The Week That Felt Like a Month

This has been one of the longest weeks of my life. As of Thursday, we have been here for one week. Yet I feel like we've been here so much longer than that. But despite all of that, I survived my first week of classes! I love them all so far. It’s weird only having one or two classes a day since I’m used to having more like four a day. A neat component of the course load of Study Abroad, though, is that some of the work we have to do involves outside traveling. This next Friday (1 Feb), our INTS class (which is everyone in the group, all 34 of us) is going to London for the day, and while we’re there, we’ve been split into groups to each investigate a specific borough of London. How incredible is that? My group got Brixton, so I’m excited to do research and explore our borough! Then in late March/early April, our group is going on a week-long trip to France to do some work as well as explore. I absolutely love being here!

So you might be interested to know what a typical week will look like for me, with my classes and exploring the town (and if you’re not, well feel free to skip down to the next paragraph, but I’m not sure why you’d be reading my blog if you weren’t interested…). On Mondays I have the Cross and Crescent (a Bible Missions class focusing on the relationship between Christianity and Islam, a really fascinating class so far) at 10 am. Tuesdays I have INTS (International Studies: Intro to Great Britain) at 10:30 am and French at 2 pm. INTS is good so far, but we haven’t gotten into a whole lot yet. However, this next week will be leading us into our London trip, so I’m sure Jacque will have lots of interesting things to tell us. I have English (Major British Writers II) and the Cross and Crescent on Wednesdays, but this is my longest day, in terms of being in class. Since we only have English once a week, it’s a 3-hour long course. I was really excited about taking it (and still am, especially since it’s our only class taught by a British professor), but it’s going to be a lot of poetry, apparently, and, well, I’m not a huge poetry fan… Thursdays I just have INTS at 11:30 am, which is great because I get the whole house to myself in the mornings while everyone else is taking Core. It’s marvelous. Unfortunately though, since I’m taking French, I do have class on Fridays at 2 pm while everyone else has the day off. There are 6 of us in the class, which is great because I really like all of them. And being a more introverted person, I prefer smaller class sizes in general. But it is a bit depressing to have to head to class while others are headed out of the city. However, I’m enjoying French. I love language classes, even if French is so complicated. But seriously, pronunciation in French makes no sense. Absolutely no sense. I am also taking two online courses (Message of the Old Testament and Walking for Fitness), but I don’t think either of them will be really intense.

When I’m not in class, my friends and I are either playing games (Bananagrams is a popular choice), or doing homework, or walking around Oxford. It’s been pretty cold outside though, so we've mainly wanted to stay inside, but we force ourselves to go out and about at least once a day, sometimes to Tesco (the local grocery store) or to get a sandwich or something. Oxford is just a gorgeous city. The architecture is magnificent. I personally just love to walk and look around. It snowed most of the early part of this week, but it’s been melting these past couple of days. I’m ready for it to warm up at least a little bit. Or at least just have the clouds dissipate a little so I know the sun is at least still in the sky. I've barely seen it since getting off the plane…

Natali and I made a snowman on our way back to the house one night. We wanted to add arms, but the twigs were too soggy...

This is a church just a street over from our house. I pass by it almost every day and I think it's the church we can see from our kitchen window. I think it's beautiful.

My favourite part of this week though was definitely Thursday night. A group of us went to Student Night at St. Aldates, an Anglican church here in Oxford. They had a really nice dinner at 7 pm, and then we went into a time of worship with a short message/sermon in the middle. It was a freeing time of worship for me. The songs were wonderful and well played. I knew most of them, which always gives me a sort of sense of comfort. I think it’s natural to look for the familiar in the new. Even in a room full of roughly 100 people, it was a very personal type of worship. The lead guitarist/singer at one point simply stopped singing and just played, but as he did so, everyone else kept singing. Some sang the same song, others did their own thing. I just closed my eyes and listened to the multitude of voices all harmonizing around me. None of the individual voices were distinct to me; it was all just a hum of music in my ears. But the incredible thing, in my opinion, is that God heard every one of the songs they sang. God hears the cry of our hearts, and it doesn’t matter if we’re English or American or any other nationality. We are all united by our Creator, and I don’t know about you, but that thought always brings a smile to my face.

Most people think (and this is what I was always taught) that England (and Europe on a broader scale) is a rather God-less place. They don’t take religion or Christianity as seriously as Americans, or that it’s just not as big a part of their culture as it is in the States. Yet, though parts of that are fundamentally true, there are so many churches here (such as St. Aldates) with thriving evangelical programs to spread the Word. There’s a big revival movement growing, and I’m excited to see it happening.

I have also been participating in Morning Prayer with a few people in House 10. Kelli, a sort of RA here, is going through the Book of Common Prayer in the morning and invited any of us who wanted to join her. I did it most of this week, and at first it was a little weird for me. Sometimes reciting things as a group seems cultish to me, but after giving it a week, it’s been a nice way to start off my day. I’ve adjusted my attitude towards it as well. I feel more like it reinforces a sense of community among our small group, which is something I think everyone needs.

Speaking of community, though I haven’t connected with everyone in the group, there is a number of people here I’ve been consistently spending time with and I am so blessed to know them. I’ve grown so much closer already to my friends I came with as well as getting to know some pretty awesome people I didn’t know as well beforehand. It’ll be interesting to see group dynamics once we start traveling, but I think I have a pretty good core group right now that have similar interests. I know I keep saying this, but it’s just because it’s so true: this is going to be a great semester!

Well, I’m off to Bath and Stonehenge in the morning with Natali, Morgan, Laura, Ethan, and Josh (and several others as well, but the six of us are for sure traveling together) and I’m absolutely stoked! We bought our tickets on Thursday at the train station. I feel like such an adult. I’ll let you all know how it goes after we get back tomorrow night, and I’ll hopefully have some pictures to share. For now, I should get to bed. Got to get up early in the morning. Again, thanks for reading!