Simple pleasures

In many ways, I feel like I am living a life that is so much simpler than my life was in Victoria. I don't yet know very many people in Montreal, our church is small and we only officially meet on Sundays, I am not yet working, my free time is spent doing whatever I feel like doing at the moment, and there is not much of the mundane because so much is new. Life almost seems to go at a slower pace, even though I live in a fast-paced city...

The words "simple pleasures" have been going through my head a lot lately and I am realizing that life is made up of a lot of simple pleasures, if only we take the time to experience them. Admittedly, I do have a lot of free time right now, but I am loving and enjoying every minute of it. And quite honestly, I can take great pleasure in what may seem to be the simplest of things right now... being able to take the bus or the metro somewhere I haven't been before, meeting someone new to talk to, accidentally meeting up with someone that I actually do know, sleeping more than five inches from the floor (I finally bought a real bed and it was delivered on Saturday afternoon), and so much more. :)

Our weather has amazingly turned to spring in the last week or so. I don't understand how it can go from snowing to 22 degrees in a week, but it did! :) It was 22 degrees on Sunday afternoon and Monday's high was 24 degrees. Apparently, spring is really short in Montreal and summer comes pretty quickly. According to Montreal standards, it is spring (the flowers are starting to bloom, etc.), but the temperature feels like summer weather in Victoria, which is funny because it is only April. This summer is going to be a hot one, that's for sure... one temperature extreme to the next!

This past Sunday was such a great day! After church, we all had lunch and then went to the park to play a game of soccer. We were having so much fun together as we played (it was the perfect combination of fun, laughter, and competition), that a few other kids came to join us. Depending on the weather, we are going to go back to the park next Sunday afternoon for another rowdy game of soccer and some of the kids that we met said they would try and come back too.

After our game, as we were sitting in the park watching the kids play, Rachel just smiled and said "these are good times" and it is so true. The church is so small at this point that organic is the name of the game. We get to spend an incredible amount of time together, getting to know and encouraging each other, having fun and laughing, and helping each other out whenever we can. And Sunday meetings can even start when everyone arrives (in the case of oven fires, for example)! In all of it, God is definitely uniting all of us together as a family.

The focus of my weekdays now definitely needs to be looking for a job, although it is honestly a bit of a struggle at times. Job hunting is not exactly one of my favorite things to do and I'm discovering that it is even harder in a city that you don't know very well. But God is good and He is giving me direction one step at a time. I can't see very far ahead, but I know that I don't need to.

The longer that I'm here and the more that I learn about Montreal's history and culture, the more that I can see what God's heart is and always has been for this city. I was reading about some of Montreal's history the other day and learned that Montreal was first discovered in 1535 by Jacques Cartier and is one of the oldest cities in North America. Cartier apparently didn't think much of the land because he left without making much of an impression, but the French explorer Paul de Chomedey Maisonneuve came back in 1641. He founded a mission on the site and set out to convert natives to Christianity. He was also the one who erected the original cross on the top of Mont Royal.

On the flip side, here's an excerpt from the book. "Back in the 1920's, when the rest of North America was in the grips of prohibition, Montreal was known as the 'City of Sin' for its freewheeling, immoral ways." Without getting into too much detail, I don't think that things are all that different in modern-day Montreal, based on what I've read and seen so far. Yet in the midst of that, God is indeed building His church!