Jane Eyre and a Delightful Evening

Friday 11th October 1:23am.

Tonight I am more delighted than I have been in a very long time, more delighted than I can properly describe. This is a rare and beautiful joy – so I’ll try to share some of it as best as I can.

Prologue 1: Three days into my English degree and I have already resorted to watching the DVD instead! I’m doing Jane Eyre next week and I have read it but a long time ago, so I got the film out of the library today just for a bit of a refresher! Anyway, it was a bit frustrating because my computer kept spitting it out, and then I borrowed a DVD reader from my mate Ellis and that for some reason was working on her computer but then not on either of mine! So that’s prologue one, frustration of my ingenious film-watching schemes.

Prologue 2: I should also introduce you to the other main characters in this evening’s story – Eve, Jo and Mollie. Eve is also doing English, she’s cool and northern and we had a fun adventure the other day looking for her lost phone and trying to stave off cardiac arrest. Jo is doing theology, which is COOL, and is a generally bizarre and wonderful person – and we have already developed the sort of hilarious bullying relationship that made somebody ask the other day if we were old friends from school! And Mollie is my ‘college sister’, and she’s crazy good at French, and learning Russian too, and is generally hilarious and actually does feel a bit like my sister (although of course, I don’t know what a real sister is actually like).

This Evening: So that brings us to the source of my current delight. Jo, Mollie and I came back from a debate thingy at the Union tonight, and I was going to just go straight to bed, partly because I was tired, and partly because Jo was so tired she fell asleep during the debate. But she said we could chill in her room if we wanted, and I realised I had been hoping to try the DVD in her computer to see if it would work. So I did, and it did, and then the three of us got chatting. And I ended up telling the story about my passport (which appears on here in April if you haven’t seen it yet) and then more stories about how I became a Christian, and about the times when God has been amazing and done amazing things to me and to my mates. And we discussed loads of things about Jesus and Christian Unions and the bit in Amos where God shows Amos a bowl of fruit, and it was all just ridiculously good. It felt right, it felt peaceful, and joyful, and full of love. And I could see in Mollie and Jo’s faces that they were sharing the sense of the evening being something strangely beautiful, somehow profound. We’re all Christians, but we were talking about how it felt like tonight God was starting something new. I think someone said, “It’s going to be different now, I think.” And that made me smile so much my cheeks hurt. And Eve joined us for an enjoyable while, and we had great chats until she had to sleep, and then we kept chatting, and in the end we prayed together, and then had a massive, childhood-friends sort of group hug, and went back to our rooms. And in the midst of the warm residue of peace and joy I thought I might as well try Jane Eyre one last time; and wouldn’t you know, it worked fine. And I thought, maybe God wanted me to go and chill in Jo’s room. Maybe He loved that conversation as much as we did. Maybe the smile on his face tonight is as wide as mine and a thousand miles wider.