Revitalise

So I've been going through a bit of a rough time very recently: emotionally and consequently spiritually. I won't go into specifics but basically its resulted in me not feeling connected to anything really. In church and worship and the like its felt like there's something in the way, connecting has just felt hard. This has been both with God and everyone else. For me, social interaction is generally hard if I don't know the person especially well and connecting with God hasn't been the easiest thing to do at times but the last few months its felt a lot easier. Then, in the last week or so, it was like a wall was put up. Starting a block placement took a lot out of me and I've been going through other stuff in my personal life thats dragged me down. So yeah, long story short, everything has come together and resulted in me feeling like theres something in the way with connecting with God. Tonight I felt a breakthrough.

I was feeling especially disconnected when I went to my university's Christian Union meeting and it continued throughout the opening worship and prayer time. Its hard when this happens, it almost feels like I have to pretend during the meetings or like I'm failing somehow. So yeah, throughout the talk we had a was feeling this disconnection but to a lesser extent because it was a great talk with a message that I really needed. The real change came in the closing prayer time: the speaker had given us some practical advise for getting through struggles alongside God and I put it into practice while listening to some of the prayers and in the quiet time in between. I was really concentrating on my personal issues and slowly I just felt my faith and hope creep back up on me and I just knew. I knew that He will show me the answers but it probably won't be how I expect it and it probably won't be something I recognise straight away but it will be His wok and therefore it will be good. As this was happening I was listening to the prayers with my eyes closed. Once I opened them I was stunned because I realised that I hadn't been here. I know thats vague but its the only way I can put it, I felt I had been in a completely different place and I felt filled with the holy spirit.

I'm still facing what I was earlier today but I feel more able now to go through it with my father God and some of that optimism that was fading is creeping back. I've been refilled and revitalised and I'm unbelievably grateful for His love and grace and peace at work in my life.

Alpha

So I've just come home from the last session of the alpha course I've been on the past 7 weeks. My head feels full but I can't actually pinpoint any one thought  so I'm going to try and work it out through this blog.

Alpha has been such a journey. Its really actually pushed me out of my comfort zone and has been very scary and very hard at times. Before alpha I was in a routine of church, societies and connect group. I was a lot happier than I ever thought I could be here in Lincoln and things were kind of steadily good. Over the course of alpha a lot of different things happened both within and to me. Since forever but more so since last year I've been quite socially anxious. After the disappointment and horribleness of not finding anyone I felt was my kind of person last year, I found it very hard to make actual connections and friendships with new people, especially if I see potential for a relationship. I get friendship crushes and they are the worst because usually nothing ever comes from it. All these things I realised during alpha when I was placed on an alpha table with mostly new people who I hadn't really talked to before. As the weeks went on and I saw more potential for a friendship to develop I got more anxious that it wouldn't and that was hard. Thats something I'm dealing with and probably will never fully go away and its not fair on other people for me to become so attached to a possibility of a friendship. I'm not really going anywhere with this, just getting out some thoughts about the internal things that have been going on for me alongside the alpha journey.

Its odd. I've learnt a lot from alpha and I've really grown in my faith, knowledge and understanding yet all I can think about is this struggle that has been going on and is still going on. In a way it seems that I'm fixated on this one aspect of the journey that isn't the most important thing but in a way also is the most important thing because my lowest point in the journey turned into something that maybe needed to be dealt with and maybe if I hadn't of done it now I wouldn't have for a long time until it became so much bigger.

So this is what I've taken away from alpha:
-  The knowledge that the bible is somewhat reliable
- The knowledge and understanding of what people may be doing when they are speaking in tongues
- A new set of faces and people that I will recognise and be able to talk to in church outside of my own comfortable group
- A deeper knowledge of myself and how I work
- An understanding of the benefit of speaking up and talking about something new
- An understanding that it might not always go to plan and that might end up with me beating myself up about it for days
- Knowing that God is bigger than my anxiety
- Knowing that there is someone who is willing to be there for me to talk to and pray for me if I need it
- Challenges and questions to work through

What I want to do now:
- Foster and grow my relationships I have through God
- Be more forthcoming with my thoughts and ideas
- Speak out when its hard but I have something to say
- Continue to grow and do new things even if they're the hardest thing
- Love better

I know this post has been a bit of a mess but its more for me than anything else if its helped/made sense to anyone else thats just a bonus.

Some thoughts on my anxiety and my experience tonight

I feel like I should cry but I can't. I feel like God's done something but I don't know what. My mind's a bit of a mess.

