Thoughts From Just Another Passer By

I mentioned in my previous group about one of my lovely youth groups. Its reasonably small and all the young people come from a church orientated background or have been going to church for a while. We  started back in January and as a leader theres that post Christmas panic when you realise you havent planned a session let alone the rest of the term. So I used a cop out, I used my first session back to help get the young people to plan the sessions - brilliant, right! Over the last five months in post here in Conwy, theres been a real theme emerging from my work and my visits and my volunteering/volunteered(ness) at things like Faith and Order and 3Gen. This is the idea of questions and having a safe space to ask questions discuss them and not necessarily come out with a definitive answer, but having explored deeply the topic at hand. At Uni I hated the big questions discussed late at night, when one should have been writing assignments because then it felt like wor...

I've sat down to write the second part of this blog many times, but it wasn't until a conversation I had yesterday that I realised where I was going with this. The previous blog I spoke about how the covenant prayer as an individual was really important to me. Two weeks later I still have my head reeling in the enormity of the promise made through the words. I was however slightly disappointed that none of the young people in my one of my Youth groups had been invited to join in that part of the service involving the covenant, nor did they know what a covenant was, (you will get to here a lot more about this particular youth group as we explore some big questions they've asked). So we looked at the prayer and with an honesty and a conviction said that it would be difficult for them to pray this prayer and truly mean all of it and rejoice in it. I admire their honesty as it is a difficult prayer. Even when I pray it, I strive to achieve the covenant I have made...

I was walking to my car this morning and I had this sudden thought 'next week everything will be back to normal.' I've had a reasonably hectic weekend travelling to be part of an amazing rep training weekend for the youth reps of the Methodist Church (I will be one of two youth reps on the Methodist Council) and this coming weekend, if the weather holds out, I'm heading home to my family and home church to be accredited as a local preacher. Them two events are enough to make life hectic, add in the exciting launch of the CYWeCare campaign ( see what its about at the blog or follow it on twitter @CYWeCare) and boom another non normal monday. SNOW yes its also is snowing.... life at the moment is not normal. Then another though occurred to me, my life is never normal. After next weekend there will be no normal week. No two days are the same. Even when you think its just meetings or planning its still different conversations, different questions,...

Happy 2013. (2013 is so hard to type I keep having to correct it from 2012) I could make the usual promises to blog at least once a month or even once a week, but as these never last maybe not. However, my boyfriend keeps saying that I haven't written lately so I'm sure his prompting will help me blog more regularly.  However this weekend is the first weekend in 2013, and that means that for many in the Methodist Church they will be juggling Epiphany and the Covenant service.  Its wasn't until the year before Cliff that the Covenant service became such an important thing for me. It was there that the Covenant prayer became very real in conversation with a member of the Salvation Army. That night was a huge night in my life because of the life changing decisions, a story I've only ever told in person and never written here, its one of them days where God starts to join the dots, and even now as I think back I only just start to see how clearly that day wa...