Lloyd about life

Oh dear. I haven’t posted to this blog for ages. This isn’t because I’ve lost interest, merely that I’ve had a crazy last couple of months. In this time I’ve finished my course at Redcliffe and started a new job two days later, then worked away from home for two weeks, moved house, been away at a conference for two weeks etc. Now I’m beginning to settle into normal routine again, and every night this week I’ve thought I should write something on my blog – only when I’ve finished the urgent tasks for the evening, I’ve looked at my watch and it’s either been tomorrow or close to it, so I’ve thought maybe not tonight…

So now a short post, although I may write more again on this soon – especially if you have anything to comment on it yourself. In short the last couple of months have been full of change, and to be honest I don’t much like change. This may sound strange as only recently (ish) I was writing about variety and how much I like it. And surely change is quite similar to variety, only on a larger scale. This may be true, but there is a difference. Perhaps variety turns into change when it becomes overly stressful and makes life far too busy. What do you think?

All the same, although I don’t like change so much, I do suspect that it can be good for us. Particularly with an interesting, varied - and comfortable – life we can get too settled, and stop growing and learning. Change helps to unsettle us and I think sometimes that God brings change about in our lives to help us to learn and grow. And for me he always demonstrates that I can trust him to help me through the change. So change is perhaps so not enjoyable but good for us all the same.

As long as there’s not too much of it at one time.

Looking through the search strings which have brought people to this blog, I noticed one question – why is my life so boring? I don’t know why my blog got listed from this search – hopefully it’s not the search engine’s judgment on the content …

But actually quite often life does seem rather mundane. At the moment it’s largely comprised of a series of essays which always need some work, combined with rocking a baby to sleep, playing with baby, eating, sleeping, the occasional weekend away, shopping at Tescos, chatting to my wife. Nothing particularly earth shattering. Talking with other friends about how things are going, we all seemed to feel much the same at the moment – it’s just carrying on.

So what stops life from being ‘so boring’. What do you think?

I’m no expert on the ‘exciting life’ – but I might as well give some thoughts on the matter having raised it. I’ve certainly had plenty of interesting things happening from time to time – going to Spain for 6 weeks recently, the arrival of our baby last year, etc. And I enjoy our holidays when they come round. But I don’t think that an exciting life consists of having more and more of these ‘exciting’ and ‘fun’ activities. When I used to have long student holidays (those were the days!) I was pretty bored after a couple of weeks, and longing to do something else instead. I think variety can help, but still I don’t think that’s the whole secret of of an interesting life.

In most of what we do in life there are elements of interest, beauty and fun as well as elements that are boring and hard work. I may not enjoy writing essays, but I do enjoy the reading that leads up to them. Long car journeys are pretty boring, but you can see some beautiful scenery out of the window (usually). I think I need to learn ‘contentment’ more – to see what is interesting, fun and good in the everyday things of life, and enjoy them. We have to realise that God has given good things even in the mundane parts of life, and I think we will always be somewhat bored until we learn to open our eyes.

I´m currently ín Spain for a college placement. I don´t have much internet access which is why I´ve not written anything here for a while. Sorry about this, but there´ll be plenty to write about when I get back shortly!!

Anyway for now, I´d just like to talk about snow. My memories of my childhood are of heavy winters with foot deep snowfalls, making hundreds of snowmen, snowfights behind walls made of snow, sledging downhill, our cat sinking up to its neck in the snow etc. It may be just that my memories are exaggerating things, but at least since I´ve moved to live further South in England, these things have become something of the past. At most we get one or two snowfalls, with only 1 or 2 cm of snow at best, and it only lasts a few hours!

Spain isn´t the place I´d expect to come to be reminded about snow – being a LOT further South and hence you´d expect milder. And indeed where I am on the mediterranean coast snow falls about once every 10 years, and we enjoyed 24 degrees C in the daytime a week ago! However, most of the Spanish TV news has been about the heavy snowfalls in many of the other parts of Spain, with drifts over head height and several feet of thick snow not seeming that unusual.

I think the snow here is particularly heavy this year, and many have been suffering in the severe weather. But it´s just funny how your childhood memories can be revived in the unlikeliest of places.