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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