Highlights of the Week

For the most part, the past week has been relatively calm. We've settled into a sort of pattern of our life now - which is interesting to me because I thought I would never get used to living in this big of a city! Not to say that I am completely used to it, but having a day to day routine has certainly made it easier. Seth is continuing to work diligently on his novel and photographs, while I go about reading and reading and reading for school (and yes, and class!). Here are the highlights of the week:

Seth got to do a photo shoot with another guy from our church who runs his own photography business. The shoot focused on taking pictures of dancers in various positions. Although they probably won't be able to use any of Seth's footage for the actual photographs taken, they might create a stop motion film out of his pictures, which I think would be very cool! So it was great for him to have a little experience and some fun all at once with this shoot.

Another event of the week was we had our friend Anita over for dinner. She was the very nice mother of the woman (Ita) we worked for during our WWOOFing adventures. Anita is absolutely an interesting character - she has traveled all over the world and yet she will spend an entire evening listening to our troubles. She was so kind to take us in at our moment of need back before we had our apartment, and we hoped to repay her just a little bit. She we had her over, and it was a great time. Even though our apartment is small, she still praised us for having a washing machine. I hope she had as good of a time as we did.

In other news, we're still attending CCH (Community Church Harlesden) and it has officially become our church while we are in the UK. The main leader (not exactly a pastor, more of the main administrator), Dave, sat down with us to tell all about how the church works, since it is a little unorthodox. Basically, if you are interested, it works on a "flat" plain of leadership and responsibility. So rather than having certain people in paid positions - pastor, secretaries, musicians - there are specific people in charge of setting up someone different for these roles each week. So someone different speaks and leads worship each week. I believe that this is something kind of hard to conceive (Anita certainly had questions for us about it), but with the size of the church, I think that it works. There are only about 35 people in the entire church and we meet in houses, rather than paying for a building. The focus of the church is not really upon growing as a body, but in spreading Christ in other ways. They have several volunteer charities set up, like a night shelter for the homeless, a mentoring program for refugees, and a debt counselling program which helps people get out of their debt (a huge problem here with all the gambling). Would all of this work with a larger body of people? To tell you the truth, I'm not sure. I have a feeling that it would fall apart, with all the responsibility falling on a few people. Having such a small group more easily holds folks accountable I suppose. Anyway, I really don't know enough about it to say more, but what I do know is that these people are truly passionate about loving and serving the Lord and that's why we decided to go with them. We hope that it will be a year of growth and worship for the both of us.

Sorry there are no pictures in this blog, but the next one should be full of them! Look forward to a Day in the Life of Chelsea...full of tube rides, crazy folks, and even a trip to the British Library!