Now here's a sermon illustration if I ever saw one

One the train we were looking fro streets, I mean seats, & we ended up sitting next to, what looked like, a mother & a daughter. The ticket man was asking for tickets, as they do, & the daughter asked for an adult & a child to Meadowhall single. She had a £10 note and was ready to pay. Unfortunately the vendor said "That's £13.60 please". She looked shocked, and I was in the middle of this. She looked like she was going to cry (she didn't, that would have been much worse), but she asked for returns instead, which was £14.70. That made her turn a funny green colour & she stared in disbelief at him. Then...out of the, supposed, blue...he found a cheaper return for £13.75 and she agreed to that, looking a bit hurt, swapped the £10 for a £20 and paid.

All this time I was watching, thinking 'I want to help, but I don't have any change, I don't have £4, I spent that on 2 teas'. What an idiot. I couldn't pay half, or even a third of the price, all I had was a debit card, and more plastic in the form of student ID's and that, than you could shake a stick at. Therefore not worth trying to exchange for money. It dawned on me that, perhaps, it was what God would have me do. 'You can't pay a bit of it, but you can pay it all.' What would have happened if I'd done that? Intervening to "That's ok I'll pay"

What did Jesus do? He knew paying for sins through sacrifice of lambs wasn't enough, it didn't do enough. So He paid it all...

Inspiration required

Women are funny creatures. I'm not saying this out of any experience I specifically had over the past week as my last rant about women was, I just felt led to write something. I just think they...Hold on, my housemates are playing hacky-sack and there's a 6-year-old child joining in. He's a third the size of them and they look quite uncomfortable involving him. That's funny. My housemates are a crazy bunch. One's a borderline alcoholic in denial, two are regular pot smokers, and spend more time than I do shut in their room creating crazy noises, one's small, bearded and always hyped up on coffee from working at Caffe Nero, and the other is a sedate Masters student with a good walking pace. Life becomes interesting when you're the only Christian in a house like that. Fun, but interesting.

I invited them to Alpha and all turned down the offer with lame excuses like, "I'm ill", "I'm in the library" (he wasn't, he was sitting on the sofa), "I'm spending the day climbing so I might be tired", or "I'm not here, I'm in Liverpool and you didn't ask me because of that very reason". Slightly on the annoying side, but I did get to spend the evening watching a video of Robin Williams swearing instead, with Abbey, of course. And now Adam and Chris are threatening to throw a brick through my window. How did they know I was writing about them?

After my experience the other Wednesday (being punched in the mouth), Life has continued to bless me, and others through the encouraging story it turned out to be. God is a good influence on my life. In fact church today (which was excellent - God says "You are my son, you are my daughter, and I love you. I love you.") Joel Edwards was preaching about Jesus being fascinating. Bringing Grace & Truth together. Truth is dificult and rules after rules cause hardened hearts towards Christianity, and Grace is nice, kind, and admissive of all behaviour. How do the two come together? When Jesus says to the adulterous woman "Go and live a better life". Grace & Truth inspires us to live better lives. Not out of obligation, but entirely out of love and inpiration for our creator.


Revelation 20:11 says: - Then I saw a great white throne and him who was seated on it. From his presence earth and sky fled away, and no place was found for them. I am really looking forward to it.

Student life is a perpetual state of tiredness

So says Abbey. Quite precise. She's in everyday at 9 o' clock, so she's naturally tired the majority of the time, falling asleep in lectures and the like. I'm in 8 hours a week, with two 9 o' clock starts and a day off. I'm unnaturally tired most of the time. No reason. I'd like to say I'm a busy person but I've been procrastinating for the past two weeks and, even though work is starting to get done, I still manage to find time to write this.

Friday I went down to the parents. It was quite amusing, a certain dread in Abbey's eyes as she would "Meet The Parents", but it wasn't a complete disaster. We watched Donnie Darko which had plenty of F'ing, but my brother said all he heard was "PIIITTTYYYY!!" when Drew Barrymore lost her job. That made me laugh. In the morning of Saturday I did some recordings of my dad's childhood stories and I'm in the process of editing it to say "Detention with Miss Upton tastes a bit like chicken". Good clean fun. We played Cheddargorge with my older brother's birthday card and ended up with "Blue cabbage themed face box magazine cupboard shop flavoured pink-ish potato skins" to go as a greeting. We were laughing heartily, so by tea we were in good moods to completely change the lyrics of "10 in the bed" involving the little one realising the "Rollover" was of the BBC1 Saturday lottery variety and Abbey laughing until it hurt. Always fun.

Roasts are easy to do, is the general consensus of yesterday. Thank you.