The Lovely Mandy (pt2)
Way back in the distant lands of 2008, I posted once about the marvels of my lovely friend Mandy. (You can read that post here).
Mandy and I first met in late 2004 at a prayer conference run by the Salvation Army, and its a weekend I remember distinctly. It was the first ‘prayer-ish’ event I’d ever been to as a team member, and it took place just a week after I’d moved to Wandsworth, so I was pretty bewildered. Just to add to my somewhat dazed state, that night me and my (beautiful, wonderful and sadly now-departed) roommate had been woken up on the hour, every hour, by a rather persistent alarm clock. Rather than taking it as a sign from the Lord, or merely unplugging it, we’d just ‘whacked’ it, every hour, and then dozed back off for another sixty minutes sleep… bright!
Anyway, all that aside, the lovely Mandy was there, and I remember a significant conversation, that I will not share with the cyber-world. It was a precious, symbolic and significant weekend, and my first opportunity to share the heart of someone who is like a sister to me, now.
Life seems pretty different, seven years on. Both of us have ‘party-ed’ and grown and struggled and enjoyed and loved and hurt and found and lost, since then. Both of us are in different places now, with different outlooks and experiences than we’d had then. I was sitting next to Mandy on a train, heading to the Millenium Wheel in London, when I heard about Jo’s death, and then in a car with her, driving to my birthday celebrations, when we heard the news of Stuart’s. Those were dark hours, and its good to have a friend beside you in them, in the silent angry moments as well as the moments when you just want to push back the heavy weight of grief for a while and have a laugh. Mandy is strong and dependable and wise, and I love her for that.
And my friendship with Mandy is so much more than the dark times we have walked through together, though it is deepened by them. Mandy gets me, which is a precious thing to find in a friend. She appreciates and celebrates and encourages my peculiarities, smiling wryly as her (probably bemused) postman delivers another quirkily addresses postcard (“Mandus Sharminator”, or “Mandimus of Glory” probably rate as my favourites). She picks awesome Christmas presents, she joins us in adventures here in the city, and she brings so much joy and fun to our lives (as well as bad Leonardo DiCaprio films 
).
She’s a hopeful person, too, and she has really encouraged me this year in my searching for the new. Her tenacity and trust in God, and the way she has been open to the new things he is doing, have inspired me to keep open and keep searching too.
I was inspired to write this post because the lovely Mandy has just started blogging, at http://amandasharman.wordpress.com
I love her tagline – ‘The Next Chapter – Live, Laugh, Love’… those are some pretty awesome things to choose and strive for and hope for and define yourself by. I am really excited about what this new year, and new chapter have in store for her, and also for the many coffees we will drink whilst chatting these things through 
EDIT: She also has a lovely Canterbury pic as her banner… I told you she was wise!!
Obligatory Snow Post
(only a week or so late!!)
Last week it snowed a whole lot. This picture was taken on the first morning of snow, before it even got especially vehement, but it was a white-out already (you can’t really see the cathedral buildings in the background). I liked the shot of the nativity scene with snow falling… just like a Victorian Christmas card.
I didn’t enjoy life grinding to a halt very much, as I’d been looking forward to some interesting lectures that week, and it also reminded me how much I rely on routine and life carrying on ‘just so’. All the disruption left me feeling a little frustrated at times, and a bit uncertain, although it did make for some great impromptu coffee meetings, even if we did have to trudge through knee deep snow to reach them.
I’ve never seen it snow without ceasing for 24 hours before, and it was definitely the most snow I’ve seen laying (in the UK, at least), in my whole 27 years. I think my prayers for snow are well and truly answered, although I’d now like to see some winter sunshine!
Cool pic!
I love this picture… and its completely real. A bit of ’post-production’ colour enhancing, but that’s all!:
Busy-ness
This week is looking like a manic one, so I’m taking a breather before it starts properly. It feels a bit like the last two weeks of uni etc have been a whirlwind, and I’d quite like a day of nothingness now. I knew that would happen.
Last weekend I went up to London to see the lovely Mumford & Sons:
We hobnobbed with the stars afterwards, well, there weren’t that many stars, but it was still fun. After-show parties really aren’t that showbiz though, and we were tired. A highlight of the evening had to be stopping off at Old Kent Road Asda/Mcdonalds at 1.30am… scary times. I loved the concert though, and it was fun to be with friends.
This week is a brief hiatus before heading to the Midlands this weekend. I’m very excited to be jumping feet first back into some SA stuff, after what feels like an age. It’ll be good to be in and around old stomping grounds too.
I have much uni work to do, I’ve just about scribbled out a rough plan for my website, and am now sourcing Marx and Engels quotes, Good times. I’m loving English too, though its hard when I don’t know what nouns are, let alone accusitive and nominative etc…
Work is great, we’ve started to get lovely Christmas items in now:
So cute!!
