Gab’s Jesus

So I’ve been in Sherby for a few days now. I did the usual stuff like empting a dresser to put my stuff in it, getting some simple groceries, putting air in Do’s pink bike’s tires, getting my fingers greasy from putting the bike’s chain back on in the middle of a hill, having the cat eat my headphones halfway through and finally assist to their final breaking on that same hill.

The headphones story is kind of a funny one. The cat ate one of the wires only haflway, so I put tape around it. When I was biking uphill after my work meeting on Wednesday, I was listening to some music with my iPod sitting in a pocket of my backpack. I changed gears just to realize that the bike couldn’t take it and the next thing I knew was that the chain wasn’t on anymore, trying to pedal was useless. I could either stop or start going backwards. I stopped. Then I got my backpack off and threw it on this person’s lawn by the street so I could fix the chain. I sort of forgot I still had headphones in my ears. So the iPod in the bag left with the bag on the ground. The headphones were obviously pluged in the iPod, so they followed the backpack too. It hurt my ears a little, but then I realized that I still had one headphone in my right ear, while the other was on the grass. Nice. I looked kind of silly, as you can see on the picture I took afterwards.

Another, but small story… I don’t know if I told you, but the camp head monitor is a Christian (the camp is a language camp, not a Christian one). So after our meeting on Wednesday morning, the head monitor got a ride home with a returning monitor (that is, this monitor was working, like me, at camp last summer and is back this year). In the car they happened to be talking about me and the returning monitor said to the head monitor: “Gab loves Jesus. Whatever you do, don’t offend her Jesus.” The head monitor emailed me to tell me about it. How intereting! This guy, with whom I only had a few smal conversations about God last summe felt that the head monitor should be careful not to offend my Jesus. I’m glad that’s one of the things he remembers about me, but I wonder why this particular thing.

Alright. I’m officially starting work on June 25th. In the meantime I’ll be planning, getting my criminal reccord thing and hanging out with my sister and her kids in a Bible school’s camp cabin.

The cat is now eating the remains of my headphones.

Ethical debate in my head.

Let’s say your name is on some papers that say that if person X  has an accident and gets into a vegetative state, you are to enforce person’s X desire to not be kept alive and unplug person X. Do you feel comfortable with that or not, why?

Leavin’

Departure from Montréal will be on Tuesday June 16 and arrival in Sherbrooke will be… on June 16, just two hours later. It’s kind of nice to think that I’llget to spend my summer again in Sherbrooke, away from the city. I would spend my life away from the city actually but it seems that it’s where universities are so I guess I have to live in the city.

Talking about university. I finally finished my winter semester on June 9. Sounds funny? Yes it does. I started my summer course (distance learning) on June 9 and I’m glad to say that I’ve already started my first assignment, not even a week after starting the course! I’m putting in a lot of my time so I can get as much as possible done before I really start working at day camp on June 25. So if you wonder what I do in the evenings and weekends this summer, don’t be mistaken, I’ll be reading and writing for that course all the time, ah and I’ll be planning my daily English lessons  for camp too.

I don’t know how much I’ll be writing here this summer. Hopefully you won’t read the same kind of stuff I wrote last summer. I remember writing about flat tires a lot… I hope this time I won’t have trouble with that.

Ok, I’m a bit too random now. Take care.

Can’t undo that.

That’s all you need for this post:

Funny how Marianne thinks the subject is funny while I think it looks suspicious.

I don’t know what we were looking at of faking to look at.

22 hours in Sherby

As most of you know, summer is coming. As some of you may know, I’ve been hoping to get a job. Why? Because it’s summer time. Things haven’t been working the way I wanted them. I wanted to work in adult education centers (teaching ESL), but the process to be hired by school boards is quite long for unknown reasons. So I decided I would be willing to work in a summer day camp as I did last summer and applied to different places. I finally decided I would apply to the day camp I worked last summer, especially because I’d be teaching ESL there, which is good experience for me anyways. Guess what? They told me on Tuesday that they had an evaluation meeting for the prospect monitors on Wednesday. So my dad dropped me in Montréal Tuesday morning (I wasn’t home), then I quicckly finished three assignements that were due on Wednesday and handed them in at university, then caught a bus to Sherbrooke and went to the meeting on Wednesday morning. Needless to say that I was quite tired (especially from painting and moving stuff out of my sister’s house for four days!!!). So anyways, I got the job!

I really praise God for the job He’s given me. I really didn’t want to have to work in a store or in a restaurant, I wanted to do something related to my field of study. The timing was just perfect also. I’m quite glad I’ll spend my summer in Sherbrooke instead of Montréal. Getting some fresh air and being in a different setting will be refreshing to me.

