Categories: uncategorized
Date: 30 May 2004 10:43:51
I went to early morning communion this morning rather than the main service for Pentecost. Our main service is to be a joint one with our church plant on the local estate, and likely to be much more informal (including action songs aaargh). I think I'm only just starting to appreciate the effect my previous (very very very informal) church had on me, in that I'm currently finding the 'low' end of church really hard to cope with. Usually at church we'll have 2 or 3 hymns but in the middle it's more 'praise songs' and I really do struggle sometimes to sing them. I guess I'm just heading a bit higher up the candle (though I'm still not into bells and smells), which is fine, but I'm surprised at the strength of my reaction against 'low' church, which is much stronger now than when I first left. I was chatting a couple of days ago with a friend who still goes to my old church, which was very interesting - I articulated for the first time how 'disapproved of' I'd felt (and still feel sometimes when I meet some people), and had a sense for the first time of how hurt I am. The danger for me is that my reaction is often just to slag them off, which really isn't constructive - I need to think about and dwell on the good that they gave me (love of scripture for a start) as well as the stuff that I'm choosing now not to run with.
At the end of this morning's service I was chatting with the vicar, and it transpires that his brother works in a large development charity, mainly at the moment on their eastern Europe desk. So I let him know I'd be really interested to talk with him sometime - when I first decided to apply for the PhD I was thinking how I really needed to get back networking in the e.Europe/charity sector but didn't really know where to start, but all of a sudden interesting people just seem to be coming out of the woodwork.
Yesterday evening I was up at the Museum Tavern for a ship do - lovely to see people again, especially visiting tourist and fellow blogger holly (the posh pretty one!). I was amazed at how many people asked me about stuff I've written about here - I can't believe people read this thing! (for the record, there've been no more sightings of the spider).
So now it's back to the grind. In the immediate aftermath of every essay the area around my desk always looks like a bombsite - files and books scattered across the floor, random pieces of rough paper etc - so I need to sort that out and plan my next block of study. At least I have a working printer again (took the old one back to the shop yesterday and exchanged it, hopefully this one isn't demon-possessed and will actually print my essays, now that would be a novelty). I'm going to need military precision to sort myself out for the next month or so, as my trip to Moldova is slap bang in the middle of when I should be doing a literature search, so I need to be very organised. Which, as regular readers may have noticed, isn't one of my more obvious gifts.