Love, Novela [Completed]

Re: A better church experience

From: novela-harmon@bethel.edu
Date: Mon, Oct 2, 2017 at 4:49 PM
Subject: A better church experience
To: grace-k-nelson@bethel.edu

I finally had a decent experience at a Protestant church. It was the same one, but this time this girl Saraí that I met last time saw me enter and invited me to sit with her and the others. I was never much for running to sit with pals, but I think it made a difference in how I filtered everything. It was the same singers as last time and some of the same songs, but I appreciated them more. Maybe being more familiar helped, or maybe I just really needed to be back in church.

Afterward the group went out for lunch and invited me to go with them. After about a 10-minute discussion about where to go, Javier announced we would go to Galerías mall so we everyone could get whatever they wanted in the food court. There were six of us and we all piled into one guy's - Rodrigo I think - car.  It was close quarter, but everyone seemed fine with it. It reminded me of last year when we all stuffed ourselves into Lydia's car since she was the one freshman we knew who had one.  

Everyone was really nice and welcoming to me, and spoke Spanish to me even though some of them seem to speak near-perfect English (they were using it with each other but not me!). The reason I didn't see meet them the first week was that they were all off at a retreat. Too bad I didn't find the church a little sooner; I could have gone. Apparently it was awesome.

The mall has a movie theater so after lunch we went to a movie. Which movie to see was another heated debate. They wanted me to decide. I really didn't care; I was happy to just be doing something with other people that didn't involve drinking for once. By the time we'd settled on Lego Ninjago the previews had already started so we had to kind of sneak in.

Rodrigo gave took me home and then went to drop Saraí off after that. It was close to 7 when I got back, way longer than I expected to be out but totally worth it.

So, there is hope for the rest of my time here.

How are you? Now I'm starting to unfocus on my little dramas here and realize other people have lives too... please tell me something about yours.

Novela