For about 5 weeks before Christmas, Belfast has an international market in front of City Hall. It is full of crepes, bratwursts, and kangaroo burgers. Having a meal that isn’t centered on two to three different types of potatoes (which isn’t just a stereotype, every person here truly loves potatoes) has been an amazing treat for Christmas time. I must admit, Belfast is very nice at Christmas time. The city center is completely lit up (City Hall is amazing at night), every organization has a huge Christmas dinner, and we will be having our Christmas Eve and Christmas day services in a movie theater.

Since Whitehouse is still being repaired from the flood (it won’t be finished until March) and the owner of a chain of Movie Houses goes to Whitehouse, we won’t be in a traditional church to celebrate the birth of Jesus. The Christmas Eve service is especially important for me, because I am in charge of it. It is an actual midnight service, starting at 11:30 at night, and the cinema’s lighting and seating works great for it. Our youth group will be acting during the service as carolers. They’ve been extremely excited for it. The first night I showed them the script for Christmas Eve, they wanted to run through it over and over again. We won’t have much room for our skit (our stage is about 3 feet wide since it’s really there just for the screen) and we will have to get a lot of things ready that night, but I am really looking forward to Christmas Eve at the Movie House.

During Christmas time, the church members (especially our deaconess and elders) have been making a crazy amount of home visits these past couple of weeks. The couple of days I went out with our deaconess, I think I visited 15 different homes. It is still very difficult with some of the visits. But I am noticing now that I leave a lot of homes with my spirit lifted, especially ones I have visited a couple of times. I have really enjoyed getting to know those people better. And when I meet ones for the first time, they often talk about how much having someone from the church come means to them.

Our Girls Brigade had an indoor hockey (not ice hockey) tournament a few weeks ago. Even though I know absolutely nothing about indoor hockey, I had been working with them on hockey leading up to it, so myself and a few other officers in the Girls Brigade went to it. Our girls are incredibly good at hockey. A couple of them play on top teams in the area. So me and the other Girls Brigade officers were cheering for them as loud as we could in a small gym hall that only had about 30 people in it. I think we got more into the game then the girls did. We also may have annoyed the other teams (and the ref) as we were screaming our heads off the entire time.

The Boys Brigade went out last Thursday to play Air Soft. Air Soft is like paintball, but with just small pellets that don’t leave any paint. It is supposed to be painless, but I quickly found out that was a lie. Our team was dominating the first couple of rounds, and I usually hung out around the middle of the course behind the largest obstacle. Halfway through I jumped out behind it as the same time as one of the kids on the other team and he shot me straight in the neck from about 3 feet away. That hurt a lot. The whole night was pretty fun, though, until the last round when we were told it was every man for himself and we could change our guns from single shot to automatic. The kids on my team all promised that they were still just going to attack the other side. Stupidly, I trusted them and went near the front. Once the round began though, I was drilled with pellets from behind for a solid five minutes. I didn’t enjoy that round very much.

It is strange not being home for Christmas. I miss things like making seven layer cookies with my family and going out and getting a Christmas tree from Young’s. But hearing from a lot of my family and friends back home has helped and I have a great community here that cares for me a lot. I’m also incredibly excited for Christmas Eve to be here. I hope everyone has a great time next week. Merry Christmas. 

   Last month I gave my first sermon. It was on David dancing as the Ark of the Covenant was coming into Jerusalem. His wife gets mad at him for looking foolish and he just replies that he will be even more undignified than that. To really emphasize my point of letting go during praise, I did a small dance at the beginning of my sermon (which got less laughter or mockery than I had hoped). It was one of the most nervous things I’ve ever done.  I’m pretty sure I was shaking for the entire second half of the talk. But I got a great response from the congregation. I think they really enjoyed it and many of them came up to me to tell me that it was an important message for the church to hear.
 
The day after my sermon, we had our volunteer retreat to the Crom Estate in Fermanagh. It was a beautiful place and on our way back from it, we stopped at a Presbyterian Church in New Bliss, which is in the Republic of Ireland, marking my first time being in the actual nation of Ireland. What amazed me about stopping there was that the people there knew Whitehouse Presbyterian Church well because of the work it has done in the peace process and the fact that we host the annual Peacemaking Conference. It made me feel really special to be a part of a church that is known for its work for peace even in parts of the Republic.
   
Soon after that trip, I was able to visit Derry/Londonderry through a program called Preparing Youth to be Peacemakers I am hoping to run with our youth group in the spring. Catholics (who make up the majority of the population of the city) call the city Derry, but the government (and Loyalists) call it Londonderry. My favorite name for it is Stroke City for the stroke (or as we call it, “slash”) between Derry/Londonderry. Stroke City is actually a walled city from the 17th Century. During my trip there, we started with a tour along the massive walls that still surround the inner city.

We followed that up with by far the most interesting tour I’ve been on. The tour was called Free Derry Tours. I mistakingly thought this meant that they did not cost anything. Instead, the tour is actually a tour of the Bogside neighborhood where Bloody Sunday occurred. It was given to us by a Catholic man who was there during the protest and shootings, which led to 14 deaths. The man is still a very strong Republican, and it was a very one sided view of the event, but working in a deeply Protestant area, I hadn’t had much chance to witness any of the Catholic view on the troubles. I think until that day I thought the conflict in Northern Ireland really was people in Northern Ireland fighting people in Northern Ireland. But as our tour guide went on and on about the British government, I realized that many Catholics didn’t view it as them against Protestants who lived on the same land as them, but as them against the British government, located on a completely separate island from them. As the tour went on, Bloody Sunday reminded me more and more of the shootings at Kent State in 1970.