Receive our adoration

Today's post is going to be a short one. I know it's been a while since I've blogged but I've sort of been busy and doing lots of things so haven't had a huge amount of time.

Today I woke up and once I got down to work I started feeling a little tired and just not in the mood to do anything. Maybe it's having lots of work and repetitive weeks of work. Anyway I put some music on while I worked snuggled under my duvet (because it's still cold and miserable outside).

I was listening to 'Adoration' by Brenton Brown and he did a little speech before it (if you watch his videos on Youtube you'll notice he tends to do this :P) and what he said suddenly seemed to speak to me and so I wrote it in my 'quote doc' (quotes I print off for when I need inspiration).

“My encouragement if you’re waiting in line for God is – don’t change lines. Don’t look for another way to receive what you need – God promises to be everything we need and He’s faithful to his promises. We bow our hearts, we lift our hands, we turn our eyes to you again and we surrender to the truth: that all we need is found in You.”

Here is the link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJ4E1bITkSs

This song is a wonderful song and it was exactly what I needed to hear today. Waiting in line for God - don't change lines. What he said seemed to relate to life and although there are lots of things to make me want to change lines, change my beliefs and stop 'waiting' for God, the times when I do change lines, my life is even more empty than before.

Here are the lyrics:
We bow our hearts we lift our hands
we turn our eyes to you againAnd we surrender to the truththat all we need is found in YouReceive our adorationJesus lamb of GodReceive our adorationhow wonderful you areWe choose to leave it all behindand turn our eyes towards the prizethe upward call of God in Christyou have our hearts Lord take our livesReceive our adoration Jesus lamb of GodReceive our adoration how wonderful you areEvery soul you´ve saved sings outeverything you´ve made resoundsall creation´s standing nowlifting up your nameWe´re we´re joining in the angel´s songwe´re gathered to your ancient thronechildren in our Father´s armsshouting out your praise

Snow happened...!

Ok, so normally decent snow is rare in the UK (well it's never been more than 3-4inches in my experience for the 10 or so years I've lived here). Last Christmas, January, February and March we in Southampton got no snow whatsoever, except for one pathetic attempt sometime in January where a few flakes graced us with their presence and laced the trees and ground. The result, it looked like someone had sprinkled a small amount of icing sugar from a giant sieve in the clouds.

In December 2010 I seem to remember that there was a lot of snow all over the UK and France (although I was actually in Nice for the most part, where we had none whatsoever, not even snowflakes). When I went to Manchester for two weeks over Christmas to stay with the family, there was a large amount of snow. We succeeded, in the week after New Years, to actually walk on a frozen canal in the countryside which we all found greatly amusing. My mother proceeded to inform us that this was the kind of thing that 'never happened in England anymore' and the last time she remembered it happening was 'the great freeze-up of 1960-something' when she was five years old and somehow they all ended up driving a Jeep onto a lake in Norfolk without the ice cracking and they got kicks out of pushing each other around the lake on kitchen chairs.*

Anyways, upon my return to Nice in January 2011 there was no snow on the ground. However, we travelled up to Chamonix in February for two and a half weeks where we stayed in an Alpine mountain village next to a ski station called 'Le Grand Bornand'. There, I well and truly experienced snow, for the first time in my life. When it started snowing there, it never seemed to stop. I remember going for a walk one afternoon in the sun, getting half-way up the mountain when it started to snow heavily, blundering in an unknown direction for half an hour (praying that I was on my way down the mountain, rather than off it) and then ending up in a forest when it stopped snowing, somewhere beyond the log cabin we were staying in, WAIST deep in snow. It was a very spectacular moment! That was certainly snow like I'd never experienced!

Anyways, on Friday this week, I woke up to an 'It-snowed-in-Manchester' phone call from my father at 7:30am. I sleepily and irritably denied any possible claims that Southampton had been snowed in, but as I hung up a seed of doubt was planted within me. I hadn't even looked out of the window by this point but getting out from under the duvet is a task in itself at that hour of the day (especially in a chilly student house, ha, ha).

When I did get out of bed, guess what I saw? Yep. I looked out through the curtains to our (ahem) lovely back garden and the whole place was actually covered with about three inches of snow. And it was continuing to fall. I was supposed to be going for a run in the Common that morning with one of my housemates, but needless to say we postponed it. We did, however, go to the Common!

There was some Narnia-esque scenery awaiting us at the Common.

We got back at midday, because I did actually have an exam scheduled for 2:30pm. However, in the true spirit of the UK ethos, it was cancelled due to the adverse weather conditions. The ground was pretty icy and made driving/walking anywhere difficult, why was why they cancelled it I suppose. BUT...they rescheduled the exam. For the FOLLOWING SATURDAY.

Which means I am going to be stuck in the house for one week longer than necessary, intermittently revising and procrastinating.

But I think the silver lining is that we got some beautiful, powdery snow, deep enough to make a snowman with. We've named him Mr Gordon and he is in the below photograph.

It won't be long til I get the hang of blogging. I intend to start 2013 on the right foot: as I've always been a journal-keeping type of girl it seems like it might be worth taking writing and recording to the next level this year.
Unfortunately I spend a lot of time procrastinating in life so one of the main reasons for starting this project is to disengage me from newlook.co.uk, fastpasstv and social networking. Well, I suppose I will never fully disengage from social networking.
I want to start a blog now so that by the time it gets to the end of the summer I'll understand enough about how it works that I'll be able to (successfully) record my next great adventure abroad, which will commence in September 2013. I tried and failed to keep a blog a couple of years ago when I went to live in France.
Here are five reasons for procrastination.

1) Work is mentally exhausting.

2) The Internet, which is a vast unending source of information which is always accessible and is required to actually do work these days. Nobody starts their essays with open books, a roll of parchment a quill and ink pot anymore, like they do in Harry Potter (which I understand is fictional). My main problem with the Internet is that you can get lost in a sea of your own (limitless) search engine thoughts.

3) Need for sustenance and caffeine.

4) Social life: sometimes, I think people go to the library just to see other human beings, even if they don't 'officially' talk to them.

5) Doing things you feel you 'never have time for' because you've so much work, such as reading a novel, tidying up, taking a shower, starting a novel. Because once you've finished an essay and finally got down to writing that novel, there's more work around the corner!

Well I've had a very productive evening so far. I am (usually) devoted to studying and work hard at translations, transcriptions and whatever other thing is required to pass language and linguistic classes BUT ALAS...sometimes I find myself procrastinating. Doing meaningless things such as visiting the New Look website for the tenth time in a week. I've always enjoying writing for pleasure, so perhaps this will be a money-saving and more enriching way to waste my time.

WHO. KNOWS.