Categories: uncategorized
Date: 28 October 2007 21:00:15
The day started well; I was up at a sensible hour, did my final bits of packing, and then jumped into my parents' car for the fateful journey. I wasn't entirely sure what was about to happen, but I was looking forward to finding out.
A couple of hours later, we rocked up outside the new place. I'd seen it from the outside a few weeks earlier, but to be honest I hadn't really noticed it then; it was just the house two doors down from the house I was going to move into. But then some circumstances had changed and I'd agreed to move into this house instead, and now I was here and ready for the adventure to begin.
The front door was slightly ajar, so I poked my head in. There was no sign of anyone, so I called out a friendly "hello?". And then a cheerful-looking girl appeared at the top of the stairs and said hello. "You must be Claire," I said to her, on the basis that I knew I was moving in with Claire, Olly and Tim, and I'd met Olly before, and the girl didn't look like a Tim. "No, I'm Janet," she replied. I froze. I was intruding in a complete stranger's house. A look of terror must have swept across my face, because the girl then said, "oh, I didn't mean to startle you, I am Claire really!" Phew, thank goodness for that.
Relieved, I was shown my new bedroom. It was big and spacious compared with my old bedroom, and already had a fair bit of furniture - desk, wardrobe, drawers and a big Ikea shelf unit which Dad took one look at and said "oh look - bunkbeds for pygmies", much to Claire's amusement. We fetched all the bits from the car and dumped them in the room, and Mum told Claire that she was now in charge of nagging me whenever necessary. Thanks, Mum.
As a little thank you for driving me and my gear all the way here, I took Mum and Dad out for lunch at the pub. Claire was going to be out by the time I returned, so she gave me the code for the burglar alarm. We had a lovely meal, and the parents dropped me off at the supermarket on their way back home, so that I could stock up on stuff. I got my shopping, headed back to the new pad, walked through the door, punched the code into the burglar alarm... and it kept bleeping at me. So I tried again, and it still bleeped. So I tried again, this time pressing one of those other buttons with a # or a * or some other odd symbol on. Nope, not having it. Then the alarm started going off and I ran out into the street and phoned the only three people whose phone numbers I had who might be able to help me. None of them were there to answer their phone at that point; all of them got a garbled and slightly panicked message with me largely being drowned out by the howling alarm noise. After about ten minutes of me standing in the middle of the road looking a bit sheepish, the landlord rang me back and gave me the burglar alarm code. It was almost the same as the one Claire had given me - except two of the numbers were the opposite way round. I went back in and tried the new number, and lo and behold, the alarm stopped.
Well, sort of stopped anyway. Not that I knew why at the time, but in all my frantic button-pushing earlier I'd managed to reset the alarm to a certain programme. You know when you walk into a shop and the alarm makes a noise to tell the person behind the counter that you're there? Well, it seemed I'd found that setting or one very like it. As a result, if I moved more than a couple of centimetres, the alarm made a bleeping noise at me. Marvellous. So for the next few hours, I tried to entertain myself with minimal movement. I read a book. I listened to a CD. I phoned a girl I had a bit of a thing for at the time and chatted to her a while. All through all of this, I sat around waiting, hoping that someone else would get home soon, preferably someone who would know how to stop that flaming alarm bleeping at me.
Finally at around 6.30, a knock at the door. It was my new next door neighbour. "That bleeping noise is really disturbing us, is there any way you could stop it?" he asked. "Do you think I'd have been sitting here with it bleeping at me every five seconds for the last four sodding hours, if I could stop it?" I replied, in my head. My mouth was somewhat more polite, bumbling some stuff about how I'd just moved in and I didn't know how I'd managed to make it do that and I really wished I could stop it and hopefully the landlord would be round to sort it out in a bit.
Not long afterwards, my friend Mark - Claire's boyfriend (and subsequently fiance and now husband), and the only person I really knew very well around here - phoned to see if I wanted to help him and Claire with something that evening. Faced with no other options apart from sitting around being bleeped at a bit more, I said yes. An hour later, I was hoovering some complete strangers' stairs. The strangers in question were friends of Mark and Claire who were about to move house and were in the process of packing up all their stuff. It was an odd end to an odd day; the first of many odd days in Birmingham.
That was four years ago today. How time flies. Every so often I get struck by just how much I've changed in that time - how I've grown up and matured (well, sort of) and become more independent, and how much I've been challenged and stretched and had my faith tested and had to rely on God in a way I never would have done if I hadn't made the move up here. The best thing is, though, the growing and maturing and stretching and trusting is still going on, increasing all the time. Just lately, it seems to be intensifying a bit. Sometimes it's tough and painful, and the temptation to take the easy route out can be hard to ignore, but I know sticking with it is far more worthwhile. Steve 2007 is a completely different person to Steve 2003, and all the changes have been positive, even when they've been difficult to make. Hopefully Steve 2011 will be just as much of a step forward. (Sorry if all that makes me sound like some Microsoft application or something, but it was the easiest way I could find to explain it.) I'm grateful for all God's done with me, and all He's going to do, even though some of it is a little petrifying at the minute.
That's the past; now for the future...