Ireland

I suppose I never wrote about Ireland. With all the business of Christmas and Dan's death I've hardly had time to reflect on my trip at all. In the two weeks that I motored through Ireland, I thought it was an absolutely lovely country.  It has beautiful quiet country side, intersting history, busy cities and some of the most fun people you will ever meet.  I found the Ireland-ers quite a funny bunch, one guy from Dublin admitted that they just like to complain-they don't really care what it's about but they like to have something to complain about.  The finance minister seemed to be the flavour of the week. Appearently he is nearly as bad as the devil himself.  I'm not sure I came to any great revelations while I lugged my backpack from train to plane to train around the country, but I did learn that you see the rawness of people pretty quickly while you're travelling.  Not as a bad thing necessarily, but it's weird. It's almost like some sort of survival instinct kicks in and everyone's personalities are multiplied by 10.  Those little things that you could ignore about people are suddenly blaringly obvious when you go to sleep in the bed beside theirs and then wake up 8 hours later staring them in the face.  Everyone's slightly annoying habits are suddenly the baine of your existance and you wonder how you will ever talk to them again when your home.  But really it's not so bad, once you get home and have a few days to breathe, you realize that you were probably equally annoying yourself and remember times where you decided that you were much more worthy of the train seat then them, or the time that that you decided you should infact not have to have the top bunk.  Travelling around with these guy friends made me wonder if this was at all like marriage.  When you can choose to see people it's always great, because it's on your timetable - you see them when you are feeling sociable and looking nice and wanting to interact.  But it's a little different when they are just there. All the time.  Maybe it's different when you're madly in love with someone, but I just think maybe that's why so many people say that the first few years of marriage can be tough. When you look gross, they are there. When you're tired, they are there.  When you want to sleep, they want to read and when you want to stay in, they want to go out.

  I think that somewhat relates to having a servant's attitude.  I have an easy enough time putting in an hour or two of volunteer work when I've schedualed it into my week, made time for it, etc, etc.  But when i'm late to my appointment and then suddenly someone that i'm not all that fond of asks for an hour of my time to help them out with this or that, suddenly the whole put others first thing kind of hits the back burner.  Travelling with people wasn't like my neatly schedualed 2 hours each Wednesday night, it was all the time. It was when I was tired and grumpy and wanted me time and didn't want to ever see another human again.  I think maybe that's what Jesus was talking about.  Serving people is easy when you plan for it, but living a life devoted to being 2nd isn't quite as easily lived out.