This morning we were expecting to be at Franks church around 10 am to be involved with the conference, when he rang and said that he would give us a call when we are needed, and not to come early as we would be sitting around doing nothing for a long. It ended up that he arrived at the Wards to inform us that we did not need to get there until 11:30 am. And to think that Ben said that Frank was usually pretty good with time at conferences. We arrived at 11:30 am and there were a few people there praying, then around 12 they starting singing and eventually I got to speak around 12:30 pm, as we were first up. Thinking back this was the lest nervous I have ever been about speaking in public, there was an ease that I had never felt before. I ended up speaking for around 45 minutes on the topic of “An Australian’s Perspective of Marriage.”
Frank had arranged for the conference to be interactive, so I had a few questions to answer which was ok. But after Pam and Eddie spoke on men helping around the house, Frank thought it was good that I give a reply to one man’s query about sweeping the floor being a womans job, just because the person asking had the same name as me. It was a tough question to answer as I knew that many men had not ever entered the kitchen at their homes, so I knew that they had strong views. In my reply I said that I used to make dinner for Kathryn when I got home from work before here, and man did this cause an uproar of laughter. So much so that Pastor Edward, who was not there today, asked the following day what I did to cause a big stirring that he heard about!
We also saw Pastor Jackson at the conference and he had a large lump right in the middle of his forehead. Apparently from a deacon from Edwards church, Loless, delivered via a hammer. I’m not sure what was happening there, but there was some sign making involved.
We had discussed over dinner last night that Phil and Ben perhaps make carbonara for dinner when we got home, so when we arrived, there was a white boy’s African version of carbonara on the table when we got home, along with a romantic candle and flower, and some soft jazz in the background. This was quite amusing, but what was scary was that they said they were going out for dinner – what actually happened while they were making it, I don’t know. But I heard that there was cracked pepper from one side of the kitchen to the other and that Phil had done quite a lot of washing up of dishes and bowls that seemed to just appear out of nowhere.