In two weeks time we’re off to pray in Paris too!!
Cantiversary!
I have been here (more than, now) 365 days, and so to celebrate I spent time with some of my closest pals tonight. We ate curry and watched X Factor. Sublime!
Later, another good friend came round with presents. It was a lovely surprise and a great end to a rather trying day. Also, top moment… my friend brought presents. An awesome cd and a candle that smells divinely of chocolate and… (drumroll please) some Madame Oiseau chocolates. I’ve long desired some of these awesome homemade wonders!!
I wonder if I’ll be able to eeek them out over the next 365 days?
A time to bury, a time to unearth
I’m always one for a prophetic action… be it burying verses under ‘in-progress’ buildings, pouring ribena into rivers or otherwise, I like the sense of something visible and tangible, an action matching a thought or intention.
One of the things we did, just before launching the Wandsworth Boiler Room, was to bury something of ourselves into a large earthen pot. At the time, I buried an item of jewellery, something that was precious to me. I wanted it to count, I wanted to make a statement that I would sow my most favourite thing into what we were doing there. It was just a symbol, but at the time it meant a lot.
Almost four years later, I sensed that the seasons were shifting somewhat, and that my calling wasn’t just to that one place any more but to something wider. So I dug up my bracelet. (In doing this, I encountered some buried beard hair belonging to a friend, which was a less than wondrous moment I can tell you!!). I quickly noticed that the bracelet didn’t look the same as when it went into the pot – it was tarnished, dulled, dusty, but still precious. Four years on the initial novelty had worn off and I think we all felt a bit ‘bashed up’, but our core commitments were still there. And so I wore the bracelet for a bit, thus carrying around what was really precious to me, moving around in my commitment to Boiler Room rather than leaving it rooted in one location.
Time passed, and I didn’t really think very much more about this, until this week, when I was reminded of it.
I was thinking about how, when I left Wandsworth, I had written a letter which expressed how I felt about the whole thing. I wrote about what had been important to me, what I had learned. I wrote about the mixed feelings I had about leaving. I wrote about the joys and the happy times, and the difficult ones too. I wanted to mark the significance of that place and that season, and of the people and community that had shaped those five years. And then, in true Vicki-stylee, I read it out and then buried it in the park, near where we used to have our church picnics (and yes, I did get some very strange looks in the process!)
This week, as I thought about reconnecting with all that Wandsworth had been and still is, my mind went back to my little letter. The chances of finding it, if I went back to the park, are pretty slim, but I wanted to metaphorically ‘unearth’ it. I wanted to go there and say out loud that those years were not buried, not hidden in the mud and forgotten, not put away and packed up and diminished. So thats what I did… hurrah for spontaneity.
Who knows what difference it made, after all, as a friend reminded me, the most significant days of our lives often feel like the most mundane and dull. But I do feel a bit more connected, like the two seasons are less fragmented in my head, and that has to be a good thing.
Spree
Last weekend, I had the privilege of heading down to near Haywards Heath for ‘Spree’, an event run by Urban Saints, for young people and youth groups.
I’ve been home a few days now, and post-event its easy sometimes to just move on, get overwhelmed with normal life, forget the good things that happened and the stuff God did and said. I don’t want to do that. Also, this weekend I’m off to do a similar thing at New Wine, and I want to process and record the good stuff of the last weekend before I move on to the next, if that makes sense.
I wasn’t sure what to expect from Spree. Usually, at events run by the Salvation Army, I’ve always been happy to hide behind those who are heading up the team, but this time I was doing that. It was the first time they’d had a prayer team, and the first time any of us had been to the event. We also ran two seminars as part of the programme: Prayer Styles, and Hearing God. I was a little nervous about these
My fears were unfounded though, and it truly was an awesome weekend. I think the ‘new’ness of it all gave us a freedom and creativity – the space to improvise. It meant we could make decisions like taking team debriefs out of the prayer zone (which was a bit set back from where the main events were taking place) and into the leaders zone, or out on the main green. I think prayer teams should be visible.
In terms of team, I was blessed by the group of lovely people who helped me lead the event through: Phil, Richard, Sarah, Mandy, Vanessa and, not forgetting the lovely Kieran, who, at ten years old, had a bit of a baptism of fire, and became our official prayer team ‘groupie’. We were also blessed by a bunch of guys from Thanet, who just showed up with the desire to help and serve. They became an essential and integral part of the team. I really love the dynamic of a prayer team. I love the sense of community and the feeling that you have experienced something significant together. I love it that by the end of the event, there is a sense of unity and family with the people you are serving with, so much so that you miss them achingly in the days after. They were all lovely and brilliant, and it was fab to step back at moments and just observe God using them all in different ways. They’re kind people too, and we stuck together in those inevitable moments of exhaustion!
