Thanks, George!
President Bush is visiting Indonesia tomorrow.
Air Force One is landing at a nearby airport (not the main commerical airport) and then he's choppering overhead to Istana Bogor, the presidential palace in the nearby city of Bogor.
On the toll road from Jakarta to Bogor, the Jagorawi , our little town is the last toll gate before Bogor's gate. Sections of said tollway are being closed tomorrow. A good percentage of our student body, as well as a large number of our staff, comes from Bogor every day. Most schools and several banks in Bogor closed for tomorrow, and Friday we found out our school would be closed as well.
They might not have liked him or thought about him in any capacity at all before, but Dubya's certainly managed to make a bunch of Indonesian schoolchildren happy. If he'd somehow managed to give them candy as well, they'd probably have offered to vote for him.
The security we've seen so far is pretty intense. Indonesian soldiers armed with huge rifles are stationed at each overpass and toll gate. Cellular communication will be shut down for something like 10 hours tomorrow to prevent bombs from being detonated by phones. Yesterday as we drove into Jakarta we saw a fleet of black Chevy Suburbans with U.S. government license plates speeding down the opposite side of the road, and on our way home we saw seven huge army helicopters (whatever kind of helicopter Marine One is) flying around in formation in the general vicinity of Bogor. Exciting.
I hope satellite communication is left alone so I can at least watch TV on my day off, and that our internet isn't down. (That likelihood has more to do with our dreadful internet provider and less to do with the President's visit-it's always a gamble whether or not we'll have internet.)
The three-day weekend is particularly welcome after last weeks three-day Youth Camp, during which we took all students in grades 7 through 12 to a nearby mountain resort. The camp went well, but it's exhausting nonetheless. Katie and I stayed in a bungalow with a small group of 12th grade girls, so our supervision duties were light.
The kids were mostly good. A few boys were caught smoking in their hotel rooms mere hours after we checked in, but other than that the week went off without any major incidents. The smoking boys swore they had no idea where the lit cigarettes came from, so they were rather irritated that they got in trouble. I'm guessing what happened is that the Cigarette Fairy, whose hobby is getting innocent schoolboys in trouble, had it in for them. It probably went something like this:
Cigarette Fairy: Mwahahaha, I'm going to leave these lit cigarettes here on your balcony!
Boys: No! No, Cigarette Fairy, smoking is bad! Please! Smoking during school functions is prohibited-please put them out and leave us alone so we can read our Bibles and do our homework!
Cigarette Fairy: No! You will smoke these and you will LIKE it! Hahaha, you can't stop me!
Boys: Oh, but we'll get in trouble! Oh no, here comes a teacher! Cigarette Fairy, please!
Cigarette Fairy disappears into thin air, leaving the innocent boys with lit cigarettes, framed with no way out.
That Cigarette Fairy, she's a real bitch.
Our guest speakers were an interesting mix, too. One was a guy we'd had before, who is young and hip and a fantastic youth minister. His messages are always interesting to listen to, and he really interacts well with the kids. He's the kind of guy who is born to be a youth pastor, who just has a knack for communicating with teenagers about real-life issues and spirituality.
The other guy was a complete tool.
He looked like a brunette version of Carrot Top, and he paced back and forth like a caged weasel when he spoke. Everything about him screamed "poser," and while perhaps with time and training he will improve, he has a long way to go right now.
During one session I thought I was going to have to get up and smack him. He had pulled a shy 9th grade couple on stage and kept demanding that the boy "take what was his" in reference to the kid's girlfriend. Both of them, particularly the boy, looked miserably uncomfortable. "Come on, man, dude, bro, get up here and take what's yours!" OK, if this girl were my daughter and I heard him indoctrinating her boyfriend with that sort of attitude, I'd slap him into last month, or pull out his nosering with a pliers.
Someone also needed to tell Skippy McPoser that prison sodomy jokes do not appropriate sermon material make, regardless of whether most of the audience would pick up on it or not.
The guy conducted two altar calls, as well. My stodgy Lutheran brain does not allow me to understand the appeal of altar calls. All they appear to be, to me, is a way to get people emotionally riled up--not a way to actually bring people closer to God. The Reverend McPoser called for everyone who wanted to give their lives to Jesus to come forward. This happens every year. Every. Year. One girl starts to cry, then her friends start to cry, and so on until the room is full of sobbing teenagers. They're all so emotionally charged (they're teens, drama is what they do best) and riled up, but I'd be extremely surprised if anything truly spiritual happened with most of them.
