A Curious Girl: Refreshed

Oh the joys of viruses. A word to all my friends - if you get an e-mail with a very short message saying that details are in the attached file, *especially* if this is from someone you don't recognise, don't open the attached file!! It is a virus!!!

But on the plus side, it means I'm getting lots of mail :)

So... what to say about the last week. The Pope is a Lutheran, bears use Portaloos, and I thought Soul Survivor was the most rubbish event I have ever attended.

And now for the people who don't understand irony ;)

SOUL SURVIVOR WAS FANTASTIC!

And now for the people who haven't read my diary in a while/ever :)

Soul Survivor is a Christian youth conference thing. Since I've been having serious doubts lately I was having serious misgivings about going. Anyway, I am so glad I did. It gave me the chance to learn, or relearn, several things :)

I will give you a quick summary...

- God loves me, no matter what. I would have been happy if that had been the only thing I'd learned, but God doesn't stop on one thing sometimes :)

- My chief purpose in life is to love, wholly, fully and passionately.

- Funnily enough, I don't know everything there is to know about God. It was good to hear other people's opinions on the whole Hell issue, the homosexuality issue, etc etc... More than that, I remembered all those reasons why I do believe in God and Jesus, reasons which are mentioned in this diary among other things.

- Perhaps, therefore, I should stop being proud and pretending I know best, and start being willing to open up and hear other people's points of view. I know that I spent a awful lot of my time judging last term.

- Prayer is good. Prayer is powerful. Prayer is necessary.

- A major part of the Christian faith (or perhaps, *the* major part) is helping the poor and the needy. Steve Chalke said in He Never Said (read this book, it's wonderful) that someone once cut out all the references to the poor in a Bible and it was literally falling apart. Take most other Christian issues (say Hell) and your Bible would probably still be readable. There was one night when Mike Pilavachi spoke on helping the poor and the oppressed - it was a pretty harrowing evening, for more than one reason - and he prayed that we would learn our calling to the poor. As we stood there waiting for God to turn up, I was subconsciously praying, "God, I know you've called me to help the poor, so give me a cool experience!" Afterwards I realised that I had been silly. It was as if God was saying, "Yes, thank goodness you've finally noticed!"

- Everything belongs to God. We had a sort of running joke where we substituted 'my' for 'God's' in conversation. "Can you hand me God's bag?" "Does my bandanna look ok, I didn't look in God's mirror." "Yes, God's bandanna looks fine." Mike P pointed out that the whole 'stewardship' way of thinking (translation - not paying for anything too expensive, no matter how good the cause) is false - God is not poor!

- There is no need to be afraid. God cares for us. How cool is that?

- I am insanely lucky. I work between 30-40 hours a week and earn Ł5 an hour. I can afford to pay the rent for my house (which I'm not living in as I'm living with my parents this holiday). All this for a job which is mostly standing around. There are people who get less money than I do for a week's work (more hours than me!) working much harder. So yup, I'm lucky, and I'm very rich indeed.

- Unity is so important. I realised that I judged an awful lot of Christians last term (unfairly, in that it's not like I talked to most of them about it), and c'mon, we're supposed to be family...

I also made two lovely new friends - Becky and Mark. Becky shared our tent (God's tent!) and Mark hung around with us (Chris, Becky, and me) quite a lot. And I saw some York people, such as Karen, who's so sweet.

Anyway, I've done this in intervals, so it's now quite late. More later :)

Random word for today:

<< last entry ... next entry >>
top of page

Give food for free.