For the past couple of days I've been staying at my friend's house, with some of our other friends too, and today I came back home. And it made me think that friendship groups are very strange things! A gelling (or sometimes mashing!) of several very different people - everyone strange in their own individual way (and some stranger than others!!!). And yet you all come together and everything just works! Everyone is yet so different, but enjoys that same thing that brought you all together as friends in the first place; being with each other. And it doesn't matter if you're doing something new and exciting (like paintballing), or just chatting, or chilling out, watching a film, playing games, or simply cooking dinner.
Because that's what relationships are. And that's what a relationship with God is too. It doesn't matter what we do, and we're so different that we could never even begin to understand him, and yet we both enjoy being with each other. So often, different groups of Christians, and even people of different religions and faiths, get so hung up on what we should do when we're with God and how we should bring ourselves before him - and yet it doesn't actually matter. We could be literally be doing anything because God is always with us. That's what happened at Christmas; God came to be with us, in everything we do. So let's just enjoy being with him; our dearest and closest friend.
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IT WAS SOOO GOOD!!!!!
I had so much fun today - running around, shooting paint, wading through rivers, climbing over branches and up banks (and falling over branches and down banks!). I got quite wet and muddy, and now have quite a few paintball-sized bruises covering my thighs, one on the back of my shoulder and one on the back of my hand! Oh and one bruise from falling down a muddy bank on to a protruding tree root on my shin! Hahaha! I wouldn't say it was the sort of fun that I'm in a particular hurry to do again, but remembering the excitement and exhilaration from the day are making me quite content - as is sitting down on a comfy sofa, all clean and dry while my muscles simply do nothing! Well. I'm not sure what to say about advent here... I'm now so tired, I just want to rest and then sleep! But just as Mary did, this can be added to the memories I can "treasure in my heart". Perhaps not so deep, or meaningful, but the general and exciting moments of life - the moments we spend with the people we love; the moments we get out of the normal routine and really enjoy life; the moments we try something new, leave any fears behind, and we REALLY ENJOY it!
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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