Monday 9 April 2007

wonderful weekend

It's been a great Easter weekend.
Church on Good Friday was fantastic. It was a sort of 'lessons and carols' kind of service (like we usually have at Christmas), reading through the account of Jesus' death from Luke's gospel, and singing songs in between each excerpt. It was a really simple, moving service that I think resonated with a lot of people, as we felt real sorrow at the great suffering Jesus went through on our behalf. One of the women reading started to cry as she read about Joseph of Arimathea going to Pilate and asking for Jesus' body so he could bury it properly, and I don't think there was a dry eye in the house after that.

Meg came over for a cup of tea after church and it was great to chat to her a bit. Meg lives in the flat below me, and by coincidence started coming to St Martin's. It's so nice to have a lovely neighbour and know there's another Christian in the building. We started discussing great plans for planting a garden in the very ugly and filthy common space. Then mum and I went to mum's place and ate a yummy fish lunch and watched Gilmore Girls all afternoon. It was a cold and rainy day, and just great to spend time together, not having to be anywhere, not having to do anything.

On Saturday I got a bizarre cleaning bug and did things like clean the windows and the kitchen and bathroom. I wanted to start buying plants for the garden but ran out of puff in the afternoon and had a sleep instead. Then mum and I went to the Opera House to see/hear the Sydney Philharmonia sing St Matthew's Passion. I realised I knew bits of it but had never heard the whole thing. It was absolutely beautiful.

Then the car broke down in the Opera House carpark, in the middle of the road. The carpark is this nifty double-helix system, one way, and you can be stuck in there for fifteen minutes if you're parked down the bottom, waiting for all the traffic above you to get out. Everyone turns off their engines to avoid being completely asphyxiated, and of course once the traffic started moving again, my car wouldn't start. A guy helped us push it to one side, mum and I prayed about it, sat there for a while talking, and then after about 10 minutes miraculously the car started again. We got home okay, but then when I went out in the morning to pick mum up for church it was dead again (I have to ring the NRMA but I haven't even gotten out of my pyjamas yet so...meh, it'll keep).

Because of the dead car, we didn't go to the Sonrise Service at dawn on Coogee Beach, which is a shame because I really love that service. Still, Easter Sunday at church was fine. I played flute with Danielle for the first time in ages and it was really enjoyable. Jeremy preached on the resurrection account in Luke.

Then the Baddeleys came over and we had a wonderful day. We set up a round table of laptops and played games all afternoon, eating lasagne and nachos and burritos and low GI chocolate biscuits and bits of Haigh's easter egg and popcorn and it was great. We watched some Buffy over dinner, played some more and then called it a night.

I was grateful I could sleep in this morning though - it's been a full weekend and I'm a little weary! But so wonderful spending lots of time thinking about Jesus and the joy I have in having a relationship with him; spending time with family and friends; eating lots of delicious food; and resting. God is good!

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