I'm back in Crazylan... woops, uh, ahem... Cardiff
Much has changed, much hasn't, to be honest it's probably to be expected. Buses still disappear off the face of the planet right before they get to my stop, my hall is still miles away from anything useful (literally) and there is still a rather large tree blocking the view from my window. Nothing new there then.
It's been a rather eventful week back, by any standards, not just the standard I usually go by which is that anything involving leaving my room is eventful. I'm therefore going to begin with a disclaimer, in that I've been trying to write this pretty much since I got back, and as such it's likely this particular post is going to feel more like 5 or 6, I just have a lot to talk about.
I should probably start this post with a confession, I really really suck at remembering things. Not in the context of information - I'm pretty good with that - but in the context of remembering to pack everything into a suitcase to go places, I'm really really bad.
Before I go any further, I should probably explain something. I left home to go back to uni on the 8th, and on the morning of the 8th I still hadn't even started thinking about packing, to be honest it just kinda got put to the back of my mind. I knew I was leaving on that day, but it hadn't quite clicked that in order to leave I would first need to pack. Unsurprisingly this meant that it got to the time I wanted to leave, and I wasn't ready to go, and unfortunately this led to my feeling rushed and wanting to get going as soon as possible, so I packed quickly and left.
I don't think there has ever been an occasion where I have packed a bag to go somewhere, and not forgotten something fairly important, and, to the surprise of nobody, due to the extra pressure I had put on myself to get going, this was no exception. On this occasion however, it wasn't something as simple as a toothbrush I managed to leave behind, it was my hard drive. Even more impressively, I somehow managed to bring the cable, but not the box itself, talk about stupid mistake...
Not sure how many of you reading this are massively into computers, but suffice to say that this was a big deal. My hard drive contains 75% of my games, all my files, all my music, and well over half of my programs. On top of this, a lot of the programs currently on my SSD are set up very specifically to save and retrieve data from this external drive, so without it plugged into my computer I was pretty much restricted to basic web browsing, lest I risk messing up practically the entire way my computer works when programs on my SSD tried to pull files from a drive that wasn't there. Thankfully I have very generous parents, and my mum kindly agreed to come all the way to Cardiff to bring it to me, on condition I spent the day with her. So I got my hard drive back, and I even got a free lunch! If you didn't know me well enough you'd say I'd planned it that way! (apart from the fact I did genuinely forget to bring the thing and to be honest don't really think that far ahead).
Things got considerably more interesting on Tuesday evening however, after the hard drive fiasco blew over, as it was the evening of the weekly River City student community group, pretty much the only thing I'm a part of outside of my degree. For anyone who isn't already aware what this is, the best way for me to describe it is that it's a bit like a more active version of youth homegroup. For anyone who doesn't know what youth homegroup is, basically people choose an evening to meet up, usually at someone's house, to just talk about life stuff, and how the week has been as well as anything in particular that has inspired them. Sometimes there is also cake. It's basically a really good way to get to know church people outside of the church setting, important for someone like me who would otherwise sit in his room all day checking social media, playing games or spending far too long trying to write blog posts like this one...
Anyway, I went to this thing last Tuesday, and it was really nice to see people again after almost a month away. Going home for Christmas made me realise just how much this place has come to mean to me, no matter how much I might complain, or despair about how awful my life is sometimes being by myself all the time (and I know what you're going to say here, yes that is largely my own fault). It's where my life is, a place I can call home, and I love it for that.
So the evening progressed pretty much in the usual way, we got there, chatted for a bit about stuff, then they played some songs which we sang along to (though I didn't join in for most of it because I didn't know the words, I just used the opportunity to appreciate the moment, and to live in it for what it was), but then something happened.
I got a picture.
No, by this I don't mean I took a picture of something, or that I had my picture taken (I'm really not at all photogenic anyway). What I mean is a picture appeared in my head, and it wasn't like it was something I had thought about myself, it was like someone had put it there. I probably sound crazy saying this, but I felt instinctively like it was something I had been given, and that there was more to it than what you could see at face value.
