So these past several days (since Tuesday evening) have found me retreating at St. Denial’s, a residence library in Wales. It’s been a complete God-send of a time here thus far and we’ll be at this location until Wednesday. Let me try to put into words some of the things that have happened thus far:
To start off, in the middle of the day on Tuesday I found out that the mom of a good Bethel friend of mine had passed away that morning. Without going into detail I’ll just say that the news set a very reflective and prayerful tone for my day. It was a blessing to be able to spend much of the day on the bus (en route to Wales via Liverpool), shedding some tears, and listening to worship music. Though I was craving some alone time by the time we arrived in Wales, I tried to prepare myself to reenter community life at our accommodations, but I found that God had knowingly arranged for most of us to have our own rooms. He’s so good like that. I felt like He was setting the tone for my time here at St. Deiniol’s to be a place of rest, restoration, and spiritual filling; hence my statement earlier about retreating.
Did I mention that these accommodations were amazing? Not only do we have our own rooms (mine has two windows that overlook the back courtyard/grounds) and is titled “Vienna”; the bed is comfortable; all our meals are provided (and taste great!), plus afternoon tea and cakes; there’s a picturesque lounge area with sinking love-seats, large windows, and an abundance of pillows where we all have coffee after our dinner hour. In addition, there is an immensely dense library on location, filled with an abundance of books, most of which are typically used to do research, yet many are for leisure reading as well. Besides the internet being very unpredictable – which isn’t a large quandary anyways – I can’t really complain about anything.
We’ve had class on Wednesday and today in the morning hours after breakfast. On Wednesday I ventured down to the post office to mail a few letters, and to send a few purchases home to the states. The whole ordeal took me about 20 minutes, conversing with the locals and problem solving about which packaging to buy and how much it would cost. It was rather an amusing experience. I (mistakenly) bought a box that I didn’t end up using because it was cheaper to stuff all my things into a large padded envelope; and the man behind the store counter apologetically exclaimed (imagine in Middle Eastern/British accent), “I am so sorry. I didn’t know you were trying to send something to America. I guess your accent should have given it away, but I didn’t want to assume. I thought you were sending something inside the country when you said you wanted a box.” I naturally chuckled and told him that it was ok. I felt my cultural experience was worth the extra £3.00; after all, it even included this same store man and I both trying to assemble the box (which he had never done before evidently), and my attempt at sealing my overly-large box with packaging tape the width of scotch tape, just in time to discard it when I discovered the cheaper method. A seriously amusing experience, I must say.
I’m going to write about my adventurous day yesterday in a separate post because it seriously deserves its own heading and appropriate space. Just the same, today has been an immensely wonderful day! I had class this morning, walked around town (a.k.a. down the street and back) with a few girls, ate lunch, read some James Joyce, checked a large amount of facebook photo comments, drank tea and read my devotional book, practiced singing a couple songs with my professor on piano (one for a party we’re having on Friday night! And the other for class purposes on Monday or Tuesday), wrote a personal journal, and still have almost an hour until dinner!
Let’s just say God is teaching me a lot about rest – besides the fact that I climbed to the summit of a mountain yesterday, but I’ll tell you about that in the next post.
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