The event itself was amazing. I’ve been to a lot of events, and seen God do some cool things, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen young people responding the way they did this weekend. Usually at an event like that, the Friday evening meeting can be a bit distracted, then Saturday builds up to the evening, where there can be that awesome sense of stuff really going on, before Sunday tails off again, but, from the word go on Friday, these young people just responded in droves. Every night there were so many that we couldn’t pray for them all individually, and on the Saturday night, when the speaker was talking about forgiveness and cleansing, about 3/4′s of the young people responded, and the sense of God moving in that room was incredible. Its so exciting to know that God was doing important things there, things that could shape those young people for the rest of their lives. The speaker was fab: funny, engaging, real and without self-importance and performance. he presented the gospel in such a relevant way, and really ‘won-over’ the audience with his style and funny stories.
There were other really cool answers to prayer too – ranging from the recovery of missing possessions, to there being gravy one dinner time. It was so much fun to stop team members randomly across the site and pray with them, to be gathering and hearing God for the event, and discussing future vision stuff. I loved it, I loved it all.
Personally, significantly, for me it was the first time I’ve served in that way since leaving my employment with the Salvation Army. When I left my job to come to uni, some people thought that was a crazy idea – to leave a job which gave me a certain degree of influence, to move to a random city and do very ‘little’, or tangibly little, perhaps… but I’d reached a place where I knew it was right to lay it down. I didn’t want to get to a place where my sense of worth or identity came from what I did, and, I always referred back to a significant prophetic word I’d been given when it all started, back in 2006, that as my ‘influence’ rose, so I would ‘go down’. I didn’t know what it meant at the time, but as things panned out, it felt like it was about that ‘him becoming greater, me becoming less’ thing. I didn’t want to build something that was about me in anyway, I didn’t want to become safe in that place, in that desk at THQ, in that job title, or that name in print on a resource. So I gave it back to him. I’d loved it, I still felt passionate about prayer, and prayer in the Salvation Army, but I thought that maybe it was the end of a season. I was tired, too, and needed some fallow time.
When I moved here, I was surprised, pretty soon, when a lovely prophetic friend, ‘Shepherd-Wizard’ (thats not his real name) gave me another word about tractors and fields (well, this is the countryside, I thought to myself…) The gist of it was that I had been gleaning in other people’s fields, but that I would get my own to plough up and sow in and tend. I was strongly reminded of that this weekend, back doing something I love, and this time not having the safety and comfort of hiding behind someone else as the team leader.
As part of the Hearing God seminar, we did that glorious activity of using random items to prophesy over each other. (My favourite occasion of this game was in Colchester, and involved a soap shaped like a camel, but this time we had to stick to stuff we’d found around the site). Again, a lovely team member friend came up to me with a beautiful, downy feather, and talked about this being a season where the things God has for me are light, not the seemingly heavy burdens of the past twelve months or so. That was such a beautiful and encouraging word.
The last glorious (if not a little freaky) sign that happened, was right at the end of the event. I was walking across the site with one of my fellow team members, and we’d been talking about how it had been cool to have people on the team who were from a Salvation Army background, but also those who were not. It made for a beautiful mix. We’d just been in the debrief, and it had come up that maybe this was something God wanted me to continue in, which I had been thrilled about, and so we were just chatting around that stuff. Anyway, so he went into the toilet block (oh the glamour of this story) and I waited outside in the sunshine. And, at that moment, a Salvation Army van drove up (it hadn’t been there the whole weekend), and the man who got out asked for the guy from Urban Saints who had oversight of the event… if that wasn’t a clear sign of the melding of the different worlds then I don’t know what else could be!
When I lived in Wandsworth, the picture or metaphor I ran with during my time at the Boiler Room was firstly a joist, and then secondly a tealight holder (lol). Since getting here, I’ve been asking for that equivalent picture. And then a couple of months ago, it came, in some discussions about bridges between here and the rest of the uk, between my church and the national elements it is involved in. This weekend made me think that that bridge extends across denominational streams and boundaries too. And I think its the kind of roll up bridge that you take around with you. Its not some weird, solid concrete structure. Its kind of ‘indiana-jones’ rickety. I like that.
Post event days can be tough… you’re out of that atmosphere of the miraculous. You’re not starting every morning with a stonking worship session. You’re back home, back in the everyday. I’ve also been aware that for me, these days are in-between days. I’m in between so much at the moment, and thats not always such a comfortable place to inhabit. But I am making the conscious effort to remember all that happened this weekend gone, and all that God promised through it. It thrills me to think of those young people travelling home, with huge transformations having taken place in their lives. I’m praying for them as they get back into their everyday routines too.