Maybe I'm just being closed-minded or overly skeptical, but I very much doubt many souls are actually "saved" by this sort of thing. It's easy to get a room full of teenagers sobbing-but emotional outburst doesn't equal spiritual development in my opinion. It's all too charismatic and out there for me, and I have a hard time believing that a person's relationship with God and personal spiritual growth can be measured by how much he or she sobs and convulses during an altar call, or how much clapping and skipping is done during praise music.
At one point, Reverend Mc Poser tried to make us teachers come forward, too. I was invited thusly: "Sister dudette, come forward to pray to Jesus."
No thanks, Jesus can hear me from here. I get very defensive in situations like this, when I am forced to participate in something that makes me supremely uncomfortable under penalty of being judged as someone who probably doesn't love God very much because she's not sent into seizures by the Holy Spirit. I am willing to talk to students, listen to them, pray for them and with them and discuss faith and other such things-I'm just not comfortable with the whole laying of hands, altar call sort of business because it seems so superficial. Oh well.
Now we've spent the weekend getting extra sleep, eating actual decent food (entire fried fish, face intact, was served not twice but thrice at Youth Camp...I subsisted on white rice and peanut butter sandwiches, which does rather interesting things to a person's digestive system) and relaxing. We saw the new Bond film tonight. Daniel Craig is all kinds of sexy and should be forced to wear either a tux or a navy blue suit (hel-lo, blue eyes!) at all times.
Tomorrow we're going to enjoy our Presidential day off and celebrate our long weekend by lounging around in our pajamas and possibly eating some donuts. It's going to be a good day.
Air Force One is landing at a nearby airport (not the main commerical airport) and then he's choppering overhead to Istana Bogor, the presidential palace in the nearby city of Bogor.
On the toll road from Jakarta to Bogor, the Jagorawi , our little town is the last toll gate before Bogor's gate. Sections of said tollway are being closed tomorrow. A good percentage of our student body, as well as a large number of our staff, comes from Bogor every day. Most schools and several banks in Bogor closed for tomorrow, and Friday we found out our school would be closed as well.
They might not have liked him or thought about him in any capacity at all before, but Dubya's certainly managed to make a bunch of Indonesian schoolchildren happy. If he'd somehow managed to give them candy as well, they'd probably have offered to vote for him.
The security we've seen so far is pretty intense. Indonesian soldiers armed with huge rifles are stationed at each overpass and toll gate. Cellular communication will be shut down for something like 10 hours tomorrow to prevent bombs from being detonated by phones. Yesterday as we drove into Jakarta we saw a fleet of black Chevy Suburbans with U.S. government license plates speeding down the opposite side of the road, and on our way home we saw seven huge army helicopters (whatever kind of helicopter Marine One is) flying around in formation in the general vicinity of Bogor. Exciting.
I hope satellite communication is left alone so I can at least watch TV on my day off, and that our internet isn't down. (That likelihood has more to do with our dreadful internet provider and less to do with the President's visit-it's always a gamble whether or not we'll have internet.)
The three-day weekend is particularly welcome after last weeks three-day Youth Camp, during which we took all students in grades 7 through 12 to a nearby mountain resort. The camp went well, but it's exhausting nonetheless. Katie and I stayed in a bungalow with a small group of 12th grade girls, so our supervision duties were light.
The kids were mostly good. A few boys were caught smoking in their hotel rooms mere hours after we checked in, but other than that the week went off without any major incidents. The smoking boys swore they had no idea where the lit cigarettes came from, so they were rather irritated that they got in trouble. I'm guessing what happened is that the Cigarette Fairy, whose hobby is getting innocent schoolboys in trouble, had it in for them. It probably went something like this:
Cigarette Fairy: Mwahahaha, I'm going to leave these lit cigarettes here on your balcony!
Boys: No! No, Cigarette Fairy, smoking is bad! Please! Smoking during school functions is prohibited-please put them out and leave us alone so we can read our Bibles and do our homework!
Cigarette Fairy: No! You will smoke these and you will LIKE it! Hahaha, you can't stop me!
Boys: Oh, but we'll get in trouble! Oh no, here comes a teacher! Cigarette Fairy, please!
Cigarette Fairy disappears into thin air, leaving the innocent boys with lit cigarettes, framed with no way out.
That Cigarette Fairy, she's a real bitch.
Our guest speakers were an interesting mix, too. One was a guy we'd had before, who is young and hip and a fantastic youth minister. His messages are always interesting to listen to, and he really interacts well with the kids. He's the kind of guy who is born to be a youth pastor, who just has a knack for communicating with teenagers about real-life issues and spirituality.
The other guy was a complete tool.
