Despite four months holiday, I'm not feeling rested at all. Having shared breakfast today with some close friends and finished the day with a few cups of tea in good company, I'm partially prepared for my fourth and final year at university. This will commence on Monday - in Norwich, so I need to get a move on! After a glorious four day train fast I'm back on the railroad tracks tomorrow, suitcase in hand. In the past, I've often felt unready to return to university at the end of an amazing long summer like this one, but today I am almost looking forward to resu ming some sort of (regularly irregular) routine.
I could try to sum up my whole summer holiday experience in one mammoth blog posts, but this is so not happening! It's far more efficient to live life than to blog it! In summary; trains and planes, holidays and rainy english summer days, catching up with old friends and making new ones, barn dancing and god camping, tea drinking and thinking about pharmacy. I've spent some time in Leicester and Luton, worked for a fruitful week in Norwich running a children's holiday club for 5-11s, and for ten days by the seaside in Dorset with a group of older young people. The seaside town Swannage was amazing, but the ultimate privaledge was spending so much time chatting with girls who were learning the implications of the fact that God's grace is free; we can neither earn it nor or lose it. Birmingham, Loughborough and Milton Keynes have also been good! Earlier this week I paid a productive flying visit to Nottingham, where I will now be moving to next year to do my pharmacy pre-registration year...I'm seriously excited about this! Which is an exciting development in itself.
A month in London was amazing; fun times and freeloading with friends, writing and sightseeing,attending conferences and pretending that I know how to use semi colons. Add to this feeding ducks, fundraising, dancing and drinking rum based cocktails, singing, baking, tubing, studying the gospels of Mark and Luke, mastering the art of accidentals on the harp, playing bingo with my nan and a casual bit of fancy dress wherever possible. Picnics in the park, Ghost the musical, bowling and BBQs, a disco boat and cosmopolitans on the red carpet. Absolutely manic in some senses, but I've lived to tell the epic tale of God's never failing faithfulness through it all, and his transformation of my weakness into his opportunity
Where I am weak and only just willing, he proves strong and evermore able to do immeasurably more than I can ask or imagine. I can't say that I don't struggle every day to keep my eyes fixed only on Jesus, but at the root of everything I still see that he is faithful. I'm inconsistent and apathetic, prone to wander from giving God the glory he deserves, but when the cracks inevitably show, I thank God that I'm called to trust not in my own faith but in his faithfulness to bring me hope in Jesus.
Let us hold unswervingly to the hope we profess, for he who promised is faithful. Hebrews 10.23.