Well, I better go to bed. I still have two papers due by June 10th. This has been a weird June so far.

Guitar by the river

My friend was spending her last full day in Québec on Monday before leaving for Ecuador for the summer. She likes going by the river near my place and sing songs. So we decided to go on Monday afternoon.

It was not long after we were both sitting on a cement block by the river with our feet dangling right above the water that a guy, guitar in hand, joined us. He was about to play by the river too and thought it’d be a better idea to play with us instead of playing over us. So anyways, we just played a little bit together. He didn’t know the songs I played, so he concluded they were compositions of mine. I told him they were mostly songs we sing at church. He then asked us to sing a song for him, which we did. Later on I asked him to play us some of his songs and etc. We had a nice little time.

At one point the guy told us about some people he knew who went to a Baptist church and how no matter the religion, what was important was that they all brought good to the world. I never know what to say to that kind of thinking so I just said that all those religions that brought good to the world was a good thing of the short term (people are fed, helped, loved, clothed, etc. by all sorts of religious organizations, what they do is good) but that in the long run it was not going to be so good, ’cause if they didn’t preach the truth, then at the end all those people they led astray would be lost. I guess he didn’t say anything and jumped to something else, he asked us to sing a song about God’s love. So we sang him, “L’amour de Dieu”.

I thought our little encounter was interesting. I hope it was interesting to you. Maybe I should go by the river more often and sing this summer.

Perogies!

Okay, I NEED to tell the world that Maxi’s NOW has PEROGIES! I only learned about and ate them in Saskatchewan. I had never seen them in Québec, but I knew a lady who knew where to find them in a special grocery store somewhere. Today, as I was walking by the frozen foods at Maxi’s, I literally and spontaneously (which is something I don’t usually do) stopped when I saw bags of perogies in the freezers. They had like three different kinds and they were like 1.50$, crazy and cheap. So I obviously got a bag! I’m really looking forward to eating them! It’s been… two and a half years I made a trip to Sask. and ate perogies. Now I just need some Farmer Sausage!

The ladies at the cash were asking me what they were. How funny.

O Quebecers! Go get some perogies!

Strike stroke.

After six full weeks of strike, the professors agreed to the university’s offers. It’s my second strike in three years and I can now say that I’ve lost almost a semester’s worth of time because of strikes. Last year we were on strike for two months and this time they were on strike for six weeks, if you add everything up, it’s almost as long as an entire semester. We obviously had to go to school after the strike so it’s not a total loss of “university time”. Last year we managed to finished early May. This time it wasn’t as easy and the timing was different from last year, so I should be completely done my “winter” semester in the beginning of June. Isn’t that unbelievable? I am usually done by the end of April. I was supposed to be finished last week!!! This is kind of frustrating, but what can I do?

Enjoy your day and remember Jesus Christ.

Conference: the Local Church

Montréal was hosting Mark Dever from Capitol Hill Baptist Church in Washington D.C. with his team of three preachers (Greg Gelbert, Jonathan Leeman, Matt Schmucker). They taught from Thursday night all through the last session on Saturday afternoon on the local church. The majority of people who attended were local pastors and pastors-in-training. I was able to attend three sessions (Friday night for young people and two on Saturday afternoon).

Here are the topics they touched upon: The Gospel, biblical theology, conversion, evangelism, involvement and discipline of the members in the church, discipleship, church life, elders and congregationalism, recognizing the real Gospel, preaching the Bible as a whole, taking part in the life of the church, the worth of the local church…

I really enjoyed what I heard, especially when Dever taught. Friday night there was a special session for young people and the topic was the local church. I assumed that it was probably not a very appealing topic for young people. Dever didn’t try to make his teaching sound somehow cool for young people, he simply kept it clear, straight-forward and always gave it a good dose of bluntness (which I particularly enjoyed).

Finally, I must quote Leeman ’cause I thought it was quite funny. At one point he spoke of the citizens of Québec and said, “The Quebecans and the Americans”. I had never thought of calling Quebecers “Quebecans” before. It seems that Leeman got mixted up or simply didn’t know and put the American ending to the name of our province ot speak of its citizens.

Too bad if you couldn’t make it!

Yoko loves you

The messages we’re used to hear in the metro are either the names of the metro stations “McGill”, “Côte-Vertu”, etc. or the operator saying something about people blocking the doors. Now Montréal Public Transportations decided to broadcast a short message every once in a while in the metro. Here it is:

“Hi. This is Yoko! It’s time for action, and action is peace. Think peace; act peace; spread peace and tell your friends to imagine peace. I love you!”

I can’t believe it.