So. . . . where to begin?
I suppose I should say why I am writing this. Someone told me to do it. Actually slightly different than that. When I first left New Zealand I used to write big group emails home. A few people told me they enjoyed them, and then slowly over time I got lazy. . . just like I probably will with this. . . The other reason why this started was because I was having a conversation with a colleague on the way home today.
P: I need to get a hobby.
Me: No you don't, people don't have hobbies anymore. They just watch tv or do nothing on the internet for hours on end.
P: But I meet people all the time with hobbies, I used to have hobbies before I moved to Japan.
Me: pshhhh! What hobbies do these people have?
P: Like... rock climbing and stuff.
Me: Just google it when you get home. 'hobbies for an English teacher in Japan'
P: Yeah, like google has all the answers.
What P doesn't seem to have realised yet is that google does have all the answers. It really does. I thought about this on the rest of the way home, and about the questions that have been bouncing around in my head for a while.
One of those questions was 'How do you meet people who are from the same planet as you?'
I should explain that I am not trying to meet aliens. Just people who look at the world in the same way as I do. A friend of mine, hmmmm... lets call her . . . Feijoa (she loves feijoas, and would like to be in a Feijoa association. Actually she would like to be in a lot of associations: koalas, hedgehogs, polish children's literature, etc). So, Feijoa often says to me "I can smell you are from the same planet as me" which is apparently, the direct translation of a Japanese saying into English. I really like it. I also really like finding people who are from the same planet as me (or just have a faint whiff about them). I met one the other day, she barely spoke a word of English, but through Feijoa we had a hilarious conversation about trimming people's caterpillar eyebrows while they slept. She also invited me to a hammock association meeting. As far as I understand, people who love hammocks meet in parks, talk about where to get the best quality hammocks, bring their hammocks along with them, and then everyone gets to try them out and figure out the best position for lying in hammocks. How cool is that??
Anywayhow, back to how google has the answer for everything. Meeting caterpillar eyebrows/hammock association girl was very exciting. I hadn't met anyone who had the same delicious alien stench as me in a while. I wanted more. Now, not later. So I googled it. I didn't find anyone from the same planet as me (not yet, but I will delve deeper into the wondrous world of google). But I found Adam McLane's blog about youth ministry, leadership, social media and life. (His words, not mine) He had a post called 'Do we live on the same planet?'
And there was this:
I believe in Jesus. He is my only hope for salvation. And I fully
acknowledge that the church is God’s chosen instrument for
believers. But there is this sliver of people in every church who… are really weird.
And no one ever has the guts to tell them the truth: “You’re
weird. And you really need to work on that. Jesus asks us to be
different in a good way. Your weirdness is making it harder for me.”
It made my day.
(The quote above may be a little out of context, I don't really think it is, but feel free to use www.google.com to find his blog and read it for yourself).
