So, I've been a bad person. Oh, I don't mean that way. I mean that for the past week, everyone on the LifeTeen Core Team as been supposed to be contacting teens and helping plan the big K-8 grades fair that the teens are working and the LifeTeen core members are organizing. There are a bunch of things happening, including food booths, 3 moonwalks of differing sizes, a bunch of other games the details of which I don't know, and a bunch of stations where teens will be dressed as their favorite saints and will tell the younger kids about the saint as they go to that station. It's a church fair; plus, it encourages dressing up as a saint instead of a devil, ghoul, ghost, comic character or intergalactic prostitute. In terms of me being bad, I have been shirking my duty all week. I just feel that, considering the lack of communication amongst everyone (as it appears to me), I cannot contribute anything good to the effort. If I tried, I would be duplicating efforts or doing unnecessary work. And so I procrastinated it. I got up early today, so I can call people (core members) and create a spreadsheet of who is doing what (in terms of teens). And I'm going to go to church early so that I can help set up everything and organize, etc. from there.

I also found out, while researching Saint David (and not the patron saint of wales, but my namesake from the bible), I discovered (should have known) some interesting stuff. We all picture David in three roles: 1) young boy, slayer of goliath, who took on the task because the challenge (by goliath) was issued while he was there delivering supplies; 2) musician and poet, still a young boy, soothing King Saul of his bad dreams and allowing him to sleep, 3) King of Judea, who conquered Jerusalem and founded it as the capital of the land of Israel, and who coveted his neighbor's wife, sending the husband to battle to be killed so that David could marry her. However, what I did not know was that after killing goliath and soothing Saul with his music (the order of the two events has been debated), David became a boon companion of Saul's son Jonathon, who was to take the throne after Saul. However, because David was anointed by a prophet, Saul's jealousy was fairly uncontrollable.
Saul tried to kill David on several occasions, prevented by Jonathon a couple times, prevented by God directly a couple times, and finally prevented because David fled and took amnesty among the Philistines, even becoming a minor king of a Philistine city. David was only given Saul's throne because during a battle, Saul and his army were terribly defeated, Jonathon was killed, and Saul had a subordinate kill him so that he would not have to live with his failure and son's death. David mourned them, but came back to Judea and spent the rest of his days ruling by the sword. He was not accepted by all of Israel and had to conquer them, at the same time conquering nearby enemies and fending off the Philistines time and time again. And he had many many sons by many many women, and they fought and connived over who was to rule after David. Each time a son died, even if the son had been openly bringing armies against David, David mourned, so much so that one of his greater servants told him that it was improper to seem such, for it looked as though if all the people of Israel had died but his son had lived, he would have been glad. And David was put in his place and became a better king, until his later days in which he sinned by coveting his neighbor's wife and murdering her husband. And as great as David was, it was the fact that he had shed blood with his hands that prevented him from being worthy to build a temple to God in Jerusalem, so that Solomon (David's son who actually succeeded him) was given the task. From the story of David, I am struck once again by the fact that God does not give him glory because he is a sinless man, but because he is a faithful man. David always puts his trust in the Lord, even when he is sinning in sight of the Lord, and for each sin that he commits, he repents and makes penance when he is rebuked for it, usually by a prophet but once by a servant. Stories such as this remind me that while Christians today are striving for "peace", and Christ asks us to love our God and love our neighbors as ourselves, God asks us to have faith and put our trust in Him, repenting of our sins throughout our lives, not just stopping our sinfulness and becoming saints. I'd talk more, but I gotta get to work on church stuff.

Lastly, I went to the Renaissance Festival again. I went with Kat, and we were met by Courtney and her infant son James, Kat's cousin Cecile and her boyfriend Sherman, and Cecile's brother Anthony. It was fun; Cecile got juggled around, 5 torches and a machete, and a carrot sticking out of her mouth was sliced by the machete, once took off the tip, and once took off the rest of the carrot, leaving less than an inch sticking out of her mouth. heh. I won at axe throwing some more, and battle axe throwing. I suck at knife throwing, but I threw some for ya, Raph. At archery, we were using my bow, and Kat was pretty good with it. Cecile wasn't bad for having never used a bow before. And I didn't suck [laughs]. Anyway, I also got devil horns, and they look really good. Like Grace's elf ears, they can be a costume in and of themselves, with whatever I'm wearing. Kat and I went to dinner after getting back, and I still had my horns on. Two workers started conversations with us based on them [laughs]. And I got a bunch of lemons from Kat's dad; they have a tree. Yay! Ok, gotta go. Laters, blogger.