Updates and Thankfulness

Hello Friends!

One year on...better late than never. Apologies if you've been waiting on tenterhooks (who am I kidding?), I guess I've just had a lot of change going on, and it's taken me a bit of time to get my head around it enough to write something.

Quick update - I'm currently residing up North, in the beautiful landscape that is God's county (aka Yorkshire). It's hilly. And a wee bit colder than down South. I live in a big city now, which is very different to anywhere I've ever lived before, and has taken a fair bit of getting used to. It's industrial, and diverse, which is wonderful, but also unfamiliar, which is absolutely terrifying for someone who doesn't really like change too much.

How did this come about? Well, that's a story in itself.

I was offered a year long internship at a charity which enables the local church to reach children who are struggling in their education. There are 370,000 children and young people excluded from school every year in the UK. 37,000 of these are from primary schools - they're not even 11 years old. I think this is crazy. These young people (often coming from such difficult backgrounds) struggle to understand & control their behaviour, preventing them from learning. This means that they won't develop the skills and qualifications needed to do well in their future; two thirds of the prison population were excluded from school, and one in six excluded young people will die before they reach 25 years old. I think that it is definitely not okay that these young people (each an individual, with talents and potential) are written off and forgotten. This is why I've come to work for a charity that wants to bring an end to this.

Honestly, it all happened quite quickly; but I never doubted that God was taking me where I was meant to be. It's been a massive learning curve. Students - don't you dare try and tell me that you're week is full until you've had a full-time job (unless perhaps you study law, or medicine, or nursing etc.). I have realised how hard I find meeting new people, and how difficult it is to build relationships when you're just out of uni, in a new community. There have definitely been points of loneliness. On the flip side, I have had so many prejudices challenged that I didn't even know I held - about people, about the church. It's been exhausting and illuminating at the same time.

One of the biggest things I've learned is thankfulness. God is so, so good. It blows my mind. He has a plan that is bigger than me, encompassing all of time and creation. Yet within that, He chooses to be in relationship with little me. I can take so much comfort knowing that he is totally in control and totally steadfast, even when everything around me seems crazy. I can hand my cares over to Him, and He will listen, and carry them so that I don't have to. I can bring before Him the young people we work with or the brokenness in this world, and believe that He will act; that He always has it, and is over the big and the small.

Once again, I have no idea where I am going next. I am beginning to get the familiar panic feeling again. But I know that I can give it to Him, and that will be the end of it. God's got it - even if that doesn't look the way I want or expect it to.

And for that, I am so very thankful.