A whole year later!

I'm not quite sure how it's possible that I'm already writing another blog - because that mean's that another week has already passed! 

Its been a strange week as Smile's new gappers flew to Uganda on Tuesday, so my time there and all my friends there have been on my mind even more than usual this week. I'm so excited for all the new gappers as they begin their adventure, but also can't help being a bit jealous that they get to spend the next 9 months with some of the people who I love and miss so much. I know they'll have an incredible year. It's hard to believe how much has happened in the past year. This time last year I was four days away from flying to Uganda, and I had absolutely no idea that I would now be doing youth work, let alone doing it on the Isle of Wight! Its so exciting that God's plans are so much more than we can ever ask or imagine.

Some of my lovely friends in Uganda
just because I love them so much and have been thinking about them all week! 

I've had a few lovely long distance conversations this week. I got to chat to Lawrence (from Uganda) on skype, had a couple of phone calls with Terry (from Uganda) who is expecting a baby this weekend! And today I spoke to Clare (my sister/another gapper from Uganda) on skype from York where she has just started at Uni.

On Monday we had our weekly YFC prayer breakfast and team meeting in the morning and then I spent the afternoon being social with some others from YFC which was lovely. I got a very early night (8.30!) as I had to get up at 5.30 on Tuesday morning, to catch the 6.25 ferry to Lymington for a day of lectures at Moorlands - which is near Christchurch (which is near Bournemouth). It was a long but brilliant day. We started the day with chapel which was great and then we had lectures on two separate modules -  'church doctrine' and 'youth and society' for which we had our first essay set.

So having had such a long day on Tuesday, I treated myself to a lie-in on Wednesday morning until about 10 as I was meeting someone at 11 to chat about my work at church. This Sunday I'll be running our first Sunday morning youth group during church which I'm really excited about!

I was invited out for a coffee (although I didn't actually drink any coffee!) in the afternoon which was lovely - so many people have been so friendly! The family that I'm staying with had friends over for dinner (one of whom just so happened to be the same person that I went for a drink with!) so that was good fun.

We had health and safety training on Thursday morning (which was made much more exciting by the presence of cake - which didn't last very long!). I spent the afternoon writing an essay, which meant that I was a bit brain dead when I arrived at church council in the evening!
I spent a decent amount of time today sat at my desk and this afternoon I finally finished my first essay (yay!)

Essay writing

Thank you so much to everyone who prays for me.
This week please can you pray...
- For Smile Uganda and the new gappers as they begin a new season.
- For the youth group on Sunday morning.
- That I'll continue settling in and building friendships.
- That God will use me.

The New Starts Continue!

  And just like that another week has gone by already!
Last weekend was very exciting because I picked up my new car! I also got a chance to put some photos up in my room and write some letters to some friends (I'm a big fan of handwritten letters over emails). We didn't have a preacher at church so we passed around a microphone and lots of people shared what was on their hearts. It was unconventional but brilliant and I think that God spoke through the things that people said.
I shared a verse in Psalm 27 that I first read in Uganda at a time when I really needed to hear it, and I've come back to a lot in the past year. Verse 14; "Wait on the Lord, be strong and take heart, and wait on the Lord"
  In the afternoon we went for a walk along the beach with the dog who very much enjoyed chasing her frisbee into the sea! Personally I didn't feel like a swim, but I did very much enjoy the view :)



  From Monday to Wednesday I was back at Moorlands for study skills (how to write an essay / make footnotes etc.) This week the campus based first year students moved in, so the atmosphere was quite different. It was lovely to spend more time with the people on my course (we escaped to the pub both evenings!) and to meet more people. On Friday I had a meeting with our Methodist minister and had lunch with him and his wife and my placement supervisor which was nice. In the evening YFC on the island had a celebration and commissioning event. It was the first time that the whole of the core team had been together and it was a fantastic evening. Among other things, we ran around the church pretending to be monkeys, played "Jesus says" (Instead of Simon says), sang some worship songs and were prayed for.
  On Saturday I drove over to Niton to visit my parents who were on holiday with their friends there. It was lovely to see them although a bit surreal to be a tourist for the morning! We had a good catch up and it was good to spend some time with them.
  This morning we celebrated Harvest at church with a messy church event instead of Sunday school, so we had a few more kids than normal, and we got very messy doing things like vegetable printing and making bread to celebrate the harvest gifts that God has given us.

  Please pray for me in the coming week as I start to try to get some of our visions and ideas to become realities. Pray that God will give me his patience and wisdom, and also that I'll continue settling well and making friends.

For those who have been asking to see photos...

My room

                                                   

1st Block Week at Moorlands

This week I started my course at Moorlands College. I'm studying a placement based course, which means that usually I'll only go to college once a week, but this week for the start of the degree, we had a whole week in college. 

