Saturday, November 05, 2011

Why I Love Fridays

Fridays are my favorite day of the week. Perhaps because for a lot of people it's the end of the work week so things are more relaxed, perhaps it's the dynamics. In any case, I love Fridays. They make me happy.

I think maybe it's a combination of things. Fridays is "Search," our discussion group. This in itself is always an interesting experience. We come together, eat dinner and have a discussion about more in depth spiritual topics. I'm not talking about hot topic items we discuss to death in the church (What is the Holy Spirit anyway?) I'm talking about stuff the world wonders about too. This week it was the differences between Christianity and other religions. It takes a lot of concentration to follow these discussions, but they're always interesting.

I also love the conversations that go on before and after "Search," we joke around a lot, chat and just have a general good time. Sometimes afterwards a group of us will take a little walk, last night some friends and I just kind of hung out and chatted.

I also have some English lessons on Friday. I've been working with some of the people from church who want to improve English skills. Yesterday, I met with Luka. Her English is pretty decent and so we're working on a lot of vocabulary building. For hour hour lesson yesterday we took a walk, went to a bakery and just chatted. I really enjoyed that.

On Fridays I also meet with two teenage girls from church. Now that's an interesting experience. I'm not sure how much English they've actually been learning but it's always a good time. Yesterday our topic was Justin Beiber. We read a little about him, watched the music video to "baby" (Singing along) and then read the lyrics and made sure we understood what the song was about. A conversation I had with another church member a little later went something like this:

Me: "I met with Sonya and Yana today. We were practicing English"
Them: "Yes...I heard you singing..."

What can I say? It was really fun though. They told me that they wanted to talk to some Americans, so I told them I was trying to arrange a Skype visit with some teenagers from different youth groups. I'm not sure how they feel about it, but I think it would be a cool opportunity.

So, all around, Fridays generally put me in a good mood. People make me smile. With some of the church people I feel like I can relax and be myself. It's really great because that weird identity crisis I've been mentioning seems to disappear when that happens. I'm American, but I'm not. I'm Russian, but I'm not. It's a cool feeling. 

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