goodwill

I'm sat at the dining room table at my mum's house, in that gorgeous lull after presents have been opened and before (long before) Christmas dinner is ready.

So, as usual, I'm starting to have that lovely, slightly nostalgic, Christmassy feeling -- thinking about Christmases gone by, and how much things have changed.

This is the first Christmas when I have really, properly, been living away from home. Of course, at uni I was living away from home for the majority of the year, but now I don't have the great long prescriptive holidays -- I now have 'annual leave' to contend with.

I think having only a limited number of allocated days when I can come home home makes me appreciate it all the more. When I first started uni, Dad said "You'll come back from uni after all that excitement and change and be amazed when you see everything at home is completely the same -- your life will be going at such a fast pace, it'll seem strange when you come back and nothing here will have changed!"

In many ways, he was right. Life at uni (and now working life) did, and does, seem to go very quickly. But I think Dad might have been worried that when I came back for holidays, home would seem a bit dull and predictable in comparison. In actual fact, 'predictable' or, rather, 'comfortable' is exactly what I want when I come home! When everything else feels a little overwhelming and grown-up, coming home and feeling utterly at home and comfy is perfection!

At no other time is this feeling felt stronger than at Christmas. As a Christian, Christmas has a very special significance to me anyway, but it's also a time of year that is embraced by everyone. If not the historic and theological importance, the cultural feeling of familiarity and cosiness is something that everyone can appreciate -- and we love it!

So, thank God for Christmas. Thank God for family, friends, and for the wafts of Christmas dinner floating through our houses.

BBQ

Man, I love Easter. All the new flowers, sunshine, warm breezes, chocolate eggs, barbecues, family and every good thing. Marvellous. And today is particularly warm-breezy, barbecue-y and blissful.

All these things I love. But mostly, of course, the fact that:

His love is never, never, never based on our performance, never conditioned by our moods–of elation or depression. The furious love of God knows no shadow of alteration or change. It is reliable. And always tender.
      -- Brennan Manning

Amen.

latest

So, coming up scarily soon is our CU's annual Events Week. It's the biggest thing in our CU calendar, and it's basically a week packed full of events for people to invite their mates to - there are talks with a free lunch on every day of the week, and events in the evenings like acoustic nights, curry nights, and sports matches. Great stuff! The whole idea is that people come along and find out what it means to be a Christian.

This year our chosen theme is "The God Delusions" (a clever take on the title of Richard Dawkin's book The God Delusion) - basically we're focusing the daily talks around common misconceptions people have about God (e.g. "if there's a God, why is there suffering in the world?").

Anyway, I made a quick promotional film about it that we'll be littering Facebook with in the week before it all kicks off - here it is!