What I saw was a jumbled slide puzzle, very specifically a 7x7 slide puzzle, much like the one you see below:
I will just stress here, this is far from an accurate recreation of the picture I got, the patterns were far more intricate, and overlapped tiles, so that there would only have been one correct arrangement of the puzzle. It was also initially black and while, so it was impossible to tell exactly what it might have been. I made this version in about half an hour in MS paint to give a general idea of what I'm talking about, so please don't judge my artistic skill too harshly. You could probably work out what the picture actually was without me telling you, but in the picture I got it was hard to tell, as everything was much more complicated and black and white.
Anyway, while I was looking at this slide puzzle, it started rearranging itself, and revealing a picture in the middle, which then gradually became more and more colourful, until the puzzle was solved, and the solved puzzle looked something like this.
I guess sometimes things can be hard to see. Sometimes what we are can just feel so messed up, so uncertain, that it's impossible to tell who the real you is. The truth is, no matter how broken you are, no matter how bad things can get, there is always ALWAYS hope. Life can be a bit like a slide puzzle sometimes, where nothing seems to be in the right place. The thing with life though, is you don't have to solve it yourself. If you are able to trust in love, then everything else will just fall into place, because at the end of the day, love always wins.
To be honest, I have no idea if this is significant or not, but I thought I might as well share it anyway, regardless, because in the words of Mike Pilavachi: "If I can help one person, then it's worth it, but if I don't try then I'll never know." Maybe it's nothing, and maybe it's everything. Maybe I'll never know, and maybe that doesn't matter...
I was talking to Ruth, a friend of mine from the church I've been going to, afterward, and how I'm so glad I've been able to find a place like River City after all the anxiety and loneliness that initially came with moving away from home, and how in some ways I feel more at home now than I ever have before. I guess because in some strange way, Cardiff is my place, and I'm in control of my own destiny here. I'm not reliant on other people (mostly), and I can be myself and do my own thing.
I came to a bit of a strange realisation though, during this conversation. If not for people called Ruth, I probably wouldn't have a church right now. Obviously there's no way to know for sure, but hear me out here:
When I moved to Cardiff, my intention was always to find a church eventually, however when I got here I think it's fair to say I had a difficult first few weeks adapting to the new environment. There are the obvious reasons for this: I was responsible for myself for the first time ever, which I'll admit was a bit of a shock to the system. I also missed people from home (I still do), and to be honest I just wanted to give up, to run away and just go back to how things were before. It was already hard enough to settle in without having to think about finding a church, so to be honest for the first couple of weeks I didn't even really bother looking. It was only when Ruth (different Ruth) - a friend from my church back home - texted me (completely out of the blue) to offer to come all the way to visit me and "do church" that I actually started looking for places. The church I ended up going to that week was not the one I ended up settling with, but if not for that visit I probably wouldn't have even bothered looking in the first place. It's easy to see how people who go to university often lose their faith, because without someone to push you in the right direction it's all too easy to think it doesn't matter, and just not try. Without proper church connections we start to lose our faith, and it's a sad truth that 70% of Christians who go to university would say they didn't have a faith any more after just one year (this is a genuine statistic from the charity Fusion). The pressure is to conform, but we can't let that get to us.
It wasn't until 2 weeks later that I found River City. The Christian union at the university organised a "Church walk" for the first few weeks of the semester, which was basically a meeting outside the students union where student representatives from different churches came and held up signs advertising their church before taking whoever was interested on that morning to wherever they were based. On the morning in question I had arranged to meet someone from the physics group chat and go and try whatever church he'd been to the week before. Of course on the morning in question this person also overslept, so I walked all the way down to the SU only to find that he wasn't there, and being forced to make a choice between going all the way back to my hall (I don't know if I've told you already, but that's a very long way, and is mostly uphill, so wasn't very appealing at the time) or picking a random church and going with that. It just so happened that the night before I had had a message from someone from River City via the Fusion app (which is really good, by the way, for anyone going to university and worried about finding a church). I therefore made the decision to find the representative from that church and go and see what it was like. The representative's name? Ruth
You can probably see where this is going...
