I have to follow Mil and write about TEAR aswell. It rocked my small self centred universe. Although what was great was that the people there are trying to live lives that are not self centred. The speakers and the artists and the organisers and the participants were all trying to encourage eachother into a life where we don’t just put ourselves and our families first. I really value that. I thought Ched Myers was a well thought through and articutlate speaker. It was great that TEAR managed to get him. Thanks Ched for hanging in Australia longer than planned. However, no one could be a bigger draw card than Jemma Castle, she was amazing and is like so famous now. It was hard to find time to talk to her she was so swamped with interested people. No, that is not true, there was plenty of time to talk to her and it was really lovely. Actually that was the best thing about TEAR, catching up with so many different people I have come to know in the left wing, social justice Christian cirlce. I feel I had some really great conversations and felt really connected to the people I was having them with. So thanks to God for that.

I am so normally happy, energy girl but the last 2 days I have been fighting of frustration and exhaustion. We have a group of people staying from overseas and I wish I could offer them more hospitality and prescence than what I have been giving. It is probably to do with the incredibly bad flu that is circulating but there seems to be a pain running deeper. Say a prayer for me if you are reading this. I need connection with God. Maybe I have been putting too much of my energy into people and discussing broad concepts and not enough one on one time with God. It seems any alone time I sleep. Yes, please pray for me.

I am so tired. We had staff retreat this week and not much sleep was had by me and then I had another late night last night. I am sitting in the office getting excited about finishing work and going home to sleep all afternoon. I am very excited about the TEAR conference next weekend and hanging out with my beautiful sister. Marcus and I had some chats yesterday about possible ideas for the stations workshop thing Urban Seed is invoved with at TEAR. I hope Marcus goes with some of my ideas. He is more creative than me though and has been doing this stuff for awhile so we will see what happens. Our theme is ”the kingdom of God, in heaven as on earth.” Pretty broad topic. I think the Kingdom of God on earth is like the trees that grow in the desert. In such a harsh environment as the desert one would think nothing could grow but life springs up all over the place. That is the Kingdom of God. Despite the realities of the harshness of earth, it is growing itself here.

“Dear Big Issue,

I just want to say how happy it makes me (and so many people) to see the rays of sunshine around the streets of Melbourne that are the big issue vendors. The positive and courageous choices the big issue vendors make selling the big issue gives us hope for a better world.”

Whoever wrote this letter is beautiful. It makes me happy. Last night I was heading out and I stopped to chat to one of the vendors and someone had walked by and insulted and belittled them. Just being arrogant and stuff, so when I got to work this morning and saw this letter posted on the wall I felt a bit better. Atleast there are some people out there who get it.

Currently at the moment I am helping my friend Boony with his assignment and in order to make sure I don’t just do it all for him, which would be so much easier than trying to get him to do it, I am doing a blog entry. That way I am distracted for a bit and he has some time to think and write some stuff. It is kind of annoying because I have been on university holidays for the last 3weeks and I feel like of that time I have still spent heaps of time in front of the computer, typing up stuff. I wrote a submission for the Government’s Green Paper on Homelessness. They put out a paper about possible ways forward and asked people within the homelessness sector to comment. It forced me to stay up late two late nights in a row to get it in on time. I was like why did I create an assignment for myself when I was on holidays and now I have created another assignment for myself by helping Boony. It is not an easy assignment either and nor was writing a submission for the Government. Maybe I will take a week off from the computer just before I go back to uni.