Sunday = church and the sabbath

Today I went with Laura, my FYI leader (First-Year Introduction -- it's a class all freshmen have to take; we're split into small groups with upperclassmen as leaders) to her church. It's a Mennonite church, like my church at home, but it's quite different. For one thing, it's in the afternoon. Today they met outside someone's house, although they do have a building where they usually meet. We all (under 50 people) sat in a circle around a fire, and whoever wanted to could call out a song, provided it was in the blue hymnals we all had, and the two guitarists would play it and we would all sing. It was an interesting way of doing worship, letting the congregation choose the music.

After that there was not a sermon, as you would expect -- they don't even have a pastor, but rather there's a man who directs things, who I believe is a professor here. Anyway, we broke up into small groups and discussed forgiveness, specifically the movie series they had been watching on forgiveness, which meant I didn't always know what they were talking about. After that we sang one last song, and then we ate dinner; it was their monthly potluck. It was nice to eat homecooked food instead of cafeteria stuff.

So it was quite different, but I did like it. Houghton's church fair is tomorrow, so I'll look around there and see what other churches I'd like to visit.

~~~

Today was also my first attempt at keeping the sabbath. It was so nice to have a day with no homework. I slept in really late, made yogurt-bran muffins with Laura for the potluck (the muffins sound really weird, but they were actually quite good), and went for a short bike ride. And am now doing computer stuff, obviously. So it was a good day.