I will finish with a picture of the most foliage-tastic prayer venue ever:
Tea-tastic
Every student needs a summer job, right? That’s what I thought to myself, back in late May, as the long summer loomed ahead, empty of revision and all things essay-related. I put in some CV’s in shops around town, and trawled recruitment sites online, and then I just emailed a few companies on spec.
So then I got myself a job, which is fantastic. I’ve loved it, this past week or so, learning new things, trying out products, standing out in the High Street giving out samples to tourists… of all the shops in the world I could have found work, this one truly suits me.
Today I was working through the first of many staff training manuals, and had the exciting task of tasting lots of different types of tea. I tried Russian Caravan, Gunpowder, Original blend, Petiagalla Orange Pekoe and Harmutty Tippy Golden. I had to comment on each one, writing down selling points for each also. I liked them all, and approached the task with an aplomb that I think freaked out my colleagues. I even brought some of the Gunpowder & Harmutty home, as I liked them so much.
Tomorrow I am meant to sample Earl Grey blends, which may well be less of a joy unto my soul, but, for the record, I love my job!!
Loving
At our Boiler Room community get together tonight, we thought about how we’re called to love God, love each other and love the ‘other’. It made me think muchly, and though its late now, and I should be sleeping / preparing for work / packing / writing emails to prayer team members, I’m sat here musing.
We chatted a bit about how we, as community, could show that we loved each other. Its more than just saying hello and making the occasional cup of tea, its really knowing and journeying and ‘doing life’ with each other. But how do you do that with a disparate group of people? And maybe disparate is the wrong word, we’re all connected by a similar heart and passion for the community and the city, we’re all in a similar geographical location, we love eating and sharing together (tonight Sam made the yummiest curries ever)… we know a bit about each other, thanks to some imaginative ice breakers, but there’s got to be more than that.
I think some of it is about story. I was sitting there tonight thinking about all of us and wondering about all the collective experiences and journeys and paths that had brought us to that point. I thought about all the conversations and dreamings over coffees and hopes and visions that had gone into the mix, and I thought about the struggles and hard times that added to the picture too. I thought about what is to come, too. What will I say of, know of, think of these fellow-sojourners after a few years of travelling together? Where will our collective and individual dreams take us? And how will that impact the city as a whole? I came away thinking that I want to get to know these people more. I want to understand what makes them tick, how best they receive love, and where they struggle to do that. And I want to be honest too. I want to know and be known. I don’t want this to be another social club, or just a bunch of good ideas, a project that affirms us and makes us feel warm and glowy, I really want us to go deep and love where it really matters.
We talked about the Holy Spirit coming to communicate adoption, to put the orphans into families, to speak of sonship, of family and belonging. That inspires me and brings me much hope.
End of a (brief) era
For the past eight weeks or so, I’ve been babysitting for some good friends in London a couple of days a week. Many of my friends here have decided that I am mad to attempt such a commute (involving getting up at around 4.30am) but I have really enjoyed it, and am kinda sad that today is my last day.
Its weird how fast you build rhythms around stuff, and I have actually found myself enjoying my Friday morning routine recently: walk to the coach station (very early, so its still and quiet and beautiful), sleep on the coach (aided by eye patches and Bebo Norman on my ipod), wake up just before the Blackwall Tunnel (though this morning I didn’t wake up until Canary Wharf), admire the huge shiny buildings (and marvel at the swarming ant-like commuters streaming into them), get off the coach at Aldgate, purchase a latte and a pain au chocolat from the little independant coffee stall there (only this morning did I find they would put it on top of the toaster to warm in it if I asked), tube it down to Colliers Wood (going south on the northern line is definitely the only direction to be going at that time of day), and find myself in sunny Merton borough before 9am.
And then I get to spend the day with beautiful Dan, who was very much a baby when I started this, back in April, but has suddenly made the transition to an energetic, inquisitive toddler in the last few weeks. He is lovely, and I’ve so enjoyed just sitting in parks, playing musical instruments, feeding him beautiful vegetable concoctions and many other things.
Its been good to be back in the city a bit more too, to catch up with friends, have coffee and generally reconnect. I shall miss my weekly jaunts!
Summer Reading
I love uni, and more specifically at the moment I’m loving Summer. Next week I start work (hurrah!) but for the past few weeks there has been much time just to relax, enjoy the sunshine and read, and I have read a whole lot.
A while back I read The End of Mr Y by Scarlett Thomas. I was initially attracted to it by the bright cover design, but then, more convincingly by the story and the setting, the questions about existence and reality, and the complex descriptions Thomas uses. I loved the book and snaffled up another of her stories, which sat on my burgeoning bookshelves whilst I wearily studied.
