More observations on General Synod; a guest post by Grant Smith

We made it to Connecticut with two flights one four hours and the other two hours, even with no on flight movies and dismal drink service we made it with little of no complaint. The hotel that we’re staying at is really awesome, in each room there is a king size bed, a fold out full size bed, a nice bath tub shower, and a full kitchen. We get free breakfast, but an ice cream sand which costs three dollars. There is a gelato shop right outside the hotel and a café that brews beer in the restaurant that’s called the Steam Café. The food is good and not extremely expensive, and the ice cream stuff at the gelato shop was amazing. Then there is General Synod itself: the civic center (where synod is being held) reminds me of a bee hive, only no queen. Thousands of people are running around performing the tasks that they need to with no big problems, sometimes there are traffic jams and sometimes bumps. Then there are the cookies, some group of people cooked thousands of dozens of cookies so that it worked out that each person needs to eat two dozen cookies to eat them all. I feel like I’m doing my own part, I’ve eaten at least 14 cookies and we have 4 days of synod left. The service at 7:30 pm on Friday night was a very interesting one. The sermon was an awesome, but being in a basketball coliseum thingy and worshiping God is an interesting mixed feeling. I’m used to seeing basketball games when I see college basketball banners hanging from the rafters not singing hymns. The sermon was really good, but I think that church music should consist of organs, pianos, and the occasional orchestra instrument is good, so the guitar and the jazz band threw me off a little bit. The hymns were good, and the four or five people that sang were awesome and I liked the hymns fairly well. Then there was the “youth event”, they played rap music so loud it hurt my ears sitting 200 feet from the speakers, and let me tell you it’s hard for my ears to be hurt by loud music. Then the minister who was leading us wanted us to go back to the auditorium because they couldn’t pan seats that were empty when honoring youth. Then we had more incredible loud music and we were told not to have sex by saying "no mixing of colors." Guys are red, girls are blue, and we are not to make dark red, dark blue, or purple, but we can make with the shaky shaky. After that and really loud banjo music remix with rap played I left with John for the hotel. The group gathered and recapped in Ryan and Shauna’s room at 11:30 and then I stayed up till 2:15 watching movies. Then I woke up at 8:30, much to my discomfort, and made my tasty lunch. So far I’m enjoying Synod and am glad that I came, especially since if I hadn’t I would be working at a fast food joint.

Grant is a member of the youth group at First Congregational UCC in Corvallis.  He will be a senior in the fall of 2007.