Furniture demolition, cups of tea, and being church...

I spent a couple of hours yesterday morning joining a mate as he helped clean out a flat lived in by one of his distant elderly relatives. The old lady in question is suffering from dementia and had been moved out of this top-floor flat in west London to live with family up in Scotland.

As we attacked old beds with saws to make them fit down the stairs, lugged 60's design chairs down four flights, and then shifted it all into a minibus, we realised the reality is we were stripping an apartment of a lifetime's worth of collected possessions. Old hoovers and chairs and pans off to the dump, pictures and books and crockery to the charity shop; it was a pretty sad moment really.

I would hardly have said there was much there that was in anyway unnecessary - it didn't make me suddenly want to streamline my material existence (although, that wouldn't be a bad thing for me to do!). But it did ram home the realisation that at the end of the day all these bits will be left behind. Whether it's being mowed down by a bus in my mid-twenties, signing out at seventy-five, or just being carted out of my home to somewhere, where for a few years, they'll sit me in front of a TV for most of the day and feed me my meals; we will leave this stuff behind us.

Yet it wasn't just furniture being left behind. As we chatted over cups of tea made in very retro china cups there were stories. Stories of a battleaxe of a Christian lady. Stories of the many gatherings in the flat as she opened up her home in loving hospitality. Stories of a woman who loves playing her part in God's body. And as the day went on two things happened: the flat got barer and barer, but also more and more people turned up to help out. Again and again, "Hi I'm a friend from her church" was the opening line. No sermons, no singing, but definitely church in action.

Word Up in the Peak District...

A great time was had this last weekend up at Ravenstor Youth Hostel, on the outskirts of Derbyshire, enjoying a weekend with forty or so students from across the country. The Peak District is beautiful - almost felt like I was in Pride & Prejudice. Bleak horizons with sparse trees standing dark against low-sun winter sunsets. No lakes to clamber out of dripping wet though.

Some more highlights:

- Seeing old faces from camp this last summer, and how grace has been poured out!
- Quality gameage, both old and new... a personal return for the sofa-game, for the first time since SA. Mafia with 25 people was intense, and the animal games never fails to bring everyone to hysterics... "I'm a dog!"
- Brilliant food, including roast chicken and Christmas pud for lunch today
- Being able to osmosize whilst listening to older wiser Christians converse.
- Getting to know some Durham faces a lot better.

On top of all that...
Bible Teaching on the 10 Commandments, and Faith, Hope, & Love were immense.
How the law brings us to our knees - standard and standard not reached, so to have a Law-Keeper! What an amazing thing! So we press on with faith and hope and love - all key as we live for Him.
Also challenged greatly on integrity and encouraged by assurance! Enthused by the gospel as I face tomorrow!

Looking forward to marriage and the present reality of love...

Yesterday 10GS hosted a surprise Engagement Celebration for my housemate Jenny and her fiancee Simon (I can never remember which term has the accented 'e') - it was wonderful to see a number of our good friends in Durham joining with them as we celebrated their forthcoming marriage (1st Sep?).

There's great pressure in student Christian culture to idolise relationships, and I think this arises particularly out of the want to be loved. But human affection isn't bound to the sexually attracted, for the church is a place of costly, sacrificial love, as Jason Clarke explained from John 15.9-17 at BEC on Sunday.

There is a incredible diversity, yet there is a common acknowledgement of sin, and a common acknowledgement of extravagent forgiveness. The one redmedy for failed human love is to know you are loved, and that is Jesus' is claim: 'As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you' (15.9). We can know we are loved, as Paul says in Romans 5.8, not in the words of novel, but in the sacrifice of history. It was whilst we were still sinners - it was then - that Christ died for us!

And this, only this, is the true motivation to love others, 'this is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you' (15.12). It is our duty and our joy to love, in obedience to the one who first loved us. Real love is to real people, and is really hard! But it's not to be without heart, for it completes our joy (15.11) and it bears fruit, attracting others the love of God.

It is hard, but it is best. It is a command, but it is a response.

God is Love

...God's love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us. [Romans 5.5.]

"With a perversity as pathetic as it is impoverishing, we have become preoccupied today with the extraordinary, sporadic, non-universal ministries of the Spirit to the neglect of the ordinary, general ones."

Just been reading Packer's thoughts on The Love of God - it is the Spirit's ordinary work to give peace, joy, hope, and love, through the 'shedding abroad in our hearts of knowledge of the love of God'. It is Paul's prayer of Ephesians 3.14, it is John's statement of 1 John 4.7.

His love finds expression in everything he says and does, and we have assurance of this in the cross of Christ (Gal 2.20), so we can trust the promise of Romans 8.28 - everything that happens to us expresses God's love to us! That is it tells us that God is love; all that happens can be used as evidence that God is love, and love is how God defines it.

I grumble and moan at my circumstances, I become distrustful, I grow half-hearted in service of Him, I split my loyalties until their no longer loyalties. God's love is ultimate. And since God loved me I ought to love others.