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.
   
  

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