Duke Special on Jools Holland - No Cover Up

you know youre getting old when...

1. People who come to your Christmas soiree (and who are younger than you) bring their kids

2. You've been out of school (and yes its a pretty awful website) so long that the 'class of 96' has their 10 year reunion.

After almost getting the wrong night (another sign of getting old - or just not reading things properly), I rolled up to White's Tavern last night intrigued as to what would ensue. To be honest I had feared it may be just a chance for people to let everyone know how successful they were, or that after the 'so where are you living now?' and 'what are you up to?' questions were exhausted it would descend into an awkward silence. I'm glad to say it was a good night - some people i hadn't seen for 10 years, others I had. Its strange that most people outwardly didn't seem to have changed that much (well, most of the guys have acquired a bit of later twenties spread) and some of those relationships were pretty easy to pick up again. Be interesting to know how much people really have changed. I know as I look back my time at uni was very significant and shaped a lot of who I am now. The shy geeky Samuel with the sideshade of 1M has become the slightly more opinionated (and still geeky) Sam who thankfully has lost the sideshade! I guess my last 10 years have been shaped by realising that if I believed God was real then I needed to take him seriously. That has meant launching into the journey of following Jesus and trying to figure out what it looks like to follow him. That's taken in rebellion against the nice easy answer tickbox Christianity I grew up with, trips to Africa and South America have pushed me deeper into understanding how God and justice fit together, its taken me through some tough times of various sorts of broken relationships, and the more recent strand of trying to understand better who God has made me to be so I can figure out how best I can be part of what He is doing. Looking back the last 10 years have been pretty exciting, God has been doing a lot of work on me, bring on the next 10!

Road rage in the Christmas traffic

Sitting in traffic and driving in general can do strange things to us. It can turn the most mild mannered person into a raging psycho. I moved house recently and am spending more time in traffic. I can lack a little patience at times, so sometimes it can be interesting. Today, driving along the inside lane (which at certain times of the day is a bus lane), I started indicating to pull out to avoid a few parked cars. All of a sudden the car on the outside sped up - definately not letting me out. I casually glanced round to see the woman in the passenger seat angrily gesticulating at me. Maybe she didn't quite get the bus lane is only in operation 8-9.30 and so figured since i was transgressing, no way was her hubbie going to let me out. It had a strange effect on me, overcoming the temptation to gesticulate back, it made me all the more determined to let people out as i drove along. Driving along can be a time when I am so absorbed in my journey and me getting there that i forget about others. Letting people out in front of me is a tiny way i try to teach myself and remind myself to be generous, to show grace to others. Today the example of ungrace or a lack of generosity drove me (sorry - unintentionally bad pun) to be generous in how i treated others on the road. Living generously doesn't come easy - to me anyway - so its something i need to teach my self to do. I guess today was a start - just the rest of my life to go now...