Strange and Beautiful

Goodness has life been strange and unexpected recently. It has included police, bashed in doors, running up and down a street 3 times, idols, wheat, ore, and lots of good chats. Let me explain. These things are not all related. There are a few stories to be told, so let me tel them. First of all, the police and bashed in doors. It all started 3 nights ago. Around 11.30, I heard faint, but still definitely audible screaming. The screaming went on for about 2 hours, and then stopped. I don't know what I thought, but I was not too alarmed. The next night, same thing. It sounded like a baby - shrieks about the length of the noise a firework makes before it explodes - the "heeeeeeeeeeeeeee" kind of high pitched noise as it goes into the sky. These shrieks were pretty constant, they would stop a couple of minutes and then start again for about 10 minutes, and so on for a good couple of hours. Yesterday morning, Jenn and I mentioned that we had both heard this. And last night, it happened again. This morning, Jenn mentioned she could still hear it when she woke up. So this evening, she called the police and told them what we had been hearing, and they said they would send someone round. In the meantime, Jenn left for the weekend, and I went out for a meeting at church. When I got back however, there was a police van parked outside our flat, and as I entered the building, I could see that the door to the flat directly above ours (where we think the noise was coming from) had been smashed in, and the lights were on. So the police had gone up and had reason to smash the door in. I later found out that they were waiting for someone to come and board the door up as this person showed up about an hour after I got home. I know no more than that. But the flat is now silent. No baby screaming, and the flat above us empty and boarded up. Slightly eerie to think about when one is alone in the flat. Running up and down a street three times has to do with a small adventure I went on to attend an interview on Wednesday morning. It was FAR away, and I had a map of the area surrounding the school and the bus stop. I started walking, but it didn't seem right, the road name wasn't exactly the same as the one I'd looked up that morning, and so I thought that I was going the wrong way. So I turned around, and started walking up the street. I got to the top, and the road name completely changed to something I had never heard of. So I turned back. My interview time was fast approaching. As I started walking back, I got out the letter specifying all the interview details, only to find out I had entered the wrong address into the search and the road I had been on first was actually correct, and I had been going the right way even though it hadn't seemed right. So I ran all the way down it, found the school and entered the building about a minute before my interview was scheduled. The interview went well, but there are a lot of applicants, and I mean a lot, all as over qualified for the job as I am. So we'll see. Idols. This is a subject that has been on my mind a lot lately. Since last week to a degree, and exponentially so since Sunday evening, when Daniel Moore, a missionary to Papua New Guinea, spoke on this subject. And since then, I have been thinking about a lot of things in my life that I hold close to me, that I sometimes seek to find security in, that I also think about more than I do about God, that I find myself praying about more than I spend the time I have in prayer just worshiping God for who He is and what He has done, that I fret and worry about, that I want to take into my own hands and hate to leave in God's hands. If I say I love God more than anything, this needs to show in how I spend my time, how I pray, how I use my money, and whether it truly honestly is God I'm trying to please, or myself. Is there something in my life more important than God? Or am I acting as though there is? I hope not, but I'm not so sure, and so I'm trying to get God back at the center of everything - my thought life, my prayer life (how strange that he isn't always the center of my prayers, huh!), my money, my time... and I need to be able to give something up if he asks me to, and I'm finding that concept difficult just now. Wheat and Ore refer to a really good fun weekend I had this past weekend. On Friday night, Derek and I cooked for a few people (actually, with the amount we cooked, we could have fed a small country) and a few friends came round and we ate together and played Apples to Apples and Cluedo, and generally had a good, fun time. On Saturday, Derek and I went to our friend Alan's, and we played Catan (which involves wheat and ore) with him, Dave, Cath and Matthew. Again, we had a lot of fun, playing and singing and chatting. We also played Twister, which was a lot more fun than I had expected (I had only ever played with 7-year-olds before this, and it is quite different when it is fast paced and other people are balancing on one of their feet and another person.) Good chats. Wow... where to begin. There have been many. Discussing, life, God, the Bible, politics (ok, not my favorite, but interesting in times like these) and what on earth is making that noise upstairs must be one of my favorite pastimes.