A good day

Last night I watched my newest favourite film, The Count of Monte Cristo. Haven't done this in a while, so I did it properly - tucked up in bed, hot chocolate in hand, laptop on legs (therefore "leg-top"?), and it was bliss. There's a reason God invented DVDs. And quiet Saturday nights. And for the first time in about a week and a half, I slept pretty well. (Don't worry, it's normal - occasionally I do have an insomniac week/month.) Praise God for sleep - a beautiful invention!

8 hours later I woke, not feeling too grand healthwise, and mused about whether I should go to church, or go to "Bedside Baptist" and go to church later. I don't think it's dreadfully heathen to decide against going to church once in a while, but today I went. Twice! (I know!) And, as always, I'm glad I did.

Bill spoke on Esther 1 today, and I'm really up for the rest of the series. God really encouraged me to set my standards high and stand up for them, even if it means being divorced by the king of Persia (although somehow I doubt that's a risk). He also showed me, again, how even though people do wrong things, and I do wrong things, and there's no excuse for it, God can and does sovereignly use our mistakes, and us, in His plans.
E.g., it wasn't right for the king to get drunk and randy (in the Bible!), and it wasn't right for him to divorce his dignified queen, but God used it all to bring Esther on the scene, and that, methinks, was quite the good move.
If you don't know the story, it's in the Bible, in the Old Testament, and it's called Esther, unsurprisingly. It's really good - I recommend it - the action film, pretty ladies, fine palaces, conspiracies, death-defiance, a big rescue op, kings, queens, baddies, goodies etc...

Anyway, after the morning service, and after talking to lots of people I haven't seen in a while/ever, a proportion of the good old student community trundled off to Paul's house, where we ate pork, and chicken, among other things, discovered the space-chair (well, Gemma did), and played Uno, with some amazing new rules I'm going to subject my home-people to at some point...

Back to halls; prepared tomorrow night's hall group study of Joshua 5 and 6 in an hour and a half (fastest yet!); prayed a while; got ready to meet Rachel to go out to church again. Her parents had just brought her back from a weekend at home, and they gave us a lift to church. Going to church in a car... felt quite the aristocrat!

Bill spoke on Romans 7, and really I can't give a synopsis here! But sometimes the Bible seems to be written to me. The apostle Paul says "I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do. And if I do what I do not want to do, I agree that the law is good... For what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do - this I keep on doing." Quite convoluted, but it does make sense if you follow it. It's about our being stuck in a personal civil war; you want to do good, but somehow you always manage to screw up. This passage shows us that it is the Law that shows us how/where/how badly we've screwed up. It is only Christ who can set us free and give us the strength to break the cycle. Read it for yourself though.

And after the evening service, and after talking to lots more people I haven't seen in a while/ever, and after starting to book up my March, a different proportion of the good old student community trundled off to Christoff & Sarah's beautiful home. There we covered a whole lot of topics between us, and generally had a rollicking good night.

It's funny, reading back through my Burkina diary (gap year #1). The more depressive entries had no-one's name in, apart from the kids'. The entries which mentioned, the kids as always, but also many other names of people I had spent time with that day, were also my good days, my uplifting days that I love to remember. I didn't notice this correlation at the time, but now I know that without fail, a good day is a day with lots of people in it. Praise God.

Praise God that He didn't "only" call us into a relationship with Him, but also He called us, from the creation of the world, from the birth of His plans, into relationships with others, into His multi-coloured family. I love that that's not just a bonus of church - it's half the whole point.