It got me thinking though, the name Ruth literally means friend, and so it's something of a strange coincidence that some of the people who have argueably been most helpful to me in settling in share a name with such a specific meaning.
You probably don't know this, because I won't have mentioned it, but one of the things I'm trying to do this year is get better at reading my bible. I've never really been very good at this, in fact I'd go as far as to say the vast majority of what I know about it is stuff I've heard from other people. That and the gospel, obviously (because let's face it, who HASN'T heard about that, at least a little bit, even if you don't have any kind of faith). To be honest though, it can be quite hard to know where to start. I'd been reading Corinthians, which I'll come back to later, but on this particular evening I decided to go back a bit, and to read the book of Ruth.
Ruth is a relatively short book in the bible, consisting of just four chapters, so I managed to quite easily read the entire thing in one sitting. It follows the story of Ruth, a woman from the region of Moab, who married the son of a Jewish woman Naomi, whose husband had died. Ten years later both of Naomi's sons also died, and so Naomi was left alone with Ruth, and Orpah, her other daughter in law. Naomi told Ruth and Orpah that they should go back home, to live their lives and find new husbands, but Ruth refused to leave Naomi alone, and instead travelled with her to Bethlehem, where they lived together, until Ruth met and married Boaz, which through a complicated series of events I won't attempt to explain here allowed Naomi's husband to have an heir, and therefore Ruth became an ancestor of king David, and therefore Jesus. The book isn't exactly the most well written, quite hard to follow at times and perhaps understandably wasn't actually very relevant to me, but there was one particular passage that stood out in particular, Ruth 1:16-17:
But Ruth said, "Don't beg me to leave you or to stop following you. Where you go, I will go. Where you live, I will live. Your people will be my people and your God will be my God. And where you die, I will die, and there I will be buried. I ask the Lord to punish me terribly if I do not keep this promise: Not even death will separate us"
While I can't say I have ever been in this sort of position myself, it's pretty hard not to admire Ruth's dedication, regardless of what you might think about the Bible and other faith stuff. Ruth is not only saying she is prepared to stay with Naomi, she is saying that she is prepared to give up absolutely everything to be with her, despite everything that has happened. Even in death they will remain together.
*Update: Met another Ruth today, though briefly* (probably need another post to explain that)
University is a strange strange experience to begin with, and can be very difficult to get to grips with. You're thrown into a situation where not only do you suddenly have to adapt to a new environment, but you also have to do that with the added pressure of having (in my case at least) no friends from home to turn to for help (at least not within about a 100 mile radius). I have a daily quotes calendar on my desk, and I confess, I've had it longer than a year and this is my second time cycling through them, but it was this quote, showing up what is now just under two weeks ago, that started me off writing what has so far been an absolutely crazy long blog post. (Seriously, longer than my formal lab report at this point, so serious congratulations if you're still with me)
I'm not sure what it was about it, I've had it as my skype status now for over a year mainly because I liked it at the time it first came around, but this time it stood out to me, because in many ways, it's exactly the way I've dealt with university. Settled down first, got used to living alone, cooking for myself and everything else. Only when I had found my bearings in this strange new world was I able to reach out properly to people and begin to form meaningful connections, or maybe it was because of that that I finally began to feel at home here. Either way, it's an interesting series of events which I hope to go into more detail about at some point when I've worked out what I'm trying to say, but I think this post has gotten too long to remain as just one post, so I'm going to leave things here for now, and I may return to this at some point in the future, who knows...
Oh, and one last thing: at some point since returning I had 3 exams, but we don't talk about those much. Just know that they went about as well as I expected them to, which wasn't good, but they could have been far worse, and I think I've done enough to pass, which is the important bit.
Rest assured there is plenty more content to come in the next week or so, including a rather interesting development which I personally am very excited about, so watch this space...
