hand on heart

i think my post last week was a bit odd

i've made the decision to leave it there, but i think it was a bit odd...

i did not mean to imply that i no longer need god.....that's just crazy talk.....

but i think that what i meant, refers to the dynamics of that need, the impulses and responses that heighten and isolate that need.......these have changed.....i do not right now feel as i felt before, and the ongoing flaw in my theology, is that it hinges in this bizarre and incalculable notion of feeling....

a wise man said to me last summer, that he believed that my (then) sadness and fear were being compounded by the problem of my having experienced a very 'personal' salvation', as aforementioned, however many years previously...

by this (and he may be reading, so he can correct me if i'm wrong...!) he meant that my version of jesus is based on who is is to me, not on who he is just because...who he is as the firstborn in all the world, the one who chooses to let us keep on living on our spinning axis everyday, the one who fails to falter...who cannot change.....that one.....

he eludes me...

if i'm crying, weak, lost, hurting, fearful, confused, aimless, feckless, loveless....he is there, as vivid and as real to me as i could possibly ask of him.......

yet it seems i cannot let him just be...

which is rude, really, because he lets me be!!

anyway. seriousness over, back to silliness in the episodes to come...!

many loves....x

theological conundrum...

so, i've never been too hot on theological matters...

i pretty much figure - love the lord, be nice to people, explore your surroundings, use your talents, give what you have, and love bravely....

what more is there, really...?!

thing is, if theology is one's view of god, or the unmovables about god, or the cumulative ideas of 2008(?!) years of deciphering the word, or all of the above, then at the end of it all its still just about your relationship with god, right...?

so, my theology - my relationship with god....

thing is, that for me has foundations that were built on total despair being met with huge expectation and shocking hope......i had an actual conversion, one pin-point moment, where i chose to live......and then the hard work started.........and that hard work was god's work, convincing me, one relentless fear after another that only he could cross them off, rub them out.....replacing abject fear with unbelievable truth....i cried every day for about the first year, fretted everyday for about the following four years.....and since then, have moved from mildly unsettled, back to hideously fearful, and then to, well, then i moved into falling in love....

and now i find myself, quite literally, happier than i have ever been.....and well, my condundrum is this:

how does one, at the ripe old age of 27, begin to imagine a god who wants to be involved in the flirting and the planning and the missing and the misunderstandings and the giddy grinning of a fledgling romance....?

the answer, i know, is that he instigated such love, he instigated this love, and that all love comes from and is sustained and enhanced by him....

this much i believe......but in practise it is proving rather difficult...not because the man in question is not a friend of the lord, but because of my second question....

where, in a relationship with jesus that is built out of a desperate, overwhelming need in me, for him, do i find a dynamic that moves me to need and rely on him, when i do not feel that same sense of lack? of course i do lack: i lack love and kindness and patience and all the other things that we all lack, but, i don't know......i have not wept for my want of god in quite some time, and truth be told, that's how i know him.....its why i know him.....its how we relate.....or was....and now? 

now, i wake up happy...i sleep better than a baby.....i do not grimace when i look at my own body....i have tiny seed-like hopes for a life in the future....i grin alot...!! there is a man who makes me laugh everyday, loves me selflessly everyday.....

once more pals, answers on a postcard....

good evening pals....

and hello from the sunny west country!

so, my new town is as fun and funner than i hoped it would be......there is a cider bar on a boat, a lovely cathedral with a seat in it dedicated to my great-grandparents, a very cute old-town section of the city centre which i had never seen before i arrived, and a general feeling of a city full of all-age working-holidaymakers! i'm not sure if its the amount of water in the city or just the slightly higher average temperature than life in the north, but it really does feel like living in a holiday town......on my first weekend here i went roaming round town on the saturday, and got pleasantly lost.....weirdly feeling very at home and not at all daunted.....and i have continued to feel that way.......the early evening i a particularly nice time to be out on the little high street that is the centre of my neighbourhood....its like a whalley-range, hulme kind of high street with one of everything and lots of people out and about, alot of whom are from alot of different countries and seem to add their own ingredients to the general feel of ease and slow-walking.....no-one seems to be in a hurry here.......haven't found my coffee place yet, but that's ok, these things sometimes take time.....the cider boat is enough to be going on with for now! i love it.....and me and roz went out for tea one night and wound up in a place that looked, felt and tasted like it should have been on the sea-front in barcelona, which cannily enough is where we were the last time we had dinner together!

as for the job, well......can you imagine a happier anna than one who gets to study maps of iraq, learn about the kurdish people, study unhcr statistics and send letters to the home office and various embassies all in one morning's work?! i imagine not......last week i was mainly learning about what happens to people who find themselves in the Uk as victims of human trafficking, and what if anything can be done to assist them once they escape their captors...turns out that by law we can't do all that much, which makes me hopping mad to say the least...victims of trafficking do not automatically qualify for refugee status or other forms of national protection, since they still have to prove a well-founded fear of persecution on their return home, to gain such a status......i would say that having been sold by your own family would be grounds for a pretty huge amount of fear, but actually its fear of having nothing to go back to, much more often than it is fear of persecution...........anyway i have a job now which allows me to help see the system circumvented, one case at a time, seeing the rules navigated round and the rule makers confounded by how flimsy their own rationales are shown in public to be......i love it.......and they all drink real coffee....i have never seen such a frequently-used cafetiere...this makes me happy....

as for the man, well, i can honestly say that i am embarrassingly in love...lately its all got much, much worse, as i think we are both starting to allow ourselves to dream a future together into being and its pretty darn fun i can tell you.....

....my new housemates are still getting to know each-other, one only having been born of the other two weeks ago....they are doing well, especially when one isn't howling and the other has got some sleep.....

come visit me....! as my friend joe said to me when we met for a pint or two last week, 'it's a hip-happy-town, you're gonna love it!'