Humble Pie

2/25/2012 (Sunday)

So I may have mentioned before that we are required to do service placement. So everyone is in different places around the city doing different types of community service.

 Mine happened to be in Lavender Bay, which is just a few train stops away. Braedon helped me figure out that I would get off the train at North Sydney and I could walk the rest of the way.

So I was feeling confident that I was going to get there with no problems. In fact, on the way to the train station at Strathfield, someone stopped me and asked me for directions! I mean, I couldn’t tell them how to get anywhere, but the fact that I looked like I knew what I was doing enough for him to ask was awesome! So I was feeling pretty darn good about myself. A little too good in fact.

The next two hours proved to be like eating a big slice of humble pie. I will admit that the first 30-45 minutes of being lost was totally my bad. I was not in the right spot. But the last hour was completely not my fault!

It all starts at the North Sydney train station. I got off at the station I was supposed to and emerged out of the train station and took a right, as I thought I had to do. I walked for a while, found the street I was supposed to be on and followed it. I passed a man at a pay phone and I thought ‘there’s still payphones in the world?’ As I kept walking I realized that the address numbers where going up when I needed them to be going down. Also, the name of the church I was going to was called “Church by the Bridge”, and where I was, there was no bridge to be found.

No problem, I’ll just turn around. But I didn’t want to look silly in front of everyone. Because obviously everyone was looking at me and knew I was foreign. And by everyone I mean no one. So I got to the next intersection and crossed the street and began to walk back from where I just came. Then I got back to the train station and I realized that the road I was supposed to be on just stopped.

Later I would find that the road is split by a highway and picks up on the other side, and to get there I just had to go left out the train station rather than right.   

But of course I didn’t figure that out. 

I thought to myself that, 'Maybe I was right the first time.' So I walked back up where I just was, and passed the man at the payphone once more. He looked at me, and unlike before when no one was looking at me and judging me, he was absolutely looking at me and judging me. 

It was everything I had not to say “Yeah, I’m lost! What about it?” But I didn’t.

Eventually I realized that I was on the wrong side and worked my way down to where I should be. But then, I was standing at the right address, and the church I was looking at did not have the same name as the church I was supposed to be at. So I walked around for quite sometime trying to see if I was just missing it. As it turns out, that was the church, and all my problems would have been solved if I had got of the train at Milson’s Point and not North Sydney. But you win some, you lose some. Now I know.

So I went home, bested by the streets of Lavender Bay. But the rest of the say wasn’t so bad. I got back, wallowed in shame for about an hour. Ate lunch. Met up with my roommates at the local library and got on the internet for the first time in 4 days (hence the 20 blog post from the same day).

Then we ended up going to Hillsong church, which was awesome! It wasn’t the main campus one (we’ll probably go there soon). But it was so cool to hear the band and see them perform. I’ve listened to them on CD for the longest time so it was pretty cool to see it in real life. It was super easy to get to too. We just had to take the train a few stops and Hillsong provides a bus that takes you from the train station to church. I like that idea a lot because I had had enough walking for one day.