Carla Gypsygirl's Blurty

Carla's adventures in a not-so-country town: romance, road trips and pancake batter

Dear readers,

So here’s the deal. If you’re a regular visitor to this page (and hooray if you are!), then you’ll know that a couple of weeks ago, I went away to South Australia. And ever since I’ve come back, I haven’t been updating as much as usual, and whenever I do, I make vague references to my life being completely different. Or I write heaps about a special boy. I think I’ve wanted to really devote care and attention to what I was writing about. So here it all is…

I had a really cool time in South Australia. I went down there with about thirty other young people from FEVA (Fellowship for Evangelism in the Visual Arts). We were there to work with a Christian school and their church there to tell people the awesome news about Jesus. It took ages to drive down there- two full days of being on the road. Two days that featured the Big Ram (yeah, it is big), lots of McDonald’s (hurrah!), questionable music taste, weird signs in Victoria that told us to surrender all of our fruit because of evil fruit flies, caravan parks full of retirees who fish in the Murray River all day long, and conversations with my buddies under the stars. There was this section of South Australia that we went through called the Hay Plains, and it was just kilometres and kilometres of dry yellow grass and stubby trees. I was in the car with my friends Ian and Timmy, and after awhile, I thought I was going to go nuts from seeing the same creepy scenery for so long…I remember holding my head in my hands and shouting, “Someone talk to me, please! Ask me a question! Now, now, now!”

Finally, we reached Gawler. Gawler is a little country town, about an hour out of Adelaide. Though all the locals were totally in denial about Gawler being in the country. Conversations would often go like this:
City slicker Carla: “It’s nice being out here in the country.”
Gawler local: “Oh no, Gawler isn’t the country. We’re a suburb.”
City slicker Carla: “Um, but isn’t that a cow over there? In a grassy field?”

During the ten days I was in Gawler, I helped the church to share Jesus with the locals. Almost every day, a bunch of FEVA people would put on a little show at the school assembly that had a message about Jesus. It was so funny- the kids would get so hyped at anything vaguely comical. The biggest night for me was a youth sleepover we had at the church, which had about eighty kids and two thousand rainbow-coloured water balloons (guess who filled a lot of them up?). I met some really great kids there (Brittany and Sarah, I’m talking about YOU!), who were really keen to learn about Jesus’ love for them. One of the funniest moments was at the end of the night, when Meg, Fiona and I found ourselves trying to whip up a mega batch of pancakes for the next day. Only we didn’t have tables to work from, and we weren’t in a kitchen. So we were on our knees in this little room at the back of the church, getting flour and batter everywhere and trying to be cheerful about it…and all the while, I had The White Stripes’ “The Hardest Button to Button” in my head: “I had a brain that felt like pancake batter”…

We did so many different things in Gawler- we had a barbeque where our resident (and fabulous) jazz band Caecilius performed, and we went around chatting to the kids about Jesus. We had a carols night, and a women’s jewelry night, a kid’s club, and other youth group events. The wonderful thing was that so many people were so open to hearing about how Jesus had changed our lives, and how Jesus could change theirs. So often, I become shy when it comes to talking about my faith, because I get scared that people will think I’m weird or stupid. But from going down to Gawler and being able to share Jesus with so many people I hadn’t met before, I learnt that there’s nothing to be afraid of. Sure, there’ll always be people who aren’t keen to hear about Jesus. But God is strong enough to stand up to any questioning, and He loves everyone so much that He wants us to all hear about what He has done for us. And when I saw so many people get so excited about what they heard about Jesus, it made me feel so good!

Okay, by now you’re probably thinking: “But what about the boy you keep writing about?” So here is the official announcement: I, Carla Gypsygirl, for the first time in three years, have a boyfriend. Yes, that’s right: a real boyfriend! Not an imaginary boyfriend, or a sort-of boyfriend, or a boy I’m pining over who doesn’t like me back. My boy’s name is Geoff, and he is really nice and sweet and funny. He always loves to talk about Jesus with me. He has brown curly hair, hazel eyes, and he loves wearing pink t-shirts. He’s crazy about music, but he doesn’t like trash pop as much as I do. He can speak French, and he knows heaps about Egyptology (unlike me- all I know is that Ancient Egypt is where eyeliner originated from). You’ve probably read about Geoff in here before- he’s the boy I danced with at the bushdance (that’s when we held hands for the first time- oooh, SO Jane Austen!), and he’s the lead singer for Caecilius.

I’ve known Geoff for ages- it’s a bit of a “Pride and Prejudice” story, actually. That is: boy meets girl, boy asks girl out, girl says no, boy and girl dislike each other for eighteen months, girl and boy go down to Gawler together, then the girl realises that the boy is actually one of the kindest, coolest, funniest and sweetest (etc) boys she has ever met and begins to totally like him, girl pokes boy a lot and smiles at him to get him to realise that she fancies him, boy takes nine days to figure it out, then finally the boy asks the girl out again (after she’s put flour all over him from the pancakes) and everything is all happy again! Hurrah!

Anyway, I’m sorry it took me so long for me to tell you guys. It all feels so special, that I wanted to make sure I wrote about it properly. Next Tuesday, it will be ONE WHOLE MONTH that Geoff and I have been together! Isn’t that exciting? I feel totally blessed to have him in my life at all. I didn’t think that Geoff would give me another chance, and I thought I was too late. But I wasn’t. I think that God is really generous. Geoff and I have so much fun together, and I love talking to him.

So that’s most of the story. I hope you liked it. It’s all true. I love how God gives me good stories to tell. I’d love to hear some of yours!

Love,
Carla Gypsygirl