Tired, frustrated, annoyed

When I arrived at Romsey Mill for my weekly reminder of life on the edge I was greeted by Gavin and Ruth complaining that I hadn't blogged about my work there for ages. Little did we realise how much material the afternoon's events would give us.

With the late afternoons becoming lighter it's now possible to take our group of Year 9's out to do something constructive, after a winter of being cooped up playing Wii Sports, Murderball and badminton. With a recent grant being made to the Mill we are able to continue work with Anglesey Abbey, a nearby National Trust property.

However, we nearly didn't get there. The minibus stopped twice on the way - firstly for a seatbelts reminder, the second time for Gavin to address some really unpleasant behaviour between certain individuals in the group. Take a mixture of bad language, misogyny and plain rudeness, use your imagination, double the result and you'll be nowhere near the level of what we experienced yesterday. After a brief pause to reconsider our life choices the journey resumed, and we eventually met up with Iwan, who works for the National Trust on their grounds and looks after their work with schools and other agencies like Romsey Mill. However, I imagine that Iwan's experience of my son's Year 4 class a few months ago is the other end of the spectrum from this group.

The energy from the minibus did not disperse when we got into the open air. Larger and larger sticks and branches were being brandished, and I was not in a mood for being polite. So when I told Andy* for the 'n'th time to put his branch-sized stick down (notice the 'told', not 'asked') and he refused to co-operate unless I said 'please' I simply pulled the branch from his hand. He went off in a strop, and I decided that this wasn't a time to discuss what I've recently learnt in Greek about my choice of the 'imperative mood'.

Half an hour later Andy was still in a bad mood. Apparently I'd made his hand bleed pulling the branch from him. Not that you could tell this from looking at his hand. I apologised and thought it was over. But no, for the remainder of the session he would not forgive me. I had sticks thrown directly at me, even after I re-apologised, and after Gavin had explained that it was now time to let it go. Gavin even at one point stood in the line of fire to take my suffering upon himself (in a literal re-enactment of Jesus), but still no forgiveness, not even by the time we got back to the Mill.

Gavin and I found ourselves asking 'why?'. Why the extreme bitterness between group members, why the irrational lack of forgiveness? Why are we doing this? We realised that we're doing this tough work because nobody else is, because we've chosen to do as Jesus tells us to - to work with the last, the least and the lost. That means that it's not always going to be easy, that sometimes we want to stop, but we can't - if we stop working with the marginalised youth nobody else is going to help them.

We each walked away knowing that Jesus would have a killer line to these young people. One sentence that would stop them in their tracks, that they wouldn't be able to answer back to, that they wouldn't dare question. But what is it?

*name changed

Tired boy

I'm not sure what happened to the last 7 days - it's that long since I last posted anything, although I thought it was about 3.

Since then I've done loads! There's been more forms to fill out, chapel, opportunities to take advantage of, chapel, 2 library briefings, chapel, chapel briefings, chapel, placement briefings, chapel, foundation lectures, chapel, a pastoral/academic interview, chapel, a puddings evening, and church. Oh, and Thursday evening chapel, and Greek twice as frequently as chapel!! My feet seem to have hardly touched the ground (apart from the day when my bike brakes were fading fast and my feet had to touch the ground....). We, the first years, have had a pretty packed programme, with barely a space to make a quick cuppa before we were due to be elsewhere, to the extent that when we did actually legitimately have 35 minutes free this morning we felt sure that we should be somewhere else being talked at.

It should all start to ease off in a couple of days when the lecture timetable kicks in, as the general pattern of my day becomes lectures in the morning and study in the afternoon. I'm going to try to keep my academic work at college as much as possible, as I lose 3 hours doing tea-and-childrens-bedtime, and 9pm isn't a good time to be doing difficult thinking type stuff. Watch this space to find out if I achieve that. There's a danger of getting involved with too many things and filling your time up beyond your capacity to cope. I've only got 2 years here and there is a lot to squeeze in, not only in terms of formal timetabled stuff, but also missions, placements and family time. On paper I have a lot of holiday in those 2 years, in practice we're already starting to think about plans for next summer, so that we do actually manage to get some family time together.

Related to that we had a foundation lecture on so called 'Life and Service' today - this is the 'Vicar School' part of Ridley, as opposed to the theological side. During this it was pointed out that a college full of ordinands is by definition full of people who have been selected for their leadership potential, and therefore there are an awful lot of Chiefs and very few Indians. Two possible results of this are huge conflicts, or total withdrawal from community life. We have to aim somewhere between the two - get involved, but don't try to run everything. I'm trying to get that balance right. How much do I get involved in, and how much is too much? Yesterday saw my first 7pm return home for a very long time, and that wasn't a good start for my college-family balance.

It was Isaac's birthday today - it was good to be able to share my concerns over his settling-down with my staircase friends yesterday and to have them pray for him and us, and so nice today that everybody wanted to know how his birthday was actually going. He's happy - he's got a new bike, and a party planned for the weekend.

Talking of birthdays, we've got an amazing coincidence on my staircase. We're a group of 13, and 2 share a birthday on Jan 29th, and 2 on May 3rd. I'm one of the latter, and next year myself and Christina will be 21 and 40 years old on the same day. Lots of tea will be drunk on that day I'm sure. Maybe even a packet of chocolate Hob-Nobs will be opened in celebration.