Last year I had a bad year and I came away from it with the view that uni had harmed my mental health a lot. This year I got better. In the first term I was better, I got out more and I met new people and I met God and things have been better. This term they're still better but I think last year's mental health issues have caught up with me a bit. I'm very anxious. Its not extreme, I wouldn't say I'm having panic attacks but I have very internal anxieties. They creep up on me during the day. I'll think about a random time or thing I've said and get this horrible feeling building up. It goes around and around and I feel like I have to do something to release it. When I do it only feels a tiny bit better and it goes around in a cycle until I stop myself or distract myself with every day things. Its been happening throughout this term and its almost building up and building up and today I felt like it's going to get worse before it gets better.

So I took it to church. This term I've been doing an alpha course at church and it just happened that the last question tonight was asking if anyone wanted prayer. As soon as I saw it I knew that I needed to bring my anxiety to my table and get help from there. So I did and a girl on my table suffers with anxiety and has done for a while, I knew this before and maybe thats one of the reasons I was able to bring it to them. So they prayed for me and I talked to this girl afterwards and she prayed for me about it and talked to me about her experiences. Her kindness and love and willingness to be there for me blew me away completely. Things didn't change in a snap but things might be shifting. I don't know. I don't have a clue what's going on inside me at the moment. I trust that it will change and I can move this mountain but I think it might be a long journey. I think it might still get worse before it gets better but I've told people about it, people I don't really know that well but still have potential with and that's huge.

This post has been a whole load of I don't knows and mixed feelings but this experience is something I needed to get out of my head. I guess only God knows what will happen next, we shall see!

My spiritual journey

So I've majorly neglected this blog. I guess I felt like I had nothing to write about. Now I feel like I do. I didn't know whether blogging about this part of my life would be helpful but I just really want to share it. Over the past year I've gone on a major spiritual journey. My relationship with God and more so religion has always felt complicated. I grew up going to church, but only ever Sunday school, and going to a church primary school but with non-religious parents. I've never really known what I believed. That religion box on questionnaires was always hard for me because I felt like attending church made me a Christian but I didn't actually hold any fundamental Christian beliefs. In college I got to a point where I just believed in being a good person and was very unsure about the existence of God.

Then I came to university. I thought about going to the Christian Union: it was something that I had a bit of connection to that I could meet new people through, I wanted to give it a go. I did try at the start but we always got the wrong room and eventually gave up trying to go and therefore I never really bothered about going to church. It was always at the back of my mind though. I had a really tough time in my first year of university and knew that something had to change and that was always one possible way to open up more doors for me. Eventually when the CU ran a games night that I went to with a friend, I got some contact with some of the members and plucked up the courage to go to my first CU meeting. I was out of my depth. I'd never done Bible study before and didn't really know what I was doing. It was an evangelical culture which wasn't something I was used to at all. They took me to Alive church and I started going every week. Even then I was completely unsure of what I believed and I'd been struggling through it from that point last year until around January this year.

Slowly I came to believe. Slowly a relationship between me and God grew. Things felt quite rocky, quite unsure, but things were happening inside me that I couldn't deny. I became a Christian. The church I go to talks a lot about being 'saved' and I wouldn't say there was one moment that I was 'saved'. I think a series of moments happened and when I went away with my church student group things really started to click. Being in a focused, spiritual learning environment with concentrated worship time helped me so much. I saw the wonders of God and how much he had done for people and how much he could do for me. My walls and reservations started to crumble and they still are to this day.

I guess I just need an outlet for this journey. A lot of the first stages of gaining a relationship with God have been completed but I know that this is a lifelong process and relationship that will help me through everything. I want to keep this up. Things are still very muddled in my head but thats okay. I am getting to know God and it is the best thing. One last thing I want to share is the reason why I decided to share my story and start blogging about this journey I'm on again. About a week or so ago in church we were singing and I just felt like I really needed to pray for an old family friend. This person used to be one of my best friends and we loved each other like brother and sister for a while before he got caught up with a girlfriend who isn't good for him. This triggered a string of events that mean we no longer talk. I still care for him but, because of his decisions, we don't have a relationship anymore. Anyway, this situation is far from my ideal and so when I felt like I needed to pray for him I did, with more desperation than I ever have, I poured out all my feelings about him to God in the middle of worship, gave it up to him and waited. Today I talked to my mum and found out that things have been moving in the right direction for this family friend: he's finally found some employment and has the motivation for it which he hasn't had in years. Its amazing, this improvement that I never thought possible has happened, God is good all the time. I pray that things will carry on progressing and that God can work in our relationship.

That has been a long, brief, synopsis of my spiritual journey. I definitely find writing and sharing to be helpful so I think this blog may come alive again through that.
God bless.

