It's my final year, and I'm a bit gutted. Also - Antiques Roadshow.

There’s something deeply poetic about Antiques Roadshow. This person has been living with this clock, or whatever it is, right there next to them – maybe for their whole lives. Perhaps it was sitting in the living room, ticking away quietly. Perhaps it was up in the attic, out of sight and out of mind. It always seemed fairly unexceptional, slightly irrelevant. It was quaint, maybe, nothing more. And so every day they’ve wondered to and fro, getting on with their lives, never giving it much of a thought. It sits – quiet, unobtrusive, meek. But then a moment of thought – perhaps a friend who is interested in these things, perhaps something seen on the TV, perhaps just a flicker of curiosity – makes them ask, ‘I wonder, is it worth anything, that old thing?’ Perhaps it is – perhaps – perhaps it is worth far, far more than you had ever imagined...

I’m about half way through my final year of university. In a few months’ time I’ll be leaving Selwyn, leaving Cambridge, and leaving – if we’re being realistic – the majority of the people I’ve met and got to know and love over the last two and a half years. And to be honest, I’m quite gutted about that.

Not because I’m not looking forward to what happens next (and I certainly am looking forward to not being 4 and a half hours of train journey away from Rachael!) but because I feel like there are so many loose ends – so many people who I think are brilliant, and who I’ve started to care about, but I’ve just not been able to invest that much time in getting to know them better and talking with them about life, the universe and everything!

Paradoxically, one of the reasons that I haven’t had anywhere near as much time as I would have liked to just be with people in the last year is that I’ve been really involved with the Cambridge Christian Union – helping to support all the different little groups of Christians in colleges as they try to share the love of Jesus with the people around them, encouraging Christian freshers to get to know God better and let the joy of that overflow into their lives and relationships, and helping to organise and lead the whole group of us in Cambridge as together we try to introduce as many people as possible in this university to Jesus! I say this is paradoxical simply because I’ve been so busy with all the stuff we’re doing to support other people in sharing Jesus with those around them, that I’ve not been able to spend that much time doing it myself with the people around me, who I love!

I think it’s been worth it, and I’m so glad to have been part of the big family of the Christian Union this year, but now I’m feeling the cost of it. Next week is #nofilter week – where we are putting on events every day for the whole university to come, and consider life, and ourselves, and Jesus, without the filters of our preconceptions and assumptions. I’m really looking forward to it – I know both the people who we have got to come and speak and answer questions at the events, and they are brilliant, lovely, funny, and insightful and I think they will be really helpful for people to engage with. I’m even performing poetry and being interviewed on Wednesday and Friday evenings, so that’s especially exciting! But the build up to the week has made me think: how many people who I’ve met, and who I really care about, are also in final year, and might literally never have as good an opportunity as this again to consider Jesus without any of the political or ecclesiastical wrapping – just genuinely think about who this man was and what he really said? It’s made me ask myself, how many people know me, but we’ve not spent enough time together to have had a meaningful conversation about the reality that changes everything for me every day? How many people do I love who I’ve never even asked them what they think about this man who has set me freer than I thought was possible?

And the answer is, quite a lot. And I’m gutted about that, because honestly every day that goes past I realise more and more both how intellectually viable Christianity actually is, and how utterly beautiful it is. And over the last two and a bit years, I’ve also become more and more convinced that it’s not a kind of optional extra to life that’s nice for me, but might not be relevant for other people who are happy as they are – I really believe that Jesus is interested in every single person, and that all of us need him.

So I’m really praying that lots of third years will hear about this week of events, and that they’ll decide that actually, if it’s all a myth, then it’s just a free lunch, but if it turns out to actually be real, it would be the most important free lunch they’ve ever eaten! If you’re reading this and you’re a final year as well, I’m really serious – give it a hearing. In my experience I’ve met lots of people where it turns out the God they don’t believe in, isn’t very much like the God that I know.

All the details are on the website – nofiltercambridge.com – and I’ll be going to basically everything, so either I’ll just see you there, or you can drop me a message and I’d love to go with you - whether we’ve been mates since freshers week or I’ve only met you once or twice!

