Under pressure

I love this film for how it captures the stress that I used to be under facing essay deadlines. I just received my worst grade ever for a piece on Esther, I loved reading about it and thinking it all through but spending three days rather than a few weeks on an essay results in 2:2s, no better. It doesn't matter too much - I knew the direction it was heading in. I returned from NY missing lectures and scrambled it in before deadlines before we left college.

I always dreamt about being in an out of control car when the pressure mounted so it became easy to spot my stress signs. The film also captures that feeling of drowning and the sense, as I interpret it, that many different weathers are occurring outside over the period of your incarceration in front of a laptop inside the house.

Some of my peers have just finished their Masters dissertations and it is with some trepidation that I consider I need to finish mine before the curacy is up - maybe sooner, there is little information coming my way about it - but then I have done little to initiate any conversations about it yet.

I am trying to get used to a clergy working week. Sometimes it feels like you never stop and hours logged do not always reflect time working. If like me you suffer 'dislocatia' - (my own diagnosis) for a complete inability to find your way around spatially and particularly on roads and in large buildings, I can spend several wasted minutes each day just trying to find the next home I am on my way to visit.

Without technology my life would be very different - my phone's navigation button now speaks to me and directs me in an interchanging American/British accent.

When trying to locate the latest clergy social, I did laugh out loud to myself, for as I was walking/talking my way there, phone in hand, I should have only looked up, and 30 feet ahead, to know to follow the nearest bearded, middle of his life Christian minister, carrying silver-foiled tray with edible offering, to find my way.

Currently, I struggle a bit with the clergy social, suspecting we might all do so.  Once I am in a room and surrounded by other people just like me, I have an overwhelming urge to get out and find people totally unlike me as soon as I can. I get this feeling if I spend too long in church as well, and consider it somewhat ironic, the stuff I have been through to secure insider status to this institution. It rather reminds me of the man I met at Lee Abbey who exclaimed in my hearing:

'Bloodie Hell - I just want to go somewhere where there are no Christians,' which I decided was definitely strange considering his location but then perhaps it wasn't of his own volition that he was there.

In contrast to this feeling, I now close down all blogging, facebooking and google plussing to head off to New Wine, hardly an 'un'Christian in sight but I anticipate it will be great fun, the Holy Spirit will be manifest - he always is. I guess when 6500 people are exalting the name of Jesus, being made so welcome encourages you to stick around and show off who you are a little more than you might otherwise.

I remember explaining this to someone once who wondered why God always seemed to do stuff - miraculous stuff at New Wine and other places where Christians gather on mass. We go there to welcome and worship - it makes sense God would show up.

This time I go with a preach to prepare rather than an essay and so I take different books with me and probably still have a lot to learn regarding this writing to speak and call over inform and wrangle.

This time I go as a 'rev' myself but not serving on a team. I wonder if it will feel any different.

...and hopefully this time I will have time to blog through some of the conferences and seminars. I still have last years' but in scribbled notes. We will see. It could be i am internetless there - no bad thing really.

I am off, where ever you are and whatever you are doing to get refreshed this summer have fun!