It was fantastic!
It was somewhat different from the 'freshers weeks' that I expect most of my friends will have experiences of, as we spent all day, every day in lectures. We covered lots of different topics in our first module; from conflict to boundaries, and from worship to preaching. The lectures were filled with lots of challenging and interesting ideas.

"What is worship?"

"Your view and understanding of God will always determine the quality of your worship."
"People should come away from your sermon praising God, not praising you."

These were just some of the things that I have written down in my notebook.

We found different things to do to entertain ourselves in the evenings, so on a couple of days I ended up going for a walk along the beach with people from my course. Another evening we had a 'party' with our tutor group (which was like no party I've ever been to before, but it was good fun!). I also discovered a particular (apparent) talent for table football!

At this point in time, I'm really quite excited about the degree I've just started. The people on my course are great. Its brilliant to have such a diverse group of people of different ages, backgrounds and characters, and I'm looking forward to studying with them and getting to know them all better. We'll see whether my attitude changes when I have my first essay set!

So I'm back on the island for the weekend, and then on Monday I'll be headed back to Moorlands for another 3 days for orientation and study skills.

New starts and old friends

Wow, well this has been an intense week!
Until Wednesday I was on the Isle of Wight, visiting different clubs that go on at church like indoor bowls and a mother and toddler group. I also went to my first YFC team meeting which was great - it was lovely to meet the team and to talk about all the things that are coming up in the next few weeks and months with YFC on the island. I also visited a youth group in another area of the island to see how they do things and I even found some time to explore a bit and go for a walk along the coast! I've met so many new people this week which has been great and I'm looking forward to getting to know people better as I spend more time with them.

On Wednesday evening I took a ferry back across to the mainland and drove back up to Basingstoke ready to meet Clare (one of the gappers from my gap year) in the morning. We made rolex for lunch, which is a type of food we used to eat in Uganda - omelette wrapped in a chapatti. Then we drove to Kent to go and visit Smile's new gappers at their training week. We were so excited because we got to get together with all the others from our gap year and also to meet Alex (our project manager in Uganda) for the first time since leaving him at Entebbe airport back at the start of July.
It was lovely to meet the new gappers and tell them all about Uganda. I'm so excited for them but also feel quite jealous as I know what an incredible year they're about to have.

So all of us ex-gappers went back to stay the night at Finch's house, and the next day 4 of us drove back to Basingstoke. It was great to be together again. Alex came on Saturday and we took him to the village show and went for a walk. We had dinner together and just enjoyed spending time together like we used to in Uganda. They all came to church and to the church lunch today. Today was my last day at Christ Church for what will probably be a long time.
Seeing everyone leave was hard - it reminded us a bit of how we felt when we left Uganda and then left each other the week later. I'm just looking forward to when I can go back and visit my friends there. All of us ex-gappers are starting uni now, so I'm looking forward to visiting them in the next few months.
Pray for me this week as I spend the week at Moorlands for a block week of study at the start of my course.

P.s. for those who asked for my new postal address...

Lorna Randall
5 Goldcrest Close
Newport
Isle of Wight
PO30 5FX

Mail is always welcome :)

So here I am!

So here I am in my new room, in my new home on "The Island"! I moved in yesterday and managed to get all of my stuff sorted out pretty quickly which was good and I'm settling in really well so far.
This week has been a bit crazy as I've been travelling all over the place, or it feels like I have. On Tuesday I drove up to a little place near Derby for a conference that I've been helping to organize at work over the summer. I was there for the first couple of days just to help out with admin and make sure that everyone who was expecting a room had one! On Wednesday afternoon I managed, by some miracle, to find a direct train from Derby to Basingstoke at just the right time, so that was great and it got me home in time for dinner and a pampered chef 'Ready steady cook' evening with Mum in aid of a local charity called The Pink Place. We even won a big box of chocolates in the raffle - result!
I spent most of Thursday packing up some things from my room to take to the Isle of Wight, and on Friday we went out for a meal as a family with Mum, Dad, John and Catherine which was really lovely.
Saturday was 'moving in day'. Mum came over with me in the car and went home in the late afternoon.
Today was my second week at church as I was here last weekend too. I was properly introduced and had the chance to warn everyone that I never stop talking about Uganda! The whole church prayed for me too which I appreciated. We haven't started a youth group yet but I went to help out with Sunday school where I got to meet all the kids and we learnt about Moses and made a burning bush by drawing around our hands on lots of different coloured bits of paper and sticking them together.
In the afternoon I had an invite to lunch which was lovely - brilliant food and company to match. We went out for a walk along the beach after lunch. I feel so blessed to be living here in such a beautiful place with such lovely people (so far anyway!).
I know the coming weeks and months will undoubtedly have their challenges, but at the moment I'm feeling very excited about the fun we can have and the things we can achieve if we're willing and have the courage to do things God's way. Bring it on!

