Has definitely hit our house, we’ve never had so many visitors, so little sleep, and so many presents.
Daisy is doing fine, she is having trouble remembering how to breast feed, but today, she seems to be remembering and we’ve just had a good 13-14 minute feed, with virtually no hassle!
The nights are the thing you can’t prepare for, sleepless nights, are something we have all experienced, but sleepless, coupled with the need to actually get out of bed, and do things, makes the world of difference, it’s still early days, so night times, are still quite clumsy, so once daisy has woken us up, it’s about an hour before we are going back to sleep.
our big plan for today, is to go to church. Not the whole service, just tea and coffee afterwards, this will be daisy’s first trip out, (apart from the trip home from hospital) so we all get a chance to try out the new pram, and Daisy gets to be the center of attention (again).
Thursday was the funeral of Ray Paton, our friend, and a leader a church. It was quite a strange day in a number of ways.
Ray wasn’t ill, well he wasn’t two weeks ago. Apparently he had blood clots which travelled into his lungs and heart, which took everyone by surprise, and he was rushed into hospital last week, where he died. So it’s all been a bit of a shock.
The funeral was packed, with well over 200 people attending, because as a church we don’t have a building, the funeral was held in elm hall drive, just down the road from the school were we meet.
Without wanting to sound to clich?d, it was a lovely service. Ray was a God loving man, who had many, many friends; it’s very nice to go to a service where people can give true testimony to a person’s life, and not see it as the end but as the beginning of that persons eternal life with God.
In a way some of the Bible you can read again and again, and take in the message, and feel you understand the meaning, but it’s only when something happens that the full power of a verse hits you. I felt that on Thursday, death didn’t have a sting, of course people where very upset, but the assurance that Ray isn’t lost to us forever but that he is now living a new life with god actually gives us hope and a desire to celebrate, both Ray’s life, and the eternal life he has been given through the gift of the lords grace.
It was also the first funeral I’ve ever been too with a burial, as Ruth said, “I’ve never known anyone posh enough to be buried before”. It’s not actually that strange it’s just uncommon.
At the Moment it feels like I have quite a hectic life and deep down I?m not actually sure that?s true. The weekend seemed to get quite frantic, but mostly that was down to my volunteering for something I didn?t want to do, and parties, and the house being a tip, and not sleeping and visiting my sister.
Volunteering: How you should only volunteer for things you don?t mind doing
Last Sunday, I was cornered and asked if I would do some Christian Aid work, basically dropping a leaflet through people?s door, and then returning sometime later and asking them for it back preferably with money in it.
Now, I foolishly felt a bit cornered and said yes, which gave me a number of moral problems.
- I don?t like unsolicited mail, I feel that if I wanted email from somebody I would ask for it, and if you drop something through my door, you can?t expect me to give you it back at a later date.
- I am against pressurising people into giving money, now call it my catholic upbringing, but It felt terribly like people where treating the Christian Aid thing as a bond, a sort of ?If I don?t donate I won?t go to heaven thing?. Now I?m not going to go into a big long theological discussion just yet, but the whole entry into heaven thing isn?t really down to how much or little you donate to charity
- I am not very good at talking to strangers especially when I?ve just randomly knocked on their door.
So it has to be said, all through the week I kept putting off going and delivering these letters and I almost just raided my slummy jar and filled the envelopes rather go round knocking on peoples doors, but Ruth persuaded me, that I had to offer people the opportunity to donate, and I had committed to it when I said yes.
I would just like to say at this point that I don?t object at all to the work Christian Aid does, in fact I don?t think the method they us to collect the money is necessarily wrong, it?s just that I find it uncomfortable.
Now the weekend’s over, I thought it might all calm down, but I arrived at work today, to find we had lost our student system and a weeks worth of data, And one of the main SQL servers had fallen over with a disk fault and JMU World was off.
oh well.
The weekend WAS nice. I, too, attached all my multitudinous fears and worries to a small stone, and threw it in the river. Kevin dropped his from the bridge – I lobbed mine into the frothy bit at the bottom of the waterfall.
Mostly, it worked. The effect is starting to wear off, now, but for a while there, I was pretty content with it all.
One of the exercises, to do with the “outward journey”, involved taking a photo of the whole group, and projecting it on to the wall. The idea was that you look at yourself, on the picture, and try to see yourself as God sees you, and as other people see you – the person who is taking God out to the rest of the world.
To my unbelievable surprise, I liked what I saw. I thought I looked well, and happy, and… pregnant. Inexplicably, because there’s not much to give you away at six weeks, and if there is, it’s usually to make you look LESS well.
What do you think?
It may sound clich?d to talk about the church as my family, but we were especially family-like, this weekend. People were so pleased for us, when we told them, and so careful of us. It was very special. I wouldn’t be without that group of people for the world.
Especially when the car broke down, and they all ganged together to make sure we got home OK…
