(no subject)

[chess]

I'm back.

No, I didn't have a great time. I didn't even have a good time. Although this was partially due to my period arriving and hence making me rather braindead and miserable.

The only fun bit was the go-karting we did on the first day. The Sunday morning event was *cancelled* so people could watch the *football*. That kind of tells you about the rest of it, really. People being distressingly normal and just sitting around talking about boys and clothes, or football, or knitting and sewing, or gossiping about other people, depending on which group I was with. I spent quite a lot of the time playing with the kiddies' bead thingamies, and reading. I read two books, and they weren't small ones either.

I'm... disappointed. Very disappointed.

Comments

<hugs>

[passage.livejournal.com]

Sorry it wasn't what you were hoping for.

How was the teaching?

What was it on?

I suspect student attendance at church yesterday morning was greatly increased by the saturday BT preacher who was talking about Daniel's priorities when faced with a law that if he worshiped God he'd be thrown to the lions.

The speaker drew a parallel saying that if we didn't go to church tomorrow morning because we're watching the football then that means football gets first call in our lives: that it's more important to us than God. This is bad.

Neil, who suffers many tempations in life, football is however not one of them.

Re: <hugs>

[chess]

Uhm, which teaching would that be, then? (This was one of the major problems. Despite it being a 'church' weekend, there was almost no spiritual input at all.)

In the mornings we read the book of 2 Peter in small groups. My small group consisted of me, my parents, and two other ppl from my parents' cell group. We tried to do a bible study type thing but we were all at completely different levels and there wasn't really enough time given to go over the passage in a way that would satisfy anyone, let alone all of us, so it was hopelessly difficult. After the morning sessions I didn't see anyone wandering around with a Bible or catch anyone talking about Christianity at all.

We had a kind of service in the afternoon, and there was a semi-sermon about reaching our full potential in Christ (the mustard-seed verse, showing around a seed from the big pine tree) but it was cut short 'cos all the kids were tired by that point in the weekend and they were restless.

So, not wonderful by any means.

Re: <hugs>

[marnanel.livejournal.com]

Well, it shows that football is more important to us than church attendance, which isn't quite the same thing, though it's presumably highly correlated.

More precisely (and more usefully in this situation), though, it shows that that particular instance of football is more important to us that that particular instance of church attendance. You can imagine that someone could go to the evening service instead of the morning service if England were in the World Cup final on the Sunday morning, which would show that priority([World Cup 2002 final]) > priority([Sunday morning service on day X]) but not that ∀f ∙ f ∈ football: ∀c ∙ c ∈ church attendance: priority(f) > priority(c)

Football is also not one of my temptations.

Re: <hugs>

[passage.livejournal.com]

My word, LJ is breaking that comment impressively ...

Anyway, we'll make a mathmo of you yet Thomas ;-).

We discussed this in Dean's breakfast and concluded that it was no big deal if you'd decided to go to one service on Sunday and hence made it the evening one, but it was a big deal if you'd been plannning to go to both (or there was no evening service), but you'd changed your plans for meeting with God to fit football in.

Neil

Re: <hugs>

[marnanel.livejournal.com]

Yes. Except that I go to church to meet with other Christians and discuss and learn about what God's doing in the world, not to meet with God. I can do that anywhere (even, I suppose, at a football match).