Maybe they shouldn’t go on the show – maybe it’s worthless, and they are very busy. But then again, you never quite know, do you? Perhaps…

Arriving at Uni - a little blog about how I felt yesterday

Yesterday I packed up my stuff and came back to uni with Mum and Dad. I was really tired, because from Tuesday to Friday I’d been running a retreat and it was both brilliant and exhausting. And coming back made me hugely aware of the massive amount of work there is to do this term – the fact that I didn’t manage to get anywhere near as much reading done over Christmas as I’d hoped – and how painfully busy I’m about to be. So I wasn’t in the best of moods. I was leaving home, feeling weary and scared.

One of the reasons I started this blog three years ago was because I hoped it would be a little way that people could get an insight into what it’s actually like following Jesus from the inside – because most of the time I’m too British and awkward, or maybe just too cowardly, to talk very openly in normal conversation about the difference it makes to me day to day that I know Jesus and I trust him. So I thought that it would be worth a little blog just to share what it was like to be a follower of Jesus yesterday!

As I say, when I was packing, and in the car, and as I arrived – not feeling great. Weary and scared. Then I arrived at 4:30ish and for an hour and a half I unpacked my stuff, while listening to Kate Tempest’s epic narrative poem, Brand New Ancients. It’s really cool, and powerful, and sometimes really sad and sometimes really beautiful, and I hadn’t ever listened to it before so it was a really great distraction! I enjoyed it and as I unpacked my head and my emotions were caught up in her words and her stories, and that was good. When it finished and I’d finished unpacking, I basically felt the same as before, a bit better, partly because I had something interesting to be thinking about that wasn’t how busy this term is going to be.

Then I went for dinner in college with my mate Alice – this also was really nice. We bumped into various other people I know who I hadn’t seen since last term and that was fun, and we went up to her room afterwards and chatted for ages and it was great. She’s really fun, and we’re good mates, and so that was good and especially nice because arriving in a new place can feel quite lonely. After a while I came back downstairs to my room, thinking I’d probably go to bed quite soon. I felt slightly better again because I felt less isolated, and because a person is a much richer and more interesting distraction than even a good poem!

And then I spent some time on facebook catching up on messages and stuff, which – as is normally the case – had basically no impact on my emotional state other than a slight deadening effect. But then I thought, ‘Mike, you really haven’t spent much time just praying and reading the Bible by yourself this week’ – because the retreat was so full on from the moment I got up to when I went to bed, I’d only really snatched little bits of time to pray, and hadn’t properly read the Bible by myself all week. And I had a weird feeling of simultaneously really wanting to do that, to spend time with God, and really feeling like I couldn’t be bothered. This is a pretty normal emotional contradiction for me when I think about reading the bible and praying! But I decided to do it, so I grabbed my bible and a notebook and pen and sat on my bed.

And as I started to pray, I started talking to God about how I was feeling and what I was thinking; so all my feelings of weariness and all my fears about the term ahead and everything I had to do came right up to the surface again. For while then I was in a weird place of becoming increasingly aware of all those negative things, but at the same time knowing and talking to God about the way that actually I didn’t need to be scared or anxious because He is the God of the Universe and he cares about me. “Cast your cares on him, because he cares for you.” I won’t pretend this made the anxiety go away – all it did really was give me a good reason not to give in to it.

But then I started reading the Bible – I have this book that’s the book of Isaiah from the bible, broken into small sections so you can read one a day, with notes and stuff to explain things that aren’t obvious or where it’s good to know something about the original Hebrew or whatever. I hadn’t read it for ages, and I opened it up to where I’d got to and the next part was Isaiah chapter 52 and 53 – this bit: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Isaiah+52%3A13-53%3A12&version=NIVUK . And as I started to read it, it was just so powerful. I’d read it before, quite a few times: it’s a prophecy, written about 600 years before Jesus was born, but God gave Isaiah this kind of vision of a Servant who was going to come, and he would be the Arm of God himself. And it speaks of how this Servant would suffer, he would be a “man of sorrows”, he would be despised by people and rejected, and his suffering would be like nothing anyone else had ever suffered. And it says that people would think that he was suffering because God was punishing him, they would think that he had been rejected by God; but that actually the truth is that he would be suffering on behalf of God’s people – that God would bring together upon him the punishment that was deserved by everyone but him. It says we have all, like stupid sheep, wondered away from our shepherd and tried to do things our own way, and yet this Servant would willingly suffer all of the pain that we had created for ourselves. And it says that at the cost of his wounds, we can be healed.