Popco, this second book, was brilliant. I honestly couldn’t put it down for three days. Its about a girl called Alice who works for a multi-national toy firm, and basically charts her growing dissillusion with the corporate machine. I really liked the character of Alice (although she did bear much resemblance to the two other main protagonists in the other two Scarlett Thomas books I’ve read), and I enjoyed the story of her growing up as it was spliced between her adult, day-to-day life. I loved all the mystery and treasure-hunting aspects, and it was the first book I’ve read in a long time that has actually challenged me to consider the way I live and the choices I make (veganism anyone?!).
The third book of hers that I read, this week, is called Our Tragic Universe again I really enjoyed this, completing it in two days. I realised I’d actually learned something in this year as I recognised some postmodern literary techniques – metafiction, where an author writes about writing, and her attempts to make the novel a plotless plot, an antinovel. This made it much simpler than Mr Y, but again I found it inspiring and a lovely way to spend a summer afternoon sitting in some Fransciscan gardens.
Unusually, too, my delving into these books have led me to other, related non-fiction books that continue the themes raised. So I’m reading No Logo, by Naomi Klein, which is all about globilisation and branding etc, and The Language Instinct, by Steven Pinker. What with these, and busily revising the whole of Whittards tea and coffee brands, I think my mind might just go into meltdown!
Find me in the river…
Find me in the river
Find me there,
Find me on my knees with my soul laid bare
Even though you’re gone and I’m cracked and dry
Find me in the river, I’m waiting here
Reflecting
The last few days have gone by in a bit of a daze. I suppose its a grief reaction that everything feels strange, in stasis. You can be doing the most normal things in the world and then you realise you have forgotten why you are doing them, or you find yourself suddenly rendered unable to complete the task in hand. This morning, I sprayed deodorant on my hair instead of dry shampoo, and then I spilt coffee everywhere – the most simple things in the world feel either impossible or pointless.
And then, there’s the simmering resentment at everyone, at the people you pass who are seemingly just getting on with normal life. How can there be tourists slowly meandering, enjoying a city which my friend doesn’t get to enjoy any more. How can it be a normal summers day, when it feels like everything has changed.
And I kinda think it would be better if I could just get in touch with any of the feelings around these recent events, but all the emotion feels shut down, safely shelved out of reach where it can’t do any harm, so I’m in this weird limbo.
Its probably bad to admit, also, that I’m struggling with some of the ‘neat’ Christian responses to this stuff. Last year we prayed and prayed for Jo to get better, we did everything in the ‘book of how to make prayer work’, we practised what we’d been preaching and teaching for years and years: we fasted and did battle, we cut stuff off and spoke stuff over, we declared and released. We believed for answered prayer, and she did get better, and not just a little bit better, but better than they could have hoped or expected. We talked of miracles, and everything looked like it was going to be ok. I spent my birthday last year worried but at least thankful that she was on the mend, and then, well… a last minute cruel twist.
And then this time last week, there was the news that the cancer that Stuart had (not ‘his cancer’, you understand), had tipped over into that scary ‘untreatable’ category. And I was so confused. The last I’d heard he was hoping for news that he was in remission, and he nearly had been, last year. And somehow nearly in remission but not quite, and then it coming back with spiteful vengeance seems all the more wrong.
The (somewhat annoying but probably comforting) thing is, I can’t have a crisis of faith at this point. Oh, I’ll joke that God must be on sabbatical, I’ll rant and avoid leading prayer meetings, but there’s not a single bit of me that thinks this proves that God isn’t real or good. I know he is, I know he is the one thing in all this that does make sense and the one person who is stable and unchanging. But it doesn’t stop me wanting to give him a good shake.
And I keep thinking how it wasn’t meant to be like this. I was so scared that if I let myself get close to Jo she would somehow disappear, and then that seemingly came true. And I left London feeling jaded and broken about that, and feeling like I never wanted to go through that again. And it was like back then I needed here to be something different to that. I wanted here to be a safe place and a new start where people didn’t die and those I loved and cared about were consistent and safe. I know that’s unrealistic, but yeah…
Stuart was the most amazing person. He was funny and friendly and yet endearingly grumpy and ‘old-school’ too. Last year he bought me a tub of magnetic alphabet letters for my birthday. I loved that gift because it was so quirky and yet really ‘me’. It made me smile that thought about the gift, and that he had ventured into the Early Learning Centre and bought them, when he could have just picked me up a shower gel in Boots. He shared some of my really significant Canterbury moments too – the Sunday when I said ‘I wish we could all just bunk church and go to the beach’, and so we did. Stuart, and the community he is part of, felt like something strong and solid in the ‘I’ve just moved to a new city and don’t know many people’ melee. And, in all the years that this city was just a bolt hole I visited on the odd occasion, I looked forward to the little things – chinese takeaways and Doctor Who and amateur dramatics. I enjoyed watching both Stuart and David perform in the musical version of Titanic, I loved just hanging out in their ‘nearly falling down house’ and watch it gradually transform into a home. I loved hearing his tales of school (he was a teacher), and who could forget the Sheep rustling board game we played once, where you had to blow your whistle before each dice roll. Stuart repeatedly forgot to blow his whistle, and so we kept all stealing his sheep, something we found hilarious and he found more than a little annoying!
