Running Busy

This last couple of weeks has been some ride!

Last week was totally focussed on getting together my fieldwork submission, which if it is up to standard will render me 'safe to practice' and qualify me as a youth and community worker. Followed by my Brothers wedding, a wonderfully low key 'do it yourself' affair in Swansea.


This week I'm working on my Spirituality and Worship essay, it's feeling good at the moment and coming together but lots of work to be done. I'm enjoying one for the first time in a while though.


Next week I have a chance to breath, and seek God. The week after that I'm heading for Snowdon with a friend for four days in the mountains. I'm looking forward to there being plenty of air to breath on Crib Goch.

A dispersed or centred God

I was talking with a tutor from college about general faith things, universalism, seeing God everywhere, theology.

I realise that I have a dispersed image of God. I see God in all that is around me, environment and people, and I meet God here and in myself. I see God as dispersed throughout the universe. I struggle at the moment to understand and grasp a centred God, one who is met in a specific time and place.

Is God a dispersed God, a centred God, or both?

The Methodist Church

Having become more and more dissillusioned with organised churches, either of the traditional or the 'emergent' variety, I was somewhat suprised to find myself thinking positively about one!

The Methodist Church's website offers hope for the way this particular branch of organsised Christianity is developing. I like their aims to:

• to increase awareness of God's presence and to celebrate God's love
• to help people to grow and learn as Christians through mutual support and care
• to be a good neighbour to people in need and to challenge injustice
• to make more followers of Jesus Christ

Sadly I don't see much of this at congregational level amoungst the churches I work with yet but let's give it time. For now I like the Methodist Church's down to earthness and sense of mission in the community. I stumbled into working for them, but I'm beginning to think that it was a good move for me theologically aswell.

6 Year Olds

The presence of the two 6 year old girls really wasn't helpful at the time. They'd dropped in to the church as they'd finished after school club and didn't want to go home.

We spent some time with them, then said they really needed to go home now, as it was late, and we were there for a detached youth work planning meeting and reconnaisance session. They didn't want to go home and took lots of persuasion. I got steadily more and more frustrated.

"I don't do six year olds! eight year olds I can just about handle but that's as young as it gets! We're trying to get a job done! We're running late! We have things to do! We're here for young people tonight not children!

Eventually they left. Only to be knocking on the door again ten minutes later. Grrrr we say. We try to ignore them. We go into another room so they can't see we're here. They're are so persistant, they're doing our heads in. We need to concentrate. We have risk assessements to write, id to sort, recording forms to develope, walk about to do. They continue to persist.

We go to the door.

"Nikki, you've left your car lights on they say"

I humbly walk out, turn off my car lights and learn something from the six year old girls. It later transpires that one of them has nowhere to go having been locked out of the house at 8.30 on a cold wet night. I realise that maybe I am interested in the six year olds after all.