The concept of "home" is a funny concept; when I'm at Uni and around Cambridge, if I say I'm 'heading home' I mean back to my college room, where I live for those 8-10 week bursts. But then towards the end of term, we all talk about when we're 'going home', meaning going back to the family home for the vacations. And when I was out in the Dominican Republic, even though only for 3 months, I 'went home' from working with the teams to the apartment I was renting while I was out there. In a discussion about this while I was there, I remember Claire (the missionary I was working with) saying that the question 'Where is home?' "only gets more difficult to answer". So I "came home", back to the family home, today and soon slotted back into the craziness of being with my sisters again! I'm sat in a full living room (though still with a gap left for my other sister who gets back from Uni at the end of this week!), surrounded by noise - the TV's on but it might as well not be because we're all talking and laughing too much to hear anything happening on it anyway! The living room is wonderfully decorated, with various strings of Christmas lights around the tops of the walls, and I've started catching up on the red doors (my ones!) of the painted Advent House calendar, in which I find white chocolate truffles my dad has made specially for me (I'm the big white chocolate fan of the house!). It's wonderful and yet still strange; strange to not have my friends around, especially not to have Thomas around - strange to have a choice of rooms to be in rather than just one - strange to have other people in most of those rooms(!) - strange to have responsibilities beyond myself (it's no longer acceptable to pile up all the crockery in the house after I use it until there's none left and no longer possible to just do what I feel like when I feel like it as things now have to be planned in advance so that joint plans can be made as well as individual ones). It's strange, for sure, but it's definitely home. And all the strangeness of family only makes me cherish it more. Family is such a big part of Advent and Christmas: it's an excuse to come together! To come together and embrace that strangeness, because the joy and wonderfulness of being together is right at the centre of it. I will always love my strange and wonderful family - and I know I will always be loved by them.
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Horror vacui is something I learnt about today, whilst reading for my coursework. It also just happens to describe my day pretty well too! I was up super late last night watching 'Chitty Chitty Bang Bang' (of all things!!!) with some friends, but still wanted to be up by 08:00 this morning to start my effective working pattern to get a large proportion of my coursework done in this week before I go home for Christmas. Anyway, safe to say, that didn't work - my alarm went off, so I dismissed it and set another for a bit later, than that went off and I again refused to get up and set another and so on until about 10:15, when I forced myself out of bed annoyed, and yet still tired, and bumbled through my getting up routine. I went from that straight into checking my internet whilst eating breakfast. Almost as soon as this was finished (I know... strange day in this respect) I met up with a friend from the summer who was in Cambridge for the day and went for lunch. I got back from this and went straight to the bar (what me and my friends today have termed 'the office') and - with the help of the tea and biscuits provided for interviewees and their parents! - worked solidly until 8pm, at which point we walked to Sainsbury's, got them to make us pizza, walked back, ate it and went back to working until around10.30pm. And now I've been writing this whilst my friends play a mightily strange card game around me!
The point being, it's been non-stop! It's been productive, and helpful for my aim of doing my coursework, but it's been full - as if I'm scared of there being any empty space. I think I do tend to do this quite a bit; I work with music because I don't like the silence; I've always picked as many modules/subjects/extra things to do as I could in order to pack my time; I don't generally like to stop, or leave empty space in which I might have to. But in the little, very short moments, in which I felt I had a moment to breathe today, I found myself reminded of yesterday's post and saying to myself, "Let God share it with you; just walk with him; let yourself be still." But I was quickly whisked away by what I was doing and the thought was lost into my own horror vacui. Perhaps I'll do better tomorrow... Last night my boyfriend finally managed to convince me to go for a night-time walk (well, evening, but after it got dark at any rate!). He seems to love Christmas lights - though only in the dark - and so wanted to go see some of them around Cambridge. I've kind of never seen the point of just walking around, and so I put it off and put it off and finally, on Saturday, promised I'd go on a walk tomorrow, and so yesterday, after dinner, off we went! And it was great! We just walked and talked; we saw Christmas trees covered in lights and went and looked over the river; we played 'pooh sticks' (though not very well as we had to wait for the cars to go to cross over the bridge and then it was too dark to really see if the sticks had come through or not... but it was still fun!); we tried to climb trees but couldn't find any with low enough branches for even his 6"5 height + arms to reach; and we mucked around and laughed and just walked.
