know how that helped, so I stood there going “go team” and clapping. I didn’t help a team, because I still had no idea how each of them needed help. All the kids just played around and got back into the groups when ready. There were 2-3 helpers for each team, so I was kind of overkill. So I got bored, I just went and sat down and emailed my friend on my phone. =(
Then I go inside and the same person that told me to take charge told me to go back against outside and cheer on the younger kids. =(, So I had to go back again outside. More pathetic cheering by me, because I didn’t know any of the kids names, and still didn’t know what I was suppose to do.
Then Awana ends, and I’m confused as to what happened. The person who was telling me, said “why don’t you go meet kids right now?”. Umm, I then knelt down and said “hi” to some of the kids, and they all ran away. So now I was really demoralized, so I just sat down in the middle of the room and opened my backpack and took out my bag of candy I had brought. Just ate the candy by myself as kids ran around doing their own things, and none of the kids came up to me when I had candy. =(
I did eventually give away the candy, but it took 10 minutes before 3 kids came over. Then they were gone, the only kids that really bothered me that night were the ones I had taught in 4th grade children sunday school, and maybe above.
So my friend who had asked me to come volunteer asked me how it went. And I said “It sucked a lot, I had no fun and I still have no idea what happened. All I did was stand outside and cheer, which I didn’t find that exciting or helpful at all”.
Good thing I didn’t tell her what else was on my mind. It would have been “I don’t ever want to help out for Awana again if it is run like this. I am an engineer, and I have some order in what I do, with a goal.. Your goal of just ‘loving on the kids”, is terrible because to me loving on a kid means, taking interest in the kids by helping them along reach their goals, and when they talk encouraging them to achieve higher, giving them candy, pats on the back, many high fives (my grandpa gave me awesome hugs and high fives), and engaging them in conversation. All I did was sit there and Cheer them on from the side. =)
I must be slightly bitter, but writing thist stuff out makes me feel better and helps me understand my thoughts.
So as summary, I think this is what I learned about myself. “I love to make an impact on a kid’s life, however I need to do it in a slightly organized, or at least have a tangible end goal. The words ‘love on a kid’, does not give me a clear idea of what I want to do. If you said “help a kid know about Jesus’s Love by emulating it, so that they in the future will know how wonderful Jesus is’, then I could work with that. Must be my goal oriented mind, where I at least giving myself a target (vision) to aim for’
I feel better now, more encouraged, even though I found out that the reason the friend had asked me to help was for the wrong reason. Because they thought I was going to do some other thing on friday that they didn’t want me to do, when all I was going to do was paint the house. =)
That was a super long post, 5585 characters.
