Yesterday I encountered my toughest support phone call ever. It was the couple who I skipped over each time I went through my list each evening. I summoned up all my courage (what little I had) and just dialed. Actually, I didn’t have their phone number, but I looked up on the Canadian White Pages and slotted it into my TnTMPD. And I remembered how familiar it was to dial at one point. It wasn’t a number that was foreign to me.

I swallowed, took a deep breath, and waited as the phone rang. The voice who picked up was familiar. But I was definitely really intimidated still.

Here’s what’s going on in my head: I feel like I’ve alienated or hurt some people in the past by not updating people or maintaining some relationships after going on two successive summer projects. I feel like I had sent letters out, people gave, I went on the project, thanked them with a summary letter, and moved on. I feel like people feel used. I feel like people think I don’t value our relationship. And maybe that’s how I even viewed it before. I mean, it wasn’t until May that I truly understood what partnership means. Now I know what true partnership is, and part of it includes inviting others. It also implicated that I had to bite the bullet and make calls I never thought I would make. And now, I know that, sometimes, the most honest thing I could share is what is going on in my life. It just so happens that what is happening in my life requires for me to share it with potentially everyone I have ever known. That’s a long step for someone who only wanted to be anonymous four years ago.

They were willing to meet. Interest! That’s all I am expecting! But in my heart, I didn’t actually expect it of this couple. I ended the call shortly after. I was so apologetic. As I should be. I’m sorry that I last summer I raised (God raised) $12,000 for North Africa and the Graphic Design Internship and I wasn’t absolutely blown away. I’m sorry that I didn’t praise God every tedious commute across Toronto to Mississauga, realizing that it was only by His grace that I was doing a job I wanted to do. And I’m sorry I didn’t thank and appreciate my supporters a heck of a lot more.

And so after I hung up the phone, I cried. I have no idea why. I think it was the fact that I am being stretched to my absolute limits by God to put my faith in Him. I know that God provides. But I do believe God is telling me gradually that He will provide from the strongholds of the places I fear. He’s saying, “Why are you fearful about that? I’m taking care of it already.”

I have now completed:

The Energy Thwap

The wind turbine at The Ex is pretty huge. Unfortunately I did not get to stand at the absolute base of it, since it was cordoned off for some reason during the last day of The Ex. Recently, as my family was driving along the highway, we saw two massive wind turbine blades go by on long transport trucks. Great stuff! I’m glad to see wind energy starting to pick up speed. I don’t think it’s really that much of an eyesore. They represent good things.

The Urban Outdoorsman

So I spent my sister’s final evening in Toronto camping in our backyard. She wanted to do it. We never got around to it. So we decided to do it on Sunday night. I pitched the tent in the dark with a convenient head-mount flashlight, and threw a bunch of blankets and sleeping bags inside. The ground was actually pretty hard, so I looked for our self-inflating camping mats, but to no avail. In the end, I agreed with my mom (a rare occasion!) that it would not be good for my sister if she went back to school with aches and pains from camping on a hard ground (for me, it was not really a big issue). So I took apart my global-village World Globe costume and used the thick camp foam inside to put in the tent for my sister. It was thick. And this is the third use of that camp foam now — for the Listerine Guy costume, for the World Globe costume, and now as a camping foam. Finally it has been used for its actual purpose. You could literally hear the camp foam praising God since it was so satisfied in fulfilling its purpose. (That one’s for Josh, who literally hates the misusage of the word “literally”).

Thunder ‘n’ rock: play guitar as a commercial jetliner takes off overhead.

So as I was in Etobicoke for a support appointment, I decided to go to the airport with Mark Cotton to complete this epic task. This is the final take. We took a video of it. The song was… spontaneously made up. Sorry about it being so windy.