Today was fairly disastrous in some ways – I went to a
church where I didn’t really feel I fitted in (CCK – it was a great church, but
just not right for me) this morning, then got hopelessly lost afterwards and
ended up wandering in the freezing cold rain looking for a bus…so arrived home
cold, wet and not feeling well. I had a (pretty restrictive) lunch, then purged
a while later and spent way too long indulging my negative thought patterns.
However, I really enjoyed the evening service at St Peters*
and it was lovely to feel more at home there…the worship was amazing and the
teaching was also so valuable. However, I knew we were having pizza as students
after the service so anxiety surrounding that meant I wasn’t fully present in a
lot of the service – which made me so frustrated with myself and caused a bit
of a vicious cycle.
When I got home though was when my day was really made – my
flatmates are all atheists and pretty cynical about my faith (not in a horrible
way – they’re just not particularly open to it), but we were chatting this
evening and somehow got onto the topic of worship…and I played them some Soul
Survivor and Hillsong to show them how my worship music actually is. They were
SO surprised and thought it was amazing – their faces when I put on ‘we are the
free’ were priceless. Honestly, I feel like it made a big impression on them. They even said they’d like to come to church
with me sometime!
God is so good. He’s powerful; and works through our bad
days and messy moments to find ways for us to reach other people with His love.
I’m so humbled by each different way He uses me and works in my life.
* The whole ‘student group’ thing at churches here makes me
a bit uncomfortable to be honest… It might just be because there is such a huge
student population in Brighton, and because I’m not used to being in a city like
that, but the way things work here seems to be that students go to the evening
services and families go to the morning
- when I’ve been to churches in the morning I’ve felt very much
shepherded towards the evening….
I don’t know if I’m just being all idealistic, but my view
of what church is, is people of all ages, in all walks of life coming together
in worship to our one God. I get that different groups of people will be suited
to different times but segregating off the students from the families etc feels
a bit wrong for me… I’m still working
out what I think – but church here is awesome!
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