Friendships

Recently, the idea of love and what it means to love and be loved and the fairness of it. When I first came home from uni in June I went through a rough patch where I knew some of my friends were also home and wanted to see them but because no one was trying to reach out to me I wasn't doing anything about it. I felt like, if they wanted to see me, they would try to. Deep down I knew the reason was almost definitely because I have always been the organiser, no one else in my friendship group has been the one to suggest meet ups that aren't birthday parties outside of school. That was okay when we saw each other every day and didn't need to try and talk to each other because we could all the time. When we had to actually try, however, it hurt me that no one else reached out and tried to contact me, let alone try and arrange anything to see me or any of my other friends. Eventually I did end up organising something and it was a fun night, I'm glad I did.

A few weeks ago I saw a post on tumblr that was talking about love. One person had said "don't cross oceans for someone who won't cross a puddle for you" and someone else had replying with a few lines basically saying do, love everyone deeply, do things for people, its worth it. I was conflicted about this post. Part of me, the stubborn part which didn't want to arrange anything for my friends without them doing something for me first, agrees with the first person. However, I also see the validity in loving deeply and being exceptionally kind to people, especially the people you love. Its something I still can't form an opinion on because I still see both sides.

I do, however, think that friendship should involve effort from both (or all) parties involved. I value a text or a message first every time, it means a lot to me. This year of being away from my friends I know that I am usually the first one to get in contact with any of my group from sixth form. Thats the way its always been and I know that that probably doesn't lessen the amount that they care about me but there's a difference between knowing and feeling. I know friendships change as people do and that's the natural progression of relationships, I know that not everyone has the same definition or expectations of friendship. That doesn't stop it hurting though when I realise that none of the people who are meant to be my best friends have started a conversation with me for months or I see them having a lot more contact with each other than they do with me.

As with many things I don't have a good conclusion to my thoughts on this, I'm still figuring a lot of things out. What I do know is that I love my friends deeply and always will, even if I'm not always able to call them friends. People mean the most to me and I got really lucky with my group of friends through the last years of high school and sixth form. I don't think I'll ever get that lucky again and I don't know how my friendships are going to be even a year from now. Its scary and I know there's a big chance that I'll never truly have the exact friendships I wanted once upon a time, I just hope that my current friendships can grow in a positive way throughout the years.

Shades of grey

Recently I've been thinking a lot about the concept of morality, right and wrong and all that complicated stuff that makes my head hurt. What I've really struggled with is knowing that everything, including morality, is one big social construction that has most likely been created by other people. I do believe that it is something that is needed though, we need to have generally agreed principles of what is right and wrong in order to function as a society. However, it needs to be something that can change and be moulded with society. Its dangerous when people aren't able to think about multiple sides of things and consider other people's point of view rather than completely disregarding everything someone says because it doesn't match what you think.

Sometimes I feel like people need to realise that people are immensely complex and have the ability to be both great and terrible throughout their lives. No one can ever know exactly what its like to be someone else and so everyone is inherently self-centred. If someone hurts you it is almost impossible to see that person as anything other than bad and deserving of punishment.. On the flip side, if someone you love and respect does something terrible it takes time and a lot of hard work to adjust your view of them and it might never happen.

Life is a lot easier if you have a set framework where you know that certain behaviour is always wrong and another is always okay. That isn't always the case though, everyone has different reasons for their behaviour and no one other than the person can ever truly know the reasons behind it. Therefore, I think it is important to take into account the complexity of behaviour before completely judging it.

I've come to judge things on how much good they put out in the world rather than in absolutism.

Being around better people

This last weekend I went to visit my best friend at her university in Durham and met all of her friends up there for the first time. Whereas I have had a less than good experience with the people at my university, she has had a great experience and has met great people who I'm sure have become lifelong friends. I really enjoyed the weekend, seeing my best friend for the first time in a few months as well as meeting new people. For the first time in a long time I found myself consistently surrounded by what seemed to be genuinely very good people for an amount of time. On the train home I felt that warm contentedness you feel after you've spent time around people who you feel are just good people and the urge to be better because of that.

I think that weekend has helped me to fully understand why it is so important to surround yourself with great people. I didn't get to know the people especially well but there was just a really good vibe. I've found this with a few people I've met at university. Sometimes, after I meet some people I just get this feeling of peace and contentedness. That feeling is a great feeling and its not one I have been accustomed to recently.  Its a feeling that lasts for a little while and then leaves but is always good, never bad. Its a feeling that makes me want to strive to be better: think more, write more, find more.

So I came away from this last weekend with two main goals: follow that feeling in the people I surround myself with and try to be a person who can give that feeling to others.