If there’s one issue I really struggle with, in the world, it is the issue of unfulfilment, like if someone has an opportunity robbed from them, or doesn’t get to do something that to everyone else is a given. It bothers me if someone has an ambition that they don’t get to fulfil, or a dream that they don’t get to see come to fruition. I guess there’s stuff in all of our lives where that is the case, and its just part of those everyday disappointments we all have to grapple with, but it makes me feel sad. I’m not saying Stuart was unfulfilled, not at all, but I know there was stuff he wanted to see and do and be that he never got the chance to. And it stirs me up, that does. I guess what makes me feel worse about it is that Hollywood ideal of getting the chance to right some of that before one dies. Like having a ‘bucket list’, and working through that item by item. When I heard that they couldn’t treat the cancer anymore, I was gutted, but I thought Stuart would at least have time to come back to Canterbury, spend time with his dear friends, have lunch in his favourite restaurants. It is nonsensical that not even two weeks after hearing that news he had died. How does anyone decline that quickly? And how do those of us who cared about him get our heads around that?
It feels like the most selfish thing in the world to reflect on, but I hate that it happened on my birthday too. How did death creep in and leave such a dent when we were so deliberately celebrating life? And my dear friends were so wonderful about still carrying on with our plans, but I hate it that June 12th has joined June 27th in being one of those dates that will stand out as marking a significant loss.
It being June again had highlighted for me how ‘not over’ Jo’s death I am. I haven’t repressed the grief or ran from it, and it is so much better than those dark days of last July, but I’ve been so aware of it, poignant and painful and raw. And I’ve been so thankful for all the stuff that God has said and done and brought about, but that doesn’t take away the sting of missing someone so much. And I feel a little overwhelmed for there to be this new, keen grief in the mix as well now. How do I know when I am grieving for Jo and when for Stuart, or when its just general grief for the other losses that I don’t often talk about? How do I trust when it feels like the people I care about will be taken away? How do I keep on living and talking about prayer and hope, when this feels like another blow to that? And how do I help my lovely friends who’ve lost their dear friend and housemate and co-community member? What does all this mean for them? So many questions and just no simple answers.
Unfair…
Sometimes life is wretchedly unfair. That’s an understatement, but its pretty much what I thought today, when I heard that my good friend Stuart had died.
I like this photo of him, I took it when we were on a walk in Whitstable, on one of the many times I visited here before moving down. It was such a lovely day – spontaneous and refreshing. In fact, Stuart was one of the first people I met here.
Last year, Stuart contracted Lymphoma on his lungs. He had a whole bunch of chemo, which was meant to wipe it out. Everyone was hopeful that it would/had.
Then just last week we got the news that it hadn’t, and that things were a whole lot worse. On Monday I heard that the doctors had said there was nothing more they could do.
To be honest, I can’t get my head round it that less than two weeks ago he was expecting news that he was in remission… and today… its awful.
Today was my birthday, and it was a lovely day, but it was so sad too, as we got the news.
Still reeling at the moment. It just feels so unbelievable and unfair.
Can’t really say any more than that at the mo.
A year on…
I’m meant to be revising, but I felt like I wanted to write. There’s so much going round and round in my head, so much is good and hopeful, but I can’t help thinking about the events of a year ago. And then I think, how did a year go so fast? How many times these past 365 days have I looked back and thought “a year ago things were so different”, and “what would I have done differently If I’d have known what was just around the corner”?
I remember, back before the events of June 2nd last year, often wondering what it felt like to lose someone, I wondered what grief was like, grief that keeps you awake through the night and has you weeping at the most inane things, grief that creeps up on you, grief that takes away the certainties and confounds what you thought you knew, what you had only just dared to trust in anyway.
I’ll remember that night, always, as being a beautiful evening. And I’m so so thankful to God for its preciousness. I’ll remember sharing hopes and dreams as we prepared a meal. I remember hearing stories of her inspiring weekend and feeling encouraged and challenged. I’ll remember the thrill of looking forward to what was ahead, of big visions. I’ll remember that the blueberries were mouldy, and that the fruit salad I made was sadly devoid of them. I’ll remember meeting with others who dared to believe that a city could be changed, I’ll remember talking plans for websites and ‘fighting books’, and I remember a long hug, our last hug.