Getting ready for the next adventure!

I can't quite believe it's only been a week since Soul Survivor! Last week I was back to work at the Diocese of Winchester doing lots of admin work for a big conference which is happening this week. It's been very busy but has been great experience and its been really good to get to spend some time there with the people that I was working with in the summer before I went to Uganda last year. I also had a chance to go out with some friends and to spend most of Friday baking too which I really enjoyed (especially 'testing' the brownies after they were cooked!)



This weekend I drove over to the Isle of Wight to visit the people and the church that will soon become my new home. I'm due to move in next week and to work with the church as a youth worker, whilst also studying for a degree at the same time. This is all through Youth for Christ who run a Youth work Training Program with Moorlands Bible college. We had a church picnic on Sunday afternoon which was a lovely chance to start to get to know people. Being me, I ended up chatting to a woman on the ferry crossing on the way back to Southampton and had a lovely chat with her all about my time in Uganda as I just love to talk about it all the time!
I'm really looking forward to becoming a part of the church that I'm moving to and to building relationships there. We've got a few ideas planned, but I'm so excited to see where God will take us in the next few months and to find out what he's got planned for us.
So this week will be my last week officially living in Basingstoke, although I will be back for a few days next week with some of the people from my Gap Year.

If people are up for praying for me I'd really appreciate if you could pray for me when I move - that I'll get to know people really quickly and make some good friends, and also that God will be able to use me right from the start.

The Blue Onesie Army from the Centre of the Universe

Its been 54 days since I left Uganda, and I thought it was about time to start blogging again.
There are so many things that I learnt during my gap year, and one of them was to live in the moment - to enjoy life whilst it's happening instead of always spending my time planning the next thing. So for the last 54 days that's what I've been trying to do, and here's what's been happening...

Of the past 8 weeks since I stepped off of that plane into Heathrow Airport, I've spent only 4 weeks at home. A few weeks ago I had the absolute privilege of volunteering at a Christian youth summer camp run by Adventure Plus where I picked up a new nickname "Dave" (Don't ask!). It was a fantastic week, not least because we got to go out climbing, kayaking, swimming and all sorts, but what was even more exciting than that was that we got to spend the week sharing with a brilliant bunch of 14 year olds about what it means to trust God.
A week afterwards, my family took the opportunity to pin me down for a week on a canal boat on the Grand Union canal. I must admit that, when my parents weren't crashing the boat, it was very relaxing, and when they were, it was incredibly funny! It was lovely to spend the week together, especially as my brother John came too. We didn't eat as many scones as we were hoping to, but we did have plenty of 'incidents' to keep up entertained!



Well, after a week sleeping on a boat, I thought it would be a great idea (!?) to go straight to somerset to go camping for a week! So I've spent the last week at a Christian festival called Soul Survivor with my sister Clare (one of the gappers from Uganda) and the youth group from her church in Eynsham (the centre of the universe apparently?) We all had matching blue onesies with our names on the back which we wore every evening to the main meeting, and so we adopted the name of 'blue onesie army' and became progressively smellier as the week went on... 



The week was fantastic. We got to spend time every day praising and worshiping God with thousands of other people and learning more about him and how we can live for him. What was also great was that 3 of the other gappers from Uganda were also there on the same week so we all got to see each other again which was lovely.

In the weeks in the middle I've been doing some work and talking non stop to everyone I meet about Uganda - sorry if you're getting a bit fed up! It's been amazing to catch up with people here who have been so supportive of me over the past year, and its been great to get to hear what everyone else has been up to whilst I've been away. I've also really been so blessed in the past few weeks to meet a lot of new people from various different places - (although a lot of them have been from Eynsham, as it is, of course, the centre of the universe!)

I can't even begin to describe how much I miss Uganda and everyone that I met there. A very small percentage of the past 54 days has been without tears, and not a single one has gone without a thought to my friends and family there. I pray that one day soon God will provide for me to go back and visit, but I know that now he is calling me to do new things for him and I'm looking forward to this new chapter in my crazy adventure with him.

So now I've got a lot of exciting things planned for the not too distant future. God has asked me to do some things that I hadn't ever considered myself to be capable of until a few months ago, and I've decided to dive in and trust him with it and see how he can use me. I'm so excited to see God at work and to get to be a part of it with him, so I'll do my best to keep you updated over the coming weeks and months. I'm hoping that this blog will be just as, if not more exciting and interesting than my last one from Uganda, so keep reading!