The problem is

..it's not just about nice buildings anymore.
And how do I know if the people who are my life and experiences will mind casting their shadows onto this cave wall where I paints.

The other weekend I went to a conference. It was about the internet. It could have been so terribly clichéd, a Christian, youth conference. It really wasn't, and it made me introspect, to the point of navel-gazing. As to why I use the internet. Being here its easy to claim I'm just keeping in touch, but when there are people around me, why do I insist on talking to those i 'escaped'. The internet was not demonised, we were told all about how it works.. Like a university lecture though I confess I've never attended such a thing. I knew the facts already, but it was good to remember, that anything on the internet is there because somebody communicated it, posted it. Its a little mirror of humanity. Porn, bomb-how-to's, suicide pacts, ana websites. It was/is all there within us.
So, refreshing. Also the way in which, you could pick up the God references at your leisure, nowhere was it said 'build a christian firewall'. Also challenging: how much do we use the internet as a concealment of identity. The security of anonymity. But then, how much do we use (insert your social networking site here) to project a particular aspect of our identity. I know I do, or even to try on a new identity.
The sermon pulled on this thread. The preacher wore a t-shirt saying 'good guy'. The verse was from numbers, about cities of refuge for man-slaughterers. He started by saying 'Friends, we are not killers.' I whispered back to my translator, "yet".

I made friends with two guys who were also listening to my whispering translator. One Romanian - who spoke no Hungarian, which the conference was in - and one from Saudi Arabia, who's at university here in Cluj. We had no small group to go to, so formed our own club of card-playing and henna-painting. Now readers, this is where my honesty is challenged. Shall I tell you only of the laughs we had, the coffee's we drank, or shall I confess that I was frustrated by their lack of emotional or intellectual response to the lectures? Here were the two men who could understand my fast, metaphor-loaded English, but I couldn't open up to them half as much as those who I knew would respond in a mixture of slow English and German. I'd like to blame them, but in this introspective spirit maybe my probing fingers will discover that I prefer to talk to people who don't fully understand me so I can pretend I have an untapped message, that if they don't agree or respond appropriately its because they have failed to comprehend the gravity of what I say.
Speaking of gravity, my dear friend Anna gave a testimony one night. Not the sweet testimony suitable for a Cairns Rd baptism, but a brutally honest, here are my sins and I still struggle, God help me, testimony.
Since coming home, she and I have met up a few times with these boys, and its been cute. The first time, we were summoned to meet, and were taken to a café near my house, then into Central Park, where we ate candy floss, went on the trampolines, the bumper cars, swings and slides and just messed around. I felt like I was watching us, four kids on some double-date. We wandered up to that hill with my cross, as it got dark. The local boy showed me where the town walls were first, and second. The church spires, the neighborhood that was built under communism. The lights lit it up like a multicoloured map, a postcard of this city where I live now. I know those sights by day, at night they project themselves up into the sky. We went to a field behind the hotel on the hill. We looked at the stars. The sky was clear and the trees framed little plough. We played wistful songs and danced. But I don't know, maybe I missed you, I felt something lacked. We ate ice cream in a café near the cross. I had tiramisu, but I don't know that I like that café because when I went up there to pray, it was playing some recognisable dance tune, and it was all wrong for an easter sunday morning.

I'm sorry if this writing seems mournful or slow to make any point. I guess you could blame the book I'm reading, where a sentence takes one or two pages to end!