And I remember, later, the text message, saying Jo had collapsed and been taken to hospital. I felt so confused because just over an hour before she had been so full of life and vision. She couldn’t be ill, she’d been so alive. I remember feeling such a dread, sitting on my bed crying, even though it felt mad, because every rational process in my mind was telling me it was probably something minor. I couldn’t sleep, could barely pray, could only numbly text equally concerned friends and hope and wait for news.
And nothing was ever the same again, and a year on I’m not sure it ever will be. And we have all learnt, we’ve walked onwards through the grief, we’ve found relief from those first days when it felt like the rug had been pulled out from underneath us. We drew together as a community and weathered those weeks, we cried together, we shared memories and dared to believe for resurrection, we stared unanswered prayer – the loss and confusion and anger it brings – right in the face. Our hopes didn’t die with Jo, because they were fixed in something, in someone everlasting, and we kept going, kept on looking for the dawn after the darkest day.
And we’re not through yet, I’m not through yet. So many times a week I think of little things I want to share with her, most of all I miss those ‘dreaming big’ conversations we used to have, where we’d dream up harebrained plans to help others get through the darkest of stuff, where we’d share stuff God had said, where we’d stay up to midnight brainstorming about boiler rooms and space rockets and prayer teams among other things. I think of her when I see an Eddie Stobart lorry, or peruse Marks and Spencers for caramelised carrot and wenleysdale sandwiches. I think of her when I look at words she wrote and remember the passions she lived with. I miss her loads.
But if there’s one other thing that comes to mind when I think about Jo, it is the irrepressible hope she held onto at all times. And it makes me more determined to live to tell as many people as I can about that hope, to carry on the work she started, to live my life as a ‘herald of hope’. Last week, here within this new community I find myself, we talked about how our greatest losses and pains in life gave us an authority to believe for and pray into specific areas. And I truly know there are a lot of situations out there that look hopeless, a whole load of people who struggle with that sense of desolation and despair. And I want to see change in those people and places. Call me an idealist, but I believe that things can always change.
You don’t spend five years working closely with someone without picking up certain of their ways and mannerisms, and so often I find myself grinning inwardly thinking ‘that was such a Jo-ism’. However painful the last year has been at points, I wouldn’t have swapped the preceding five for all the world, and I am so so thankful for them, and all I learnt. I feel like I didn’t tell Jo enough times how much she meant to me, because I know that my life is so different and so much the better for our relationship, but I trust that somewhere in it all she knew, and, however tough these next few weeks are, there are many things that loss and pain simply cannot erase.
Beach Days
Taking a break from impending exam doom to post some pictures from where we went on Monday:
You Matter Very Much
(I found this on a website I visit often and loved it):
“I hope you know you’re not the only one who feels the way you feel. You are not the only one who struggles. You are not the only one with questions. You are not crazy. You deserve to be heard, to be known. You deserve love.
You deserve love.
You deserve a place that feels like home. You deserve some hands to hold. Hands to pull you past the broken moments, hands to catch you when you fall. Eyes to see you. To say you’re there, that you exist, that you change a room, that your presence is significant. Ears to hear you – hear your stories, hear you laugh. Ears to hear your questions and to say they matter.
Your questions matter.
Maybe call a friend today or invite someone to coffee. Tell someone they matter or tell someone you could use a conversation. Write a letter or ask someone how they’re doing. Like a song too much. Feel the drums or get lost in the chorus. It means that you’re alive.
It’s good that you’re alive. Who else could play your part?
I hope you get to a place, wake to a day, where that feels true. You deserve to know it’s true.
To Write Love on Her Arms is a community of people with questions and struggles. It is for broken people and it is led by broken people. Life is heavy and light. Life is both. Beauty and pain, aches and dreams… We are saying that it’s okay to talk about those things. We are saying that we need to. We are choosing to believe that stories deserve better endings. That hope is real, that help is real, that people need other people.
You are not alone today. You matter very much.
Peace to you.
Sunshine & The Sea!
It has been a beautiful few days here, the sun has shone faithfully each day and everyone has dug out their summer wardrobes. Today I lay on the grass in the park revising, listening to live music playing on the bandstand and generally soaking up the rays, it’s been lovely.
One of the best things about living here in that the sea is so close. I have a theory that seeing the sea everyday makes one more ‘well’ in every sense of the word, so I have been enjoying exploring some of the coastline round here. I’ve always wanted to live near the sea.
Yesterday myself and a friend braved it and actually paddled. The water was murky and we couldn’t see our feet so it wasn’t the most fun paddle ever, but at least I can say I’ve done it. I’m tempted to try swimming in the sea, but I don’t want to be swept off by an over-zealous current somewhere!
