Wow sorry for no update for ages; I have had quite a manic week. I’ve been writing some of my dissertation (now up to 6000 words or so), a sermon for the preaching class that I go to, and also been trying to see everyone before they go down for Christmas.

On Tuesday evening, there was the CICCU carol service. I went to the 10pm one by Jonathon Fletcher. It was quite good, although he is very Cambridge and quite academic so it was more logical arguments than passionate proclamation, which is the style that connects with me the best. Spent the rest of the evening chatting to friends until quite late.

Wednesday I got up late and so missed all of my lectures. I lead the Bible study at CU which seemed to go ok. Sarah, one of the reps, was having her joint birthday party afterwards, so I went there for a bit and saw Tabs and Zish. I then went round to Emmanuel to see Ed, Nat, Ruth, Dave etc and we saw Charlie and the Chocolate factory. It was quite a good film although very strange and creepy in places!

Thursday evening I went out to Pizza Express with about 30 people from Emma to celebrate Natalie’s 21st (even though it’s not until next weds). It was, as expected, really good food and nice to meet lots of other people from Emmanuel. Went back to her floor afterwards and had quite a good party going on until about 2am.

On Friday, Ben arrived from America to see some of us. He was the leader of our China team in the summer. We had a recruitment drive in the afternoon which was quite sparsly attended although the people who came seemed very keen. I then went off to have a supervision, which went quite well, and then in the evening, Mary, Lauren, Anna C, Widge, Ben and myself had a chinese at mine. Joel came round a bit later and we sat around until about 12:30 chatting about things. I then remembered that I had to write my sermon to give at preaching class in the morning, so I was up until about 2am on that. I then went to bed and got up at around 7 to finish it off and print it out etc. It seemed quite successful and I learnt a lot. Scarily enough, I have to do one at St Nix on the evening of Jan 8th about my experiences in China. Should be fun anyway.

After that, I came back and some of us went out to have a full English breakfast with Ben and Andrew (who’d just flown in from Vancover and is headed back to HK on Monday) at Tatties. We talked about the future of the China programme and then came back to mine. Everyone left about half one and I slept for a few hours and then did some more work on my dissertation.