Dependent and dependable.

I began the day yesterday burdened by sin.  As is often the case when I have a guilty conscious to work out, I pulled out my journal and began to trace my feelings back to their source, opening myself up to the Lord’s correction.  I finally allowed myself to be very honest about what we’ve really been doing here.

I wrote the following:

“I don’t know how many times I’ve said that we need to depend on God.  I guess I had hopes that saying it enough would finally make it happen.  That’s really the thing that’s been bugging me these past couple of weeks.  We observe our failure, write about a lesson that could be got out of it to send back home via our blog, and then live just like we have been, having ‘learned our lesson.’

I honestly can’t say that we’ve ever fully committed to relying on God.  And that’s wrong.  We’ve been fooling around half-heartedly with going places and checking Facebook… and somehow, only by the majestic grace of God, the work is getting done anyway.  That’s not how it should be.

As children of the most High King, our entire lives should be devoted to pursuing Him and His work.  May our Father have mercy on us for ever thinking it’s okay to sit around all day on Facebook, trusting that He’ll get something done for us.  Jesus has done more than enough for us already at the cross, and though we can do nothing without Him, with Him we can accomplish so much more than we have.

I said it about the Irish people last week, but now I see that it holds true for us as well.  Our creativity and potential  is being squandered by the state of our spirits.  We don’t really believe in what we’re doing, and so we don’t try to do it as fully as we should.

May our Father forgive us of that and help us.  May He fill us with His Spirit and not let us get complacent.  May He send His consuming passion into our hearts, igniting a fire for His work and His kingdom.  May we never be satisfied in doing nothing, but may our lives overflow with joy as we trust fully in Him.  Dependent and dependable for the sake of His kingdom.”

Freshly convicted, I forced myself to share this with Ethan, who readily agreed that we needed to buckle down and seriously commit to getting work done.

With a fresh mindset, we decided to forego Starbucks and get a head start on photographing the entirety of Falls Road, the most Irish speaking community in Belfast.  The idea behind this particular portion of our assignment is that, when it’s completed, if done correctly, we’ll be able to create a sort of virtual prayer-walk down the road.  I grabbed both my cameras as Ethan suited up with his borrowed camera, and we set out for the bus stop.

When we stepped outside it was raining.  Undeterred, I tucked my expensive Sony camera into my Gore-Tex water-proof jacket, and pulled out the cheaper of my two cameras.  After the walk to the start of Falls Road, we stood in the downpour discussing strategy.

We couldn’t simply walk down the street both taking pictures of everything, because that would be impossible to sort through.  We also couldn’t capture only one side of the street.  Neither could we shoot directly down the road, or we’d only get pictures of the road and miss the buildings on either side.  After hashing through the logistics of angle and image compositing, we came to the conclusion that the best course of action would be for one of us to be on either side of the street.  Then, together, we would cross-shoot the street, each taking a picture every so often, when we had reached the end of our previous photo.  This would, in the best case scenario, create two reels of images that could be composited into a sort of panorama of the street.  So, strategized and ready, we set out, carefully watching each other for signs that it was time to stop and take another picture. 

It didn’t take long for my memory card to fill up.  This is the same camera and card I brought last summer, and so it was already full of two summers worth of memories.  Obviously, I couldn’t bring myself to delete any of them, so thinking quickly, I swapped out memory cards with the expensive camera hanging around my neck and snuggled safely in my jacket, and we continued down the road.

It’s very hard not to look conspicuous, walking at the exact same pace across the street from each other, stopping to take pictures at the same time.  We decided, if questioned about our strange behavior, we would play the eccentric card.  “Because nobody ever questions eccentric people.”

Luckily, though we got a few strange looks, no one ever inquired, and we progressed quickly down a large portion of the road before, almost simultaneously, our cameras died just outside That Wee Café at noon.  So, of course we stopped in for lunch.  I took the time to re-swap memory cards and play around with my other camera. 

I’m generally afraid that if I take it out too often, I’ll end up breaking it, but the more I play with it, the more I absolutely love my Sony Alpha.

After lunch we decided the best course of action was to return to the hostel to let our cameras charge while we got some computer work done.  While Ethan wrote his blog for the previous day, I transcribed half an hour’s worth of interviews into Word documents.  We finished around the same time, and with newly charged cameras, we ventured back out.

We’ve never been lucky enough to catch the bus that stops outside our hostel, so when we found it waiting just outside the door, we quickly climbed aboard, hoping it would take us to City Centre where we could catch the bus back to Falls Road.  After riding a route through very unfamiliar territory, I spotted a familiar landmark that can easily be seen from Falls.  Nudging Ethan, who until then had been lost in The Best of Sherlock Holmes, I motioned at the giant spheres that meant we must be near Falls.  He didn’t hesitate in pushing the button that signaled the driver to stop, and we hopped off… 

As the bus pulled away, I got the sinking feeling that we weren’t exactly where we thought we were.  I was right.  We were on the complete opposite side of the spheres, without a clue as to how to get to Falls from there.  After asking for directions at the conveniently nearby Spar, we were back out in the rain, meandering toward the landmark that had betrayed us.

We were actually kind of hoping that we would finally be able to figure out what exactly the giant sphere within a sphere was or stood for, but even from close-up, we were entirely baffled.  As seen here:

Just on the other side of it, though, we discovered a shopping mall we had marked on our list of places to check out for Irish speakers.  As far as we could tell, there weren’t any. 

Farther up (literally, it was a hill) the road, we finally stumbled out onto Falls Road, a few blocks up from the Culturlann.  Tired from our adventure, and with only a couple of hours to go until our next Ceili dancing lesson, we decided to continue our photographing the next day, and enjoy a light dinner of “spicy chicken goujons” at the Culturlann.  Our dinner conversation mainly centered around pinpointing the exact location of the goujon within the chicken.  We decided it was probably near the nuggets.

Eventually, our foreign Ceili dancing partners entered, and shortly after them, the instructor.  She regretfully informed us that she would not be able to do our interview then, because she had been called to do a Ceili session at the conclusion of a local business meeting immediately after our lesson, but we rescheduled her, so hopefully we’ll get an interview out of her, yet.

The Ceili lesson went beautifully, though it was cut short by our instructors need to get to her meeting, and, since we’ll not be in Belfast next Thursday, she gave us hand-outs so we can practice back home.  Ethan was most pleased with this.  Look out Louisiana.

Out early, and with nothing immediately on the agenda as far as work was concerned, we agreed to hang out with the foreign girls back at a nearby apartment complex.  It was refreshing to spend time with people our own age with similar interests, and it was an awesome reminder that people are people regardless of culture or location.  Sitting there, watching Aladdin with girls from Holland and Germany, and talking about tv shows like Lost, Heroes, and The Big Bang Theory really helped put things in perspective.  We’re all not quite so different as we tend to think.

We finished the evening with a little cross-cultural experimentation on humor-transference.  Let’s just say we can now bill our web-series, The Apartment, as an international success.

- Sam R. Franklin

Day 13 in Belfast