This is a picture from a beautiful harbour/seaside town we visited last week, it was quaint and lovely, and made me want to hole myself away in a crumbling B&B and write excessively:
Roots – Post 2
Maybe it is the second or third time you do something that you begin to just do it out of habit and routine. The fear and trepidation starts to diminish and it becomes ‘just Roots’. And you still look forward to it, but without that sense of ‘anything can happen here’. And Roots was always such a blur of intensity for us, from Wandsworth – staying up late and dreaming up crazy creative plans, scouring South West London for lights for a menorah, eating sleeping and breathing an event, so much so that when we got there it sometimes felt like a bit of an anti-climax.
(To explain, for any non-Salvation Army readers, Roots is a conference that is held by the movement each year in Southport. We usually head up the prayer venue. Last year we had a sabbatical year and so the event didn’t take place. This year it was back with a vengeance, reshaped, rebranded and hopefully freshened up. It took place last weekend and it was pretty darn amazing).
I wasn’t really sure what to expect, this time. So much was different for us as a team – we were in a different location, with different team members (and some notable absences…), a different program, no Wandsworth van of stuff, and the event was shaped differently too. I wasn’t sure where I’d fit in. I wasn’t sure how it would feel, or how the room even looked.
But, a few days after getting back, I am still amazed by what it was like and what God said and did. The whole thing was amazing and any fears and concerns that any of us had did not come to pass. The conference programme itself worked well, with people really finding they could engage with the speakers and respond. The theme was ‘Wholly Holy’, and many people came for prayer to go deeper and get stuff in their lives sorted.
It was great to be on the prayer team, too. The team really worked together well and there was a strong sense of community. I loved being with that group of people – friends from across the country, I loved working together and laughing and crying with them. It was an awesome feeling.
Its odd because I didn’t go into any of the main sessions or speaks but I find myself really stirred up by the theme, really engaged with issues of social justice and longing to work at and pray into issues of that nature in the here and now.
This weekend I am off to a creative worship weekend in Sunbury, helping to run a prayer labyrinth, so I am looking forward to some more challenging times!
Summer in the city
Had a lovely morning today, breakfast in a little french cafe, felt oh so European, made me glad to be in this lovely part of the world:
Intercessory Capers
There were many places I could have spent Good Friday. Usually I find myself holed up in a church, or another such noble place. In Wandsworth, I’d have been doing a walk of witness then embarking on a mammoth fast. Yesterday, however was very different.
To give a bit of the background to the tale, you need to know that, in the past at least, a small bit of tension/rivalry/general dissension has existed between this fair city and the other, smaller towns and villages around it. I guess like everywhere, there have been places we have looked down upon and besmirched… We don’t think this is an especially helpful thing, especially as some dear friends of ours in one of these said towns are planning and praying and believing for a centre of prayer, similar to the Boiler Room we have here. We believe that we need them and they need us in a way, that there needs to be some form of mutual reliance and partnership, so we decided that we would walk and meet them as an act of prophetic intent, a prayerful ‘Come on!!’
Undeterred by weather forecasts of doom, five of us set off yesterday morning to walk to Birchington. It was only twelve miles away, and the sun was shining (at that point at least). We prayed up a storm before we left, and then set off on our way, following an ancient road to our destination.
And, it was just amazing. One of the most incredible moments was looking up and seeing two large birds of prey circling above us. This was amazing, as you don’t tend to get those sort of birds here. We were very encouraged.
We walked through each of the little towns and villages, pausing to pray and drive a tent peg into the ground in each of them as a symbol of our connectedness:
It just felt so brilliant to be able to walk, to pray, and to spend time as a community just getting to know each other a bit better. We also all found that you see a place really differently when you walk through it – we all travel that road probably a few times a week, but one gets a much better feel for the land actually taking the time to walk it.
A top moment was when we made it to a village about halfway, and a lovely friend from church met us in a bus stop with a hot flask of tea and coffee. We were so grateful, and it was a real blessing to see her. We sat in the bus stop and had lunch together.
About four miles from the end of the walk, it started to pour with rain, but we were all in high spirits, and had a real sense of God being close, so I don’t think any of us felt cold or glum. It was funny because friendly supporters kept on driving by, waving, beeping and offering us lifts. They were such an encouragement, but we plodded on.
It felt so amazing to see the Birchington sign and to drive the last peg into the ground. We then met lots of people from the community there, and were then picked up by said lovely people and driven to a warm house, where we took communion and spent some time praying for each other (as well as eating and getting dry).
Yesterday felt a bit like one of those things you know you’ll never know the full impact of, but it was awesome to meet with and share with our friends in Thanet, and it was such a blessing to receive from them too. I am looking forward to all that lies ahead.
