Soap for Jesus

Looking around my bedroom, my shoulders slump - yet again. The last two and a half weeks have been so, so wearying. It's a strange combination of tired joy, as my physical body gets more weary, learning once more to look to the Lord for the strength I need to get through the day on five hours sleep. And now, tonight, my stepdad just wriggled through all the boxes and bags and more dumped stuff on the floor that, a month ago, was starting to look almost tidy. I sat on the bed, just watching, nearly crying but somehow keeping them back. That seems to be a well-developed habit, how to turn the tap off so it was never there. But it's still sad. He puts Pepsi up next to me because the kid keeps jumping around the floor and getting in the way, before carrying on pulling all the books off the shelves, pulling the bookcase up and over the chest, nearly at a horizontal angle because there's too much stuff in the way. I want to help, but there's not enough room in the messy c

Recently, I've been watching so many people change, grow away, start courting, get engaged, get married, have their first child - or even their second, and/or go to university, start their job, start a company... These are people I grew up with, people I knew, people I watched struggle through dark times or watched as they forged a path to their dream...or are still fighting. It feels strange to be on the sidelines, living quietly, watching them now. It is their turn to be the mainplayers on the stage of life. Watching my friends and acquaintances form a new world...change this current one - both for good and for an evil they cannot even imagine is coming. And there's me... Trotting back and forward every day to work, going home, occasionally travelling, starting a project here and an event there, blogging here, posting there, watching the sky, always dreaming and somehow never quite getting done... Someone can say a word, a phrase, and more and more recently, t

I've just got home after a ten and a half hour shift at work. It's 9:30pm and I have to be up at 5:30 in the morning. I've not yet eaten and have a bunch of household chores to tend to before I go to sleep - including packing. Yet I'm happy. And kinda bouncy. And no, it really doesn't have anything to do with the Mars energy drink - that's just the thing propping my eyelids open invisibly. So what's so utterly enchanting about the pile of freshly air-dried clothing on the kitchen table - apart from it being one of the best smells on God's earth? Neither the 10.5 hour shift or the 5:30 rising are normal for me - I've spent the whole week living at my brother's house, both cat-sitting and house-sitting, and now tomorrow I'm off to Preston to spend the weekend with my best friend, Steph. So why the bouncy? Because this week has proved something. I left home with fears and foreboding looming. I hadn't cooked a meal in pretty much a y