Flabbergasting Nobblement

Wednesday 07th October

Mother, be warned: one of the topics for discussion last night in the prep room was: chat up lines.

Was your father a boxer? Because you’re a knock out.

Do you like raisins?
Why do you ask?
Do you fancy a date?

Do you work in a library? Because I’d like to check you out!

In case you hadn’t worked it out, the topic was BAD chat-up lines. So I shared some of the Christian ones that the holiday started with such as “Nice Bible!” “Your bible looks heavy; do you want me to help carry it?” “I didn’t know angels flew this low.” “Excuse me; I think one of your ribs belongs to me.” (for the guys’ usage). It was a very educational holiday this year, by the way!

Family group was fun – not the social night or being invaded (that was a one off) – this time it was an actual family group. Stefan and Hanna, the two staff members who are kind of running it with Mark and his wife. They did the session on trust and started it with that game where you close your eyes, fall back and (hope that) the person behind you catches you. Only with this one, they didn’t just catch you, they pushed you back up and you fell in another direction and the people in the circle caught you. A couple of people ended up falling over, but I think that was owing to over-enthusiastic pushing rather than inability/refusal to catch. Then Hanna brought out a very lovely, very dopey-looking sheep to illustrate the point that we are sheep and we need to/can trust our Shepherd.

After that I got all confused by the lectures. They put the new week’s timetable up on a Saturday and I put everything in my diary so I know where I’m up to. We were supposed to have another Transforming Friendship lecture now that Rob was back from Canada but instead we got ‘Getting the best out of Bible School’ with Ian Ellershaw which we weren’t meant to get until tomorrow. So that confuddlement did very strange things to my poor little vacuum (the one between my ears, not Henry – who’s very well if you were wondering). Aside from some practical bits and pieces which were mostly common sense, Ian took the image of restoring a house and used it to represent our time at Capernwray. Some of us are in the blueprint stage: knowing God’s there, planning life around Jesus but there’s nothing solid, no real foundation. Some are in the falling apart stage: knowing God really well but things have started to deteriorate because we’ve allowed things to take the place of Jesus – He’s started to fade and the worries of the world have taken over. Others are at the ‘rotten inside’ stage where things look OK, but inside lacks reality. Each picture was finished with Ian saying that Jesus is ready to build, restore or refurbish. I thought that was a great way of looking at it, but I was confused again: is it possible to be all three?

Rob was looking at actual encounters with Jesus in his series. Today was Nicodemus. I didn’t realise before, but Rob pointed out that the crowds in the bit before Nicodemus’ visit were following Jesus, but they weren’t really committing to Him, so He didn’t commit to them. Nicodemus wanted unrestricted, uninterrupted one-on-one time with Jesus because He was more serious about wanting to commit to Jesus. Jesus was both sensitive to Nicodemus by using language and illustrations he understood, and straight with him by not pulling any punches.

It was during the first of those last two points that Rob compared God with an old Mac as opposed to an old Amstrad computer. Amstrads (the black screens with the green writing) you effectively had to be a computer programmer to work the things. Macs were simple, easy to understand graphic user interfaces that hid a load of very sophisticated and complex programming. Jesus used language and parables that His audience understood and could relate to and God always talks to people in language they’ll understand. Can’t say I’ve ever heard that illustration before though!

Today was a bit of a weird day outside of lectures. Carolyn nobbled me about what outreaches I’d signed up for, asked if I’d be interested in doing children’s work and the next thing I know, I’ve been assigned an outreach that starts tonight! There’s just two of us helping out at the little church down the road. We’re helping with a youth club that’s aimed at primary school children and it’s run by two girls, one of whom I met last year on the holiday. It was great fun! I got to be a big kid again and do all the songs with the actions and colour in a name badge and play games . . . and I get to do that every week!

The only catch to the outreach is that it cuts into one of our evening lectures, so I missed one half of our last Introduction to the Bible this evening, which meant that when Mark was going on about hermeneutics and stuff like that, I didn’t have a clue what he was on about. Looking forward to playing catch-up! (Groans!)

Other weird thing: I showed Viv (pastoral worker) my stories when we went to hers for tea – well, I gave her a disc with them on that she’s going to look at – and she was very encouraging about me being a writer, giving me lots of practical advice. She also mentioned Sean Callaghan who is doing the optional seminars which I think I’ve already mentioned. She said that he was the person to talk to because he’s much better at that sort of thing than her (she’s had her first book published this year). So at lunch, she and Sean ended up sitting at my table and it wasn’t long before she pointed me out as the one who wanted to be a writer. So Sean was asking me all sorts of questions about my stories, gave me his e-mail address so I could send them to him; and he wanted to know if I’d be interested in going into schools to read them to children if he arranged it? Bit weird. Hugely encouraging. Utterly flabbergasting. (I cannot believe my computer knows that word.)