And as I read it, and re-read it, I was honestly weeping – weeping with a kind of mixture of joy and incredulity and gratitude, thinking, ‘God, how – how on earth could you love me like this?’ Thinking, ‘This is ridiculous. I’ve known it for years but it’s still ridiculous – that He would willingly walk into this immensity of suffering and not complain for a moment but be delighted to do it, delighted to die, because by his wounds we could be healed.’ That he would be despised and rejected, so that we could be utterly loved and accepted when we do not begin to deserve it. That at the cost of his death, we can share in his resurrection and have life forever. I knew it all already but it hitting me all again and I was genuinely weeping with the beauty and the joy of it.

And I just thought, ‘A love like this dwarfs all of my problems.’ As in, if this term turns out to be really really hard and stressful, well you know what, God himself loves me to death! Genuinely. And in front of that it just shrinks and it doesn’t frighten me. If I end up actually stuffing up my dissertation so badly that I don’t get the degree I could have done, well you know what, the Creator of the World will still be delighted with me. Not because I’m a particularly good person but because he has adopted me to be his kid! It’s just really good. It’s just better than everything. And most of the time I don’t realise that at an emotional level but last night I did, and I thank God for that, and I wanted to share it with you.

So feel free to stop reading here (not that you’ve been compelled to carry on until now…). But if you’re interested I’ll just copy it out below – the bit that I read – and I’d encourage you to give it a read, and ask yourself, ‘If this was true, what would I do about it?’

Here you go:

See, my servant will act wisely;

    he will be raised and lifted up and highly exalted.

Just as there were many who were appalled at him –

    his appearance was so disfigured beyond that of any human being

    and his form marred beyond human likeness –

so he will sprinkle many nations,

    and kings will shut their mouths because of him.

For what they were not told, they will see,

    and what they have not heard, they will understand.

Who has believed our message

    and to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?

He grew up before him like a tender shoot,

    and like a root out of dry ground.

He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him,

    nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.

He was despised and rejected by mankind,

    a man of suffering, and familiar with pain.

Like one from whom people hide their faces

    he was despised, and we held him in low esteem.

Surely he took up our pain

    and bore our suffering,

yet we considered him punished by God,

    stricken by him, and afflicted.

But he was pierced for our transgressions,

    he was crushed for our iniquities;

the punishment that brought us peace was on him,

    and by his wounds we are healed.

We all, like sheep, have gone astray,

    each of us has turned to our own way;

and the Lord has laid on him

    the iniquity of us all.

He was oppressed and afflicted,

    yet he did not open his mouth;

he was led like a lamb to the slaughter,

    and as a sheep before its shearers is silent,

    so he did not open his mouth.

By oppression and judgment he was taken away.

    Yet who of his generation protested?

For he was cut off from the land of the living;

    for the transgression of my people he was punished.

He was assigned a grave with the wicked,

    and with the rich in his death,

though he had done no violence,

    nor was any deceit in his mouth.

Yet it was the Lord’s will to crush him and cause him to suffer,

    and though the Lord makes his life an offering for sin,

he will see his offspring and prolong his days,

    and the will of the Lord will prosper in his hand.

After he has suffered,

    he will see the light of life and be satisfied;

by his knowledge my righteous servant will justify many,

    and he will bear their iniquities.

Therefore I will give him a portion among the great,

    and he will divide the spoils with the strong,

because he poured out his life unto death,

    and was numbered with the transgressors.

For he bore the sin of many,

    and made intercession for the transgressors.