Sunday #1 pt1

I arrived at the Church quarter of an hour before the A2J (Addicted to Jesus) meeting was scheduled to start. I met the friend that had invited me in the carpark, and we entered.

It was a nice enough building, from what I could see. We went up a narrow stairway (as she warned me about the funny smell) that took us to the room where the meeting was being held. It was a largish room, and there must have been over twenty youths there already - most of them lounging against the many sofas or sat on the floor. My friend pointed out various people, most of whom I forgot the names of moments later (as is the nature of these things), and introduced me to a boy before displacing him to the other side of the sofa and dragging me down to sit on her other side.

More introductions commenced - my friend pointed out two of the Youth Leaders (called disciples), and one of them came over to shake my hand. Friendly.

There was no clock in the room that I could see, and so I had no idea how long we would be waiting. So of course I was employing my usual nervous-indicator: pointing out various small things to start conversation and/or put the focus on someone/something else. For example, I carried on a commentary on the four-or-five-frame repeating PowerPoint Presentation that was playing on the wall in front of us. "Wow, they must be enthusiastic - look at all the extra Os in ""Jesus loves you soooooooo much!"", " and that kind of thing. "Do you really do the fasting?" "What?" "Like it says on the slideshow?" "Oh. Oh! Yeah." "... Sounds healthy."

I'm still not sure whether I meant that last part sincerely or not. My friend does seem to be a hypochondriac when it comes to the 7DS.

Finally, one of the Disciples went up to the front and put a book in front of the projector. Everyone hushed up over a few minutes, he read notices, and then we stood and spread out around the room. He said a prayer, someone else said a prayer, he said another prayer, and then Lucy (another Disciple) put the music on and we were told to "sing along, or if you don't know the words just listen to them and think about what they mean."

I selected the latter option, and did some people watching. By the chorus of the first song, people were lifting their arms and swaying as they sung, and when we got to the second and third songs the majority were swaying. One man was praying for a bit, then went up to another man and hugged him for the majority of one song, a few other people were people-watching and at one point between songs a boy said a prayer which was "Amen"ed, but apart from that there wasn't much movement or fidgeting.

The music wasn't hymns. The fact that it wasn't should have prepared me for the 'Street Bible' quotations later on, but I'm not there yet.