-Getting a fun new haircut. I realize that in light of rioting and looting in England and conflict in Syria, a haircut seems pretty insignificant. But you need to know a bit of my haircut history, y'all. Our story begins, of all places, in a hair salon in a massive shopping mall in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa. I was there as a leader for a cross-community reconciliation trip of Protestant and Catholic teenagers from Belfast in the summer of 2005. These kids were fantastic, and had a very particular way of showing affection: sarcastic banter like you've never seen it before. Insult = endearment with them. At the end of our life-changing trip, we stopped by a mall before going to the airport so folks could get last-minute gifts and I had the sudden impulse to spend my last Rand on a haircut. "A fresh haircut will make a 13-hour flight much better," thought I. I thought wrong. I wanted a simple bob: what I received was somewhere between a mullet and a pageboy haircut...choppy in the back, straight across at the sides and just plain terrible all over. The woman who cut my hair - I kid you, not - cried because she was so embarrassed by the hair cut. She wouldn't even let me pay her. I ended up giving her a hug, telling her I loved it and hurriedly leaving to catch our bus to the airport. I knew it was truly dismal when those quick-witted, harsh-bantering teens saw me and said, "Oh, it looks nice." At one point on that flight back to Belfast when I went to the restroom on the plane, I looked up at the mirror and jumped from my own weed-eater hair looking back at me. So you see, dear blog buddies, a haircut is just a haircut, but a great one like my Audrey-Twiggy-ish one today is a rare and wonderful thing. After my hairdresser Gary finished my hair today, he said, "We did good today." I replied, "YOU did!"
-A particularly delicious and sermon-inducing hazelnut latte.
-Walking barefoot in soft grass.
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