And then today; I needed to go get some books out from both the University Library and the Divinity Faculty library and for some reason, when sat with my friends at lunch time, I asked if anyone wanted to go for a walk (to go get them!). Usually I'd just cycle, but for some reason, this was my suggestion, and one of my friends needed to get some books out of the UL and her department library too, so we did a big library round-trip - all just walking. And again, it was nice; we chatted and laughed and took in the fresh air, dodged other pedestrians and collected our books (until I felt I would've been better crawling back due to the heaviness of the numerous humongous books I now had in my bag!!!). It took longer than cycling would've, but it was also WAY more enjoyable! On both occasions, it was the fact of somebody else's company that made the experience, which otherwise seems pointless, long, and boring actually quite enjoyable! As I said in my first advent post; I'm not very good at waiting! I don't see the point; it takes too long; and it is just so boring!!! And I've gotten to the 7th day of my advent blog, and I'm there again - wishing it would just hurry up and be done with so we can just have Christmas! But what makes the waiting not just bearable, but even enjoyable, is sharing it with someone else. And God most certainly wants to share it with me; so that together we can just wait. So we can talk, and laugh, and take in the fresh, beautiful air; so he can show me all the things I'm missing in life and marvel at my excitement or my sorrow when I see them; so he can lift me up to the branches of the trees too tall for me to climb and shine a light on the stick floating in the water too dark for me to see. So that in this time of waiting, my mind might be drawn away from the boredom in myself, to the excitement there is in him. Life is not meant to be boring; so why do we make it so?! The Bible certainly doesn't present a God who wants our lives to be boring - everyone with whom God interacted went on the lead a highly exciting life; in this time of waiting, this is something I am finally finding the time to explore! Today has been a pretty cool day for me! I lo-ooo-ve water; the sea, rivers, waterfights, any water you can end up covered in and still laughing - I love it! So when I came to Cambridge, the obvious thing was to row! I've been rowing for my college W1 boat these last 3 years and have had ups and downs with the sport, but have generally always loved being out on the water, hanging out with my crew and just having a laugh a lot of the time! Well today was one of the 3 main races of the Cambridge rowing year; the Fairbairn's Cup. It's a timed race and the longest of the 3, and not as much fun for both of those reasons! It's also in December... and December is cold! So we turned up today and I wasn't expecting much! We're a small college; we had 5 senior women coming into this year and so could only race in a IV, we hadn't had a huge number of outings and if we're honest, most of us haven't done as much land training as we really should have. It also just hadn't been feeling as technically accurate as it had in previous years, and so we weren't exactly getting our hopes up (for the fear of them being well and truly dashed)! We tapped the boat down to where we were marshalling, in our matching Magdalene-coloured hats and all our extra clothes; and then, upon being told to move off, removed those extra layers and followed the boat in front towards the start line. After at least 10 minutes - and what felt more like half an hour - sat shivering in our racing gear, we were finally informed that a boat had crashed off the start-line and so there'd been a delay but we would be starting shortly. We started, we raced, we tried our hardest - and we all reached the finish-line just about still breathing, our muscles agonisingly questioning why we'd intentionally decided to do this and thinking solely about when we could stop moving, and where we could get water from! The stopwatch on the stroke-coach said 13 minutes 40 seconds had passed from just before the start to when we finally pulled in, meaning our time had to be less than that; and to say we'd been aiming for 14 minutes, this was great news! Later, once the times had been confirmed we found out that with a time of 13:02.7, we were in FIRST PLACE!!! We were SO surprised (and proceeded to jump around squealing like "stereotypical" little girls)! We didn't really believe it! But sure enough, at the awards ceremony later this evening, we were handed out - what our cox called - "chicken shields" and awarded first place of all the women's IVs! Having never really won anything proper before; this was all very exciting!!! But 'what does all of this have to do with Advent?', I hear you cry! Well, it kind of got me thinking about how part of advent is the expectation and the hope of what is to come (at least I read that somewhere recently!). But do we really wait expectantly for God to come into the world; do we expect that?! Or do we go into life, not wanting to hope for too much from God, in case those hopes are well and truly dashed? At this time of year, we wait in hope and expectation for Jesus to be born; God literally and physically present with us; Emmanuel; 'God with us'. And when it gets to Christmas, we remember that God isn't a God who has no relation to us in the world; he is a God who came into the world himself, as a human, so that he'd know what it is like, and so he could be in relationship with us. He is a God who interacts with us and lives with us; through the good and the bad and the purely mundane. Perhaps we should allow ourselves to expect a bit more from him, and dare to hope that he is a God who lives with us; and is a God who hears our prayers; and is a God who wants a living, breathing, moving relationship with us. And you never know, maybe we'll be surprised when God repeatedly exceeds even our newfound expectations and hopes! At least, that's what I'm taking from today! ;-D
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AuthorI'm a recent Cambridge Theology graduate now studying for a Masters in Biblical Studies and blogging about all sorts of things! I'm interested in faith, Church, theology, social action, the great outdoors and being creative, and all of those things - along with many more - come through in my posts!
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