Birthday!

Hey, sorry I haven't written anything in the past week or two.  There has been a lot going on but nothing I could think specifically to write about.

Soo.  I haven't thought about it much, but I'm a year older now.  I've been so busy I didn't think about my birthday a whole lot until the day of.

A whole lot of people have been here for the 50th jubilee.  It's the 50th anniversary or YWAM and people are coming from all over the world to celebrate.  So for weeks we've been working to prepare, doing weeding and building and such.  But on the 29th it started, and people started flooding in.  It's a mass of joyful, colorful, multi-cultured business and celebration.  With that there's lots of work to do during this week to keep everything from turning into complete chaos.  So the morning of the first day we all got assigned work duties.  A couple people got garbage/recycling (I prayed the whole time they wouldn't call on me, and thank goodness I wasn't called!) and a whole lot of people got night security, and the remaining ten or so of us got Friday night cleanup.  Everybody else on Friday night cleanup was super happy because we only work on one day, and only four hours.  But I was disappointed because I really wanted to be on security and stay up hanging out with people.  So I just randomly caught up with a few of the South Africa girls and I ended up sleeping with their team.  We watched despicable me and midnight passed, and I just turned to my friend Ashley and said "Hey, I'm nineteen.  Yay!"  And that was the technical beginning of November 30th.

The next day I woke up and all my roommates wished me happy birthday and I went pleasantly about my morning.  It was super weird, I kept thinking "It would be really cool if somebody gave me a little flower for my birthday." But I wasn't expecting anything of course.  But I'm just minding my own bisiness when BAM, one of my China team buddies gives me a little plumeria flower.  It was pretty cool.  God always likes to plan neat things like that.  ^_^

As afternoon passed I wanted to maybe do something fun, not anything big but maybe tag along somewhere and just hang out with people, but everybody seemed too busy.  It seemed like everybody was going somewhere, like they were planning to do something, and I kept asking "Where's everybody going?  Can I come?" and they either ignored me or changed the subject.  So I thought "Gosh, I must be really annoying, this sucks.  Nobody wants me to tag along anywhere.  They won't even tell me where they're going!"  It was awful!

So I just sat around feeling kinda depressed and lonely and played my ukulele for awhile.  And for some reason my roommate Elise REALLY wanted to take me to the beach with some of our other roommates so they could pray for me.  So I'm like, what the heck, okay.  So we walk down there, and she seems really happy, and keeps looking at me.  When I got down to the beach there was a table with some balloons set up, and I wondered who they were for.  (Yes, I am really THAT easy to fool.)  Anyway I walk closer and all the sudden about fifteen or so friends randomly jump out from behind a wall and yell SURPRISE!  And I was soooo stunned that I just could barely talk for at least a minute!  I felt soooo loved and blessed, and it was just wonderful!  And then I understood why nobody would tell me what was going on earlier, and I just felt so silly!

They made me a birthday bowl of mud-pudding stuff.  Chocolate pudding with cookie crumbs and gummy worms, which is totally me since I like worms.  And they got me these cute little presents too!  And we all played games and just hung out for a bit and it was just wonderful.  I want to give a special thank you to Elise and Esther and Laura who helped plan the whole thing, but also just everybody that came too.  You guys absolutely made my day and blessed me soooo much!

THe rest of the day was splendid probably not becuase anything else comparably awesome happened but because I was just so happy.  Somebody even bought me a frappe, and I got to hang out with my China team nd stayed up super late with them, and all in all being nineteen has been pretty fun so far.