For the shortest month of the year, February was crazily busy with two Mission Weeks back to back and Forum Midlands (New Leader’s Training) Weekend as well! So here is an (overdue) update on what has been happening so far…
Nottingham Trent’s Events Week 7th-11th February
Only during Mission Weeks do you see students up before 11 o’clock. Every day they started with a prayer breakfast at 8 in the morning, with a short devotional and prayers committing the day and the events to God, before setting off to either flyer or help prepare food for the lunch bar. Trent’s theme was ‘I Heart’ and all the lunch bar topics were about what mostly dominates students’ lives; parties, sex, material possessions, love and life. Their guest speaker for the week was Henry Olonga who was the first black cricketer to represent Zimbabwe at international level and was exiled to England after wearing a black armband during a game in protest against Mugabe coming into power. He was such a good speaker, down to earth, honest and direct, you could tell he had the respect of the students who came to the lunch bars to hear him talk. Of course being a former cricket player, some students came to get a photo and an autograph! It was such a good week, God’s hand was in it and it was evident to see. On Tuesday night, Trent CU held a pub quiz which traditionally doesn’t get a large crowd, but to everyone’s surprise, over 100 people showed up. And on Thursday, over 50 people came to the lunch bar on the topic ‘I Heart Love: What is True Love?’ and we ran out of food. It was so good to see how increasingly encouraged the CU got over the week, and at the end 4 people signed up to the follow up course the CU were running called ‘Christianity Explored’.
Nottingham’s Events Week 14th – 18th February
Compared to Trent, Nottingham University is massive in terms of size of campus and student numbers, and of course the feel of the week and the way it was organised and run was completely different. There are around 200 members in their CU and during the week I was staying with a female student in Florence Boot hall as a CUG (Christian Union Guest) and would be working with her and the hall small group as well as eating in halls and talking to other students. Coming straight from one Events Week to another, I was already physically and mentally drained but it was such a good week. Nottingham ran two lunch bars a day, one from 12 – 12:50pm and another repeated at 1-1:50pm as well as evening events. Tuesday night was planned so that all the different Halls of Residence could have their own event to invite people to. Flo Bo planned to have an Open Mic night on Thursday in the bar and after waiting for ages, they finally got the go-ahead from the Warden only to find out the Wednesday that bar has decided to change it’s opening times. After trying to find another time in the week to do it but finding dead ends, sadly we had to admit defeat and arrange it for another week. Despite that disappointment, it was really good getting to know the small group’s friends in Flo Bo and I had lots of interesting conversations with the students who had been going to the lunch bars as well. Also I was able to tell someone my testimony when he asked how long I had been a Christian for. It was amzing to hear from the other CUGs what had been happening on the other Nottingham campuses and at the end of the week 3 people decided to become Christians!
Forum Midlands Weekend (New Leader’s Training) 25th-27th February
Held at Quinta in Shropshire, Forum Midlands Weekend is when students elected onto the new committee from 20 CUs across the Midlands, come for training and support in their new leadership roles. Jason Clarke led talks on the book of Hosea showing how even today, people can so easily turn their backs on God and seek fulfillment in other things, yet claim to be spiritual, and how God’s judgement is real and great but also how amazingly tender and greater still is his mercy and forgiveness. Trent’s new exec seemed to really enjoy the weekend and the teaching and it was so encouraging to hear their plans for the CU and how their relationship as a team is building. It was a good weekend, but also for me an exhausting one. As soon as all the students had left and everything had been packed away, I sat down and suddenly felt so tired I just wanted to cry.
Through out this month God was truly working in it. Before Trent’s Events Week I was reading my daily devotion book (hearing God through the year by Dallas Willard) during my quiet time and read this from Leviticus 26: 8 “Five of you will chase a hundred, and a hundred of you will chase ten thousand, and your enemies will fall by the sword before you”
And Dallas Willard writes:
“The sense of God’s presence is sometimes accompanied in Christian experience by extraordinary events or powerful effects not attributable to merely natural causes. The mark of the working of God’s Spirit with us is the incommensurability of the effects with our merely human powers. A hundred soldiers will be cornered by only five, and ten thousand will run in fear from only one hundred. The working of God’s Spirit produces disproportionate results that do not make sense humanly. The outcome is beyond human logic to understand or natural powers to accomplish. Such humanly unaccountable effects fit into, and even certify, the principles and purposes of the rule of God in human history, as manifested in the works of Christ”
After I read that, I prayed that during Trent’s Events Week unexplainable results would happen which could only be explained with the fact that God must have had something to do with it, not only our human efforts.
