Bacon Sanwiches and Salvation

The lack of posts over easter does not reflect a lack of activity in the Posse House, in fact, it reflects a load of activity and hence a lack of opportunity to post. Easter was massively busy and massively awesome. I went through a crazy sleep pattern, not sleeping Thursday nite so that I could drive Heth to the airport at 3am (closer to 4am by the time she was actually ready to go!) and then snatching an hours nap before the Good Friday breakfast and Easter March in Risboro. Friday I slept and then Saturday was the Easter Prayer nite so I stayed up all nite praying and mucking about with a bunch of the youth from church (In order for much of the prayer nite to happen I had to fit myself, Guybo, twelve cushions, a guitar, an amp, two duvets, three boxes of art pens, two a3 pads of paper, one board game, two bags of clothes, a djambe (drum), a PA system and a data projector into the smallest Ford KA ever invented. I took a photo but it really doesn't do the magnificence of the feat justice). We then headed to the Easter Sunday service on little or no sleep (I think everyone except for Emma and myself got a little bit of sleep) and the service was really good as well. This is very possibly due to the fact that I was so tired I'd hit the hyper phase and so was being a clown, as were most of the others now that I think of it. Emma and I went up the front for one of the kids activities (two reasons for this: we had had the least sleep -namely none- and were therefore the most hyper, and to bag the free chocolate) and Guybo made me the funniest Easter card ever, it consisted of two pictures- one of him holding up the "vicar" to get the chocolate and the other with the subtitle "From the overflow of the heart, the mouth speaks" (something Geoff had been talking about in the sermon) and a picture of us going crazy screaming GIVE ME CAFFIENE! We finished the service by adding to our carbon footprints and releasing some helium baloons with our names written on them, meant to symbolise something I can't remember, and then Guy and I spent an extremely hyper half hour mostly reciting lines from Cromwell a movie we have both seen multiple times (and will probably see a few more with our present work) before we headed to radnage for a BBQ with some aussie friends. Sunday nite I slept from 7pm til 10am, woke up briefly at 1am and for some reason I remember feeling better then than when I woke up in the morning. Monday I had two BBQ's, one as a late lunch in Oxford, the next more unexpected as Binnie and I had been invited to the Tippings for dinner and the girls had decided to reverse the gender roles on us and were burning the heck out of some snags and kebabs (actually they did a great job, but don't tell them that!) and we headed up Chinnor hill to chill out, which we did, both figuratively and literally until 5am when we realised Sammie had to be at work in 4hours and perhaps we should head home.
Tuesday, on not a lot of sleep, Binnie and myself drove down to Minehead for Spring Harvest. I think we had both built up unrealistic expectations in our heads (talk of staying in chalets ten mins from the beach and that kind of thing had me dreaming of an Aussie beach with large chalets just up the hill. Minehead, it turns out, is more along the lines of brown dirt beach (which to be fair is good quality in England) and rows of dorms in a tacky version of an English caravan park. Don't hear me complaining, it was actually alright and I was massively thankful for the invite, it was just not Oz. So instead Binnie and I spent the week planning a trip to Oz for about a year and a halfs time, dreaming of Augusta and Beach Mission and Kings Park and Hillary's and the beach... And we made use of the sunshine and beach whilst it was there, I won't make extravagant claims about tans or anything but I'm not feeling quite so pale as I have been the last few months! The definite highlight of the week was seeing Adrian Plass speak, he was brilliant, so good in fact that I bought his book Bacon Sandwiches and Salvation which is bringing me much entertainment. He works his way through the alphabet defining certain terms and nouns in amusing and occasionally deep ways throwing in a few stories and bits of value along the way. My favourites so far are Bless You: Clear Off and Unity: the bond that automatically joins together all those who love Jesus, definitely not an informal agreement that we all hate the Baptists. We concluded in the end that Spring Harvest was catering for old people and therefore there were snippets that we would enjoy and a lot that we wouldn't. We therefore made the best use of our time by attending things of interest - I got my text read out twice by Steve Chalke in one question/debate/talky session, never figured out why he read it the second time but I was still well proud - and spending the rest of the time chilling on the beach or practicing our left handed throws with the vortex, getting quite decent now. Friday I spent about 8hours driving. My sense of direction utterly deserted me, possibly due to fatigue, and we managed to miss the turn onto the M4, the A40 and the Gloucester slip road! So we ended up 5miles past Cheltenham and had to backtrack and cut down to the A40, where we got stuck in the most irritating traffic jam ever. Later I drove with Sammie to pick Heth up from Gatwick, adding an hour to the journey as I managed to miss the M25 both on the way there and the way back and then we nearly ran out of fuel and had to jump off the motorway at Wycome and proceeded to head towards Beaconsfield, which turns out to be the opposite direction to home, corrected this and arrived home at 2.30am as opposed to the planned 1am. Spent today bumming around and doing some work on the side.
Follow the Captain Justice link in my blog roll for Guys rather entertaining account of the Easter Prayer Nite.