it seems that it is in the nature of profundity to take us by surprise, recently it was joey from friends with his confused comment…
“you don’t have a tv?! so what does all your furniture point at then?”
Monthly Archive for June, 2003
The sun shines, the rains fall. Clouds come, clouds go. The wind whistles and roars. We live on an island, we live with unsettled weather. Being British is learning to put up with the weather, to accept it, to carry on going whether mother nature would seemingly like you to or not.
And in the words of many a philosopher before me… this is very much like life. The metaphors are almost endless, I won’t go there anymore.
I’m trying to scrape money together to go away this summer. My friends in Spain have offered their empty house to me as a space for me to escape, reflect, relax. Sevilla is known as the boiling pot of Spain. I remember the sweltering heat of the sun as it burnt away any rebellious cloud that tried to make itself at home in an otherwise clear spanish sky. The heat, the light, the colours, the smells, the thousand miles from manchester… and my debt, d’oh.
I was telling you about us being church together, well we spent this intense weekend being church together. After that I tried to recover from the exhaustion and spent the large part of last week in edinburgh. This week i’ve had Emma and Anna, from my university days visiting and done computer stuff, that’s not all that interesting. The weekend before was though.
And it went a little like this…
The overhead displayed a freshly written song and was to keep on displaying that song for the next few hours. We had scurried around town and gathered in a church hall drinking tea and catching up. The next thing we were singing and praying, though I struggle to pray in words. To an observer there are a few things missing; a front speaker, pews or even chairs at that, the guitar led worship band, notices… how can this be church?! Time kind of gets a bit blurry as the spiritual atmosphere changes and it all gets intense.
Roger and Sue Mitchell had come to visit and were speaking paternal and prophetic words over the community and supposedly learning from us also. People started facing things they hadn’t dared or even been able to before. Lives were being messed up.
That happens. The bracelet broke but I still remember allowing God to mess my life up. Well yet again I began to see some messing. The community moved on from the church hall and gathered at the spacious house I currently live at. I went to work as the fun continued. Head hit the pillow shortly after 5am.
A multitude of voices awakened me about five hours later. I could have stayed in bed, put my headphones on and gone back to sleep… but I wanted to to get involved. We split boys and girls, I am a boy, we went into the adjoining house to hang out, chat and pray. It quickly got to a point where the conversation was going to get deep and they turned on me. I knew why, but I was still half asleep. They didn’t forget me and were back on my case after Russ had sparked up an interesting chat.
I have had a difficult time in manchester and that was part of the reason why I found myself on the fringe of this community, why I was in a shell. Because I was a turtle wandering on the fringe was exactly why they wanted to hear from me. So I shared where I was at, I did so by sharing my story from just before I arrived in Manchester up until that very weekend. I didn’t expect to be sat there giving account to a room full a guys, half of which began to cry as I talked. This is stuff that I have only scratched the surface of a few times on this blog. Then people, especially Roger, started speaking stuff into my life.
Then they prayed for me. I have been a Christian for like forever and I have been prayed over numerous times … this however will stand out for a long time, this was intense and had noticable and personally mind/faith bending implications. I came out of it exhausted… physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually; but though it sounds contradictionary I came out it feeling refreshed and alive. The non-Christians out there reading my site are probably quite perplexed, curious, indifferent… I don’t know… in reaction to all this, that is if they are still reading.
Explanations and understanding spoken for my last several month’s of difficulties. I’m left to process what happened, to process the fact that I have been very productive in my time in manchester even if it doesn’t show in a worldly sense, even if I have difficulty getting my head around it. I came to Manchester willing and available, I let God know and though I thought I had been overlooked, my thoughts were just so far from it.
Standing on a high-rise roof some guy turns to another guy who happens to be struggling with a new sense of reality and tells him: “you have to let it all go… fear, doubt and disbelief… free your mind”