‘His life was trees’ was one of our favourite bench inscriptions back in those park-roaming university days. How would we choose to be remembered, we wondered, if the totality of our lives had to be whittled down to a one-liner (which, depending on the park’s location, stood a high likelihood of being defaced anyway)? On…
Is anyone else bored of this ‘emerging church’ malarkey? As with many words which used to excite me (‘missional’, ‘incarnational’, ‘holistic’ etc etc), this has rather lost its pizzazz, which perhaps says more about my fickleness than the speed at which innovation becomes institution. The point is I wasn’t enthralled by the prospect of this…
Hey, hey. Happy (belated) new year! I’m back. And it is, you’ll be glad to hear, a relatively happy new year so far. And here I am with my confession: I don’t like December and, dare I say it, I’m not really sure I like Christmas either. I discovered this through the obligatory ‘how was…
“Are you really ok, Milly?” Hannah asked me last Saturday; a question which stemmed from her reading of my blog. To be fair, if you judged me solely on my blog you’d think I was a lonely moaner who did nothing but ponder life in a melancholy kind of a way. Perhaps I need some more posts which…
A friend and I were recently debating my old church’s strap-line ‘Delighting in God and displaying his glory’. (I’m beginning to question whether or not churches really need/should have strap-lines, but that’s for another blog post). We wondered if words like ‘delighting’, and even ‘glory’, really resonate with people and mean something to them. Do…
A woman in North Dakota, no longer waiting ‘for someone to complete me’, has married herself, according to this column in the Guardian. Her wedding to her ‘inner groom’ is a move that is celebrated, albeit with a healthy dose of cynicism, by the columnist who is ‘always cheered to hear that anyone has learned…
Sunshine, friends and food have worked their restorative magic after an exhausting week. It was the week which began with submitting our dissertation proposals and ended with our much-dreaded and much-prepared for group presentations. As we left SOAS at 11pm on Presentation Eve, after hours of printing and practice, I was definitely ready for a…
This time last year I went to Australia and Singapore for a holiday. How time flies! All my friends’ little children will be a whole year older and I’ll have missed so many significant moments. Perhaps I need to be going again. Bother that this world is so big. With a rush of nostalgia, I…
Yesterday I spent most of the beautiful sunny day hidden away inside SOAS’ library trying to pull together some thoughts about my first essay: ‘Does modernisation necessarily imply dependency?’ And I can tell you that it’s no small task moving, in just two months, from a place of knowing very little about development to trying…
Six years to the day since I arrived in Oxford, I rush back in my lunch break to hand over my keys to the letting agent and bring the Howard Street era to an end. A few weeks ago I was loving the liminality. (One of my new words of the moment, slightly misapplied to describe…
emilyintheworld 