He looked like a brunette version of Carrot Top, and he paced back and forth like a caged weasel when he spoke. Everything about him screamed "poser," and while perhaps with time and training he will improve, he has a long way to go right now.
During one session I thought I was going to have to get up and smack him. He had pulled a shy 9th grade couple on stage and kept demanding that the boy "take what was his" in reference to the kid's girlfriend. Both of them, particularly the boy, looked miserably uncomfortable. "Come on, man, dude, bro, get up here and take what's yours!" OK, if this girl were my daughter and I heard him indoctrinating her boyfriend with that sort of attitude, I'd slap him into last month, or pull out his nosering with a pliers.
Someone also needed to tell Skippy McPoser that prison sodomy jokes do not appropriate sermon material make, regardless of whether most of the audience would pick up on it or not.
The guy conducted two altar calls, as well. My stodgy Lutheran brain does not allow me to understand the appeal of altar calls. All they appear to be, to me, is a way to get people emotionally riled up--not a way to actually bring people closer to God. The Reverend McPoser called for everyone who wanted to give their lives to Jesus to come forward. This happens every year. Every. Year. One girl starts to cry, then her friends start to cry, and so on until the room is full of sobbing teenagers. They're all so emotionally charged (they're teens, drama is what they do best) and riled up, but I'd be extremely surprised if anything truly spiritual happened with most of them.
Maybe I'm just being closed-minded or overly skeptical, but I very much doubt many souls are actually "saved" by this sort of thing. It's easy to get a room full of teenagers sobbing-but emotional outburst doesn't equal spiritual development in my opinion. It's all too charismatic and out there for me, and I have a hard time believing that a person's relationship with God and personal spiritual growth can be measured by how much he or she sobs and convulses during an altar call, or how much clapping and skipping is done during praise music.
At one point, Reverend Mc Poser tried to make us teachers come forward, too. I was invited thusly: "Sister dudette, come forward to pray to Jesus."
No thanks, Jesus can hear me from here. I get very defensive in situations like this, when I am forced to participate in something that makes me supremely uncomfortable under penalty of being judged as someone who probably doesn't love God very much because she's not sent into seizures by the Holy Spirit. I am willing to talk to students, listen to them, pray for them and with them and discuss faith and other such things-I'm just not comfortable with the whole laying of hands, altar call sort of business because it seems so superficial. Oh well.
Now we've spent the weekend getting extra sleep, eating actual decent food (entire fried fish, face intact, was served not twice but thrice at Youth Camp...I subsisted on white rice and peanut butter sandwiches, which does rather interesting things to a person's digestive system) and relaxing. We saw the new Bond film tonight. Daniel Craig is all kinds of sexy and should be forced to wear either a tux or a navy blue suit (hel-lo, blue eyes!) at all times.
Tomorrow we're going to enjoy our Presidential day off and celebrate our long weekend by lounging around in our pajamas and possibly eating some donuts. It's going to be a good day.
posted by Erin @ 3:41 AM
3 Comments:
At Sunday, November 19, 2006 4:30:00 PM,
Anonymous said…
We saw the new James Bond movie, too. Does God really make eyes that blue? Perhaps we should pray about it at the next altar call!
At Monday, November 20, 2006 12:35:00 PM,
Anonymous said…
Yikes. I feel the same way about alter calls. Provoking emotions to lead to some giant conversion that will go away in the next ten minutes is not good theology. What happens when they don't feel that thrill anymore? They will think that they don't have God anymore, or that they are doing something wrong. Faith comes with emotions but is not AN emotion. Ohh..I would have punched that guy in the face!
Yay for having a day off for our fearless leader coming in. Maybe you can write a sign for me and go hold it? "Even though I voted for you, I kind of regret it since you have really done nothing constructive in your 5 years and also, nice job with Hurricane Katrina, however I think Condi is the bomb and I will vote for her and her only in the GOP." Could you do that for me?
Haven't seen the Bond film yet, but we are going this weekend. He does look very handsome. Usually I'm not a blue eyed blond haired type of girl. No, mine is more the glasses, brown hair, I like Star Wars alot, type of heartthrob. It's the same.
At Monday, November 20, 2006 6:08:00 PM,
Anonymous said…
On the news today they told us that for some reason the country with the world's largest Muslim population doesn't like President Bush. My earth was shattered.
As I fill out paperwork in the hopes of receiving my first call, one of the sections is about my thoughts on the charismatic renewal movement. I think I'll just provide a link to this blog entry.
I'm not recommending that you see the movie "Borat" (really, don't see it), but if you did you would see yet another example of the picture McPosers around the country give people of Christianity. But don't watch the movie; just take my word for it.
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