One thing I know

Almost eleven years ago now I first came to Oxford as a fresh-faced first year. I was 18. And when I think back to 2004/5 me, there's just one thing that stands out: I was so young. So young. Just didn't know very much. About anything.*

Younger me used to be freaked out the onset of big birthdays, milestones - serious adultdom. I often joke that I started to get dismayed by the ageing process around age 9 (Urgh! 9, I don't want to be 9!) and I don't think that's too far from the truth. Life was a troubling hourglass, turned over too soon - all its latent possibilities for joy and fulfilment trickling away.

If you're older then you only have more to prove within more restricted options. When you're little it seems like you can have unlimited dreams.

That's how I used to think. I thought that my future would be shaped largely by my choices and my performance. My efforts. I had this expectation that if I worked really hard, and ran hard after God then everything would work out more or less in sync with how I wanted it. I'd be able to avoid mess and pain. These were unspoken assumptions, my intuitive theology. 

I was wrong. Hardly anything I imagined being in my future has turned out to be in it. Working hard and running hard after God has not protected me from illness, failure, loneliness and trauma. My intuitive theology has been exhaustively exposed as ..... wrong.








To live is Christ
To die is gain

*Particularly French grammar, but that is another story.