Warning: graduate in transition.

Time lurches on and I'm just beginning to feel the effects of transition.  No longer a student, I enter the graduate realm of unemployment and sarcastically-framed comments on the use of my degree.  Well, almost.

No, it's 4 days until the first Relay conference and really I'm just kicking back and waiting for this new chapter in my life to get started.  There's the usual practicalities of packing and how I'm going to get my stuff on the train on Tuesday without the aide of a packhorse (or two).  And don't forget the 'study' I haven't quite finished but am weaving -though somewhat feebly- between my hours of looking for a new bicycle, enjoying my parents company and just doing things I've had no creative space to do since academia took over my life.

But really, all's well in the Parsons' land of ee-by-gum and guinea pigs (my Mum's).  Warning--the accent has already taken multiple downward turns for the worse...

For those who know nothing about the Relay discipleship and training scheme, I suggest you look here because UCCF explains it with more brash, gusto and wholeness than I can at this hour.  In short, I'm returning to the Warwick area (after a couple of conferences at the Quinta Christian Centre near Oswestry) to help out the Christian Union at my -sob- old university and to be equipped, through study, personal work and learning new skills, to better share my faith as a Christian with students around campus. 

So, with no academic timetable in hand I'll be skipping the railroad tracks down to the Welsh border for fun and serious stuff with people I've never met before, at a place I've been to more times than I can count on fingers, with only a vague idea of what's actually going on.  Nothing new there then.

Amazingly though, my anxiety levels are low.  This time last year I was coming to the end of my stint in France and contemplating my return to university with utter dread.  I remember that for at least the first six weeks of that first term I was constantly on edge. 
While walking to lectures I couldn't help but feel deeply nervous, I think maybe because I felt incapable of tapping into those academic brain cells after my year abroad, which, in comparison to uni-life, felt like mental vegetation. 
Getting stuck into CU again brushed me back hard against my self-elevated thoughts of being needed.  I clearly wasn't. 
Some of my closest friends had already left, some to other countries, and this made me cling to the friends I did have left.  I am grateful to those who helped me settle back in to Warwick in ways they didn't even themselves perceive.
I came back to a country which spoke my language but where I felt I had no place, or at least one I had yet to discover.

It sounds like doom and gloom but I'm just being honest.  I found it hard and for weeks I was constantly anxious.
But there was one passage of Scripture I had running through my mind daily.
'Do not be anxious about anything, but in all things, by prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, make your requests known to God.  And the peace of God which surpasses all understanding will guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.'  Philippians 4:6-7

And it's to that passage that I turn now daily for strength, even though I am relatively calm compared to this time last year.  Reading Jerry Bridges', The Discipline of Grace, has refired those apathetic spiritual nerve-endings to revive the great truth that no day is so good or so bad that I do not need God's grace in my life.  So, anxious or not, coping with stress or going grey with the pressure, I have to turn to Jesus.  Why?  Because whether I perceive it or not, He is sustaining me.
Jesus is Lord.

The fast lane.

Vietnamese rice paddies: just one of the sights I was treated to this summer.

Since the last time I blogged I have:

crossed the country more times than I can count on both hands
visited five different countries (OK, I am being true to my Welsh roots by counting Wales in that number)
flown over ten thousand miles
graduated from university with a 2.1 and got to throw my cap...whoop!
moved house
been a bridesmaid for a friend's wedding
made the final touches to a summer newspaper
done a beach mission

...and am now finally 'resting' (i.e. getting my head around what I have just done and preparing for what I am about to do) in the North West.  Roll on Relay.


PS.  More photos to follow soon.