Last Week and Day 1 of HIM

Right, so… blogging. About that. I’m going to do a quick recap of the last several days… but when I get to the weekend spent at the HIM conference, I’m going to stick to an itinerary sort of overview and save all of the personal revelations, theological ponderings, and existentialism concerns for a subsequent post. Or posts… I’ve been thinking a lot of thoughts. So, recap:

Last Monday, March 21:  After working all morning and early afternoon, Sam, Travis, and I went on a top-secret escapade about which you can beg endlessly to know, but I’m not going to tell you. :) Following the escapade, we drove up to the north shore to go to the Blue Room, which is a wet cave carved out of the side of a rocky mountain cliff. The water was FREEZING… but after floating around for a few minutes, it actually felt refreshing. At the back wall of the cave was a small passageway (a few feet long) that led to another smaller chamber of the cave, but the water level was a bit high and the passageway was almost entirely underwater. There were a couple inches of space between the top of the water and the roof of the passageway… just barely enough for us to grab a couple of breaths if we swam with our necks bent back.

I will never, ever, ever do that again.

Halfway through the passageway I panicked and breathed in some water, so I ducked under the surface and swam the last two feet into the chamber, where I surfaced in complete darkness and started to hyperventilate slightly. We were in deep water with the roof of the cave only two feet above our heads, and I couldn’t find a crevice in the rocks to hang onto. Eventually I found a place to grip and spent a few minutes slowing my breathing and letting my eyes adjust to the darkness… and even though I was tweaking, I think I did a decent enough job of pretending I wasn’t about to have a full-out panic attack. But even now, if I close my eyes and remember how it felt trying to breathe in that passageway… oof. I have to take several deep breaths and do a little shake to get rid of the heebie jeebies. I will never forget that feeling.  

Anyway! After I took a few minutes to steady myself, I feigned courage and dove under to swim out of the inner cave… and all was well. After spending a bit more time at the Blue Room, we drove back to Hanalei and ate at Bubba Burger (oh my gosh… that sounds so good right now) where we talked theology for a solid hour before stopping by Sam’s house, where Trisha (Pastor Steve’s wife) fed us warm brownies with ice cream. Then we went hot-tubbing at the Gauthiers’, who awesomely open up their home, hot tub, and pool for us pretty much any time we want. Yeah, they’re cool people.

So after a full day of fun and activity, Monday ended with us relaxing in the hot tub, star-gazing, and contentedly discussing “life” stuff. On the drive home, Sam said, “The only thing that could be any better right now would be dying.” That about sums it up.

Last Wednesday, March 22: Bible Study! Wednesday fell in the middle of my insomnia, so at Bible Study I collected a variety of suggestions from my friends on how to deal with it: sleeping pills, reading Psalms for peace, reading Leviticus because it’s boring, getting knocked unconscious, refraining from computer use, taking a hot shower, employing reverse psychology by trying to stay awake, taking three deep breaths, and praying for Super Sleep. None of the suggestions worked.

Last Thursday, March 23: So Thursday morning when I picked up Robbie and Dillon for HIM at 6:00 a.m., I was pretty much a zombie. But oddly enough, Robbie was the one who fell asleep on the drive:

Despite my zombie-like state, we made it to the airport without any mishaps, met the rest of the group at their airport café (the breakfast sandwich I had was disgusting), and caught our flight. After landing, we picked up our rental van and headed straight to Target to pick up some toiletries and other things (Shikinah had been making a shopping list for weeks), ate lunch at Pizza Hut (inside Target), and dropped off our luggage at the hotel. Here’s a picture of Ryan (blue), Robbie (green), and Dillon (red) posing in front of our rental van… they bought matching sweatshirts at Target and claimed to be part of a band called “Skittles.” Silly boys.

Then we went shopping at the Ala Moana mall, which is a four story open air shopping mall. It’s HUGE. Shikinah and I separated from the group to get mani/pedis… and it was heavenly. In addition to the manicure, we got the spa package, which consisted of wax treatments on the hands/feet, a hand/foot/arm/calf massage, and a gritty scrub on the arms/legs at both the beginning and the end of the massage. And our seats were lazy-boy massage chairs. Blissful. At that point, it was about the only thing I had energy for. We then went back to the hotel where I changed and took a short nap, then we walked to the Hawaii Convention Center to register for the conference. If you remember, I’m a “Lost” fanatic, so I was ridiculously excited when I remembered that the Convention Center is where they filmed most of the airport scenes in the later seasons of the show… here are a couple shots of the outside and inside.

After registering, we walked to Ala Moana (where we had parked the van) to eat dinner at Ruby Tuesdays, then went back to the conference for the general session (we were late) and seminar. Ryan, Shikinah, and I chose to go to a seminar taught by Tony Campolo (one of my favorite speakers) entitled “We Have Met the Enemy and They Are Partly Right.” It was interesting… he spoke on themes of Freudianism, Marxism, and Nietzscheanism. After the seminar, we went back to the hotel; I immediately crashed and slept until morning without waking. Finally.

And speaking of crashing… I’m going to have to finish this recap tomorrow. I’m beat. Goodnight!