Today seemed long and tomorrow is only a few hours away, so this is going to be a short one. The Tube journey was uneventful and I did not stay awake enough to read anymore of the 'Four Loves'. I did however manage to listen to the HTB sermon by Nikki Lee on 'Transforming Relationships'. I will have to tell you about it another day but it was a very timely talk for me. I forgot to tell you that I received an invite from WBC for the Disciple and Mentoring course. I am seriously considering joining. Although I am pretty certain that I could not do it for real. I have never been mentored myself and I am the least disciplined person I know. However I guess the thing is that I would not be alone but be guided by God and my other Christian brothers and sisters. We shall see...
When I eventually got to work, I spent the first 30 minutes on the phone to a social worker. Spent the rest of the morning dictating letters. Then discovered at one fifteen that no patients had been booked into my clinic, therefore spent the rest of the day completing my dictation and trying to complete my next teaching presentation on ADHD. I was going to say that I left work early but actually I simply left work before six. I went to WHSmith to buy a diary for 2012. Even thought I am trying to complete this daily blog - I still have to keep a written diary. I have kept one since I was 10 I think, they are all piled on a shelf in my back room. They are all page a day, except for 2011. For some reason I thought I would try something different and just write whenever the mood ovetook me. The result was a very short diary that started on 5th February and ended on 31st December with 15 enteries. The content was really boring too - just pages of ' I am so lonely'/ ''Oh my goodness I am 35 this year!' does not make for interesting reading!! So nothing really has changed this year but I am sure I shall be able to write something positive and productive for 33 lines each page. Having bought my diary, I did a guilty walk through Monsoon, their clothes are lovely.
Then, back to reality I took the train to South Kensington to St Pauls, Onslow Square. I have volunteered to help at the homeless shelter that is set up every Wednesday evening. It is part of West London Churches Homeless Concern. I go once a month and serve the homeless food for the evening. If I get there early, like today, I help with setting the tables - cultery, water and buttering the bread, taking out hot drinks to the guys outside. We have a choice of serving food, washing up or hosting a table. For the past three occasions that I have done this, I have hosted a table and I did this today. It is quite an experience. We have a three course meal, soup for starter, lamb and coucous for main meal and fruit crumble and custard for pudding. The food is actually quite nice. The guests are also pleasant too and very chatty. My table today was relatively quiet, Philip, Adam, May and Hannah (names changed) All with different tales to tell about life and the immediate day. Hannah told me she had been painting part of the day and told me a little bit about her family. May was an Afrikaaner, living in London for the past 14 months. She said she was not feeling well and therefore I launched into taking a medical history and rightly guessed her medical condition but she said her was stable. Adam was a fellow Nigerian and therefore we had a lively discussion on child-rearing in the UK versus Nigeria and the wonders of Nigerian food. Philip, was silent and thoughtful, seated at the head of the table, watching and listening to everything. Occasionally walking over to the side of the Church to check on his friend Stuart who was not feeling so good this evening. The funniest thing at the end of the meal, was Hannah pointing out a piece of vegetable on the table. "That's a tooth!". I told her it was not a tooth. She then told me, that she had been laughing all evening at me because she thought it was my tooth on the table. Clearly she had not taken taken note of my full 'toothful' smile! I had a few chats with a few of the other people volunteering. The lawyer with the human rights interest, currently working as an estate agent, with a girlfriend who works as a nurse at Great Ormond Street Hospital. Learnt about the exorbutant rents for two bedrooms flats in Chelsea. Then there was John, this young thing, full of energy and clearly a passion for Christ and spreading the gospel and somehow reminded me of Tigger, bouncing around and just unstoppable! I am pretty certain we shall be seeing more of him at HTB. I think he was the one that Pete Grieg was praying over at the Kingdom Come 'thing' last month. And the evening came to an end at 10.00pm we finished with a prayer and were allowed to go home. I never really know quite what to make of these evenings. I guess if I thought too deeply about it, I might not come to conclusions that would be particularly comfortable to hear/bear. I have yet to speak to another Christian or another person about. I have one more evening to go, sometime in March. I did not think, when I first signed up in September that I would be able to sustain volunteering every week. I am not sure what I will do after March. We shall see. I may well go back to the hospital visiting but we shall see.
And so now I am tucked up in my bed, thinking about tomorrow. Clinic in the morning and meeting in the afternoon. I will need to do some preparation and therefore will need to get up a little earlier than normal. I do not like getting up in the dark! Walking to the station, when the street light are on, is not much fun. However it is all good, all good. I have not had much chance to listen to the news today, however all the headlines I have heard and seen have been the usual catalogue of bad news, doom and gloom! Perhaps I ought to counter balance my record of news in 2012 with the good news reports that I saw on Twitter one day, related to CS Lewis. Anyway, enough already.
O di aaro!
No comments:
Post a Comment