C3
First of all, it’s high time that I filled you in on what I get up to on Thursday evenings. At the English-speaking Church, we’ve started up something which is called C3 (Christ Church Café). This is similar to the International café I’m involved in with the Christian Union in Southampton. For those of you who have no idea what I’m talking about, or a vague idea, I’ll try and explain. It’s an event for International students, and every week there are different themes for the evenings. Students come and chill out, speak English, drink tea (or other beverages), eat cake and make friends. It’s normally a really nice atmosphere, with different nationalities and cultures coming together. And of course God’s backing goes a long way. The ‘themes’ I talk about are anything, from team challenges to ice cream, and from British culture to food from around the world… There are group trips out and about too. Making friends with people and providing a fun place to hang out, we pray for opportunities to share our faith and our lives with the people that come. At the Southampton CU International café there are optional Bible studies every week now, for which there is a good level of participation. It’s early days for C3, as it started in February, and we pray that there will be a good team to carry it on and give it a new level of publicity in September.
The ‘give something up’ challenge
In youth group at the English-speaking church, we’ve been given the challenge to give something up for a week. The point is to give up something which perhaps hinders us in our relationship with God and every time we thought of that thing to praise God instead, an activity off the back of a study on the 'rich young man' story in Matthew, where he asked about how he could get eternal life and was living in line with commandments but not able to give up his wealth/possessions. I suggested to the other two leaders when we were preparing that we give up something the week before we set the challenge to the kids, so as we could understand what it would be like and show an example to them. I chose to give up facebook* because I know I waste time on there. It was hard, but a good and useful exercise to give it up. By the end of the week it became easier and I began to think I could manage with a bit less of it more often. This week the challenge continues as we carry on with the kids, but I’m changing from facebook to attempting to give up criticism…not at all easy, and already broken, but I’m going to do my best and I know I’ll learn from it!
*For those of you who don’t know what that is, it’s a website where you can send messages to your friends and share photos and various other things.
The rest of the week in brief
I’ve had a pretty busy week; on Tuesday evening I went to a concert that Marie from the GBU was in. It was done by an orchestra composed of students from all three universities of Lille and was very enjoyable. I’ve started to make headway transcribing the interviews I did for my university project, but it takes a long time. My teaching went fairly well in both schools this week, for which I am grateful. I also prepared a Bible study in French with Marie which we’re going to do this week on Tuesday. The weekend was full up, going to a French-Polish church to support a youth meeting there which someone from the GBU was involved in, and afterwards spending time with Nathan and his family. It’s also been nice to catch up with some people on the telephone.
Bonne semaine à tous ! (Have a good week everyone!)
Fiona x
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