Audience of One

Ashburnham 2006

As I didn’t mention before, let me mention that, like last year I have spent the last week at Ashburnham Place on a St Helen’s-organised summer school. I’ve made some of my best friends there over the past few years, so it’s always a fantastic week and helped me cope with coming home from Japan a bit better. (If I hadn’t had Ashburnham to look forward to I would have been far more unhappy coming home from Japan.)

The week at Ashburnham with St Helen’s people always sets me up for a year of irritation with my own church. The teaching at the summer school is always excellent, never boring, and only a problem due to the lack of sleep the teenage listeners usually get. This year (despite three or four nights with five hours sleep or less) I was always awake, due to my rediscovery of the afternoon nap.

I was helping with the three year olds in the mornings as I am now too old for the teenage group. This is an interesting experience, as the group had a greatly varying grasp of the English language and were often hard to understand for the unexperienced. They also have an attention span similar to a reasonably intelligent goldfish. Cute, though.

Leader: And now we’re going to say a thank you prayer about people. Who should we say thank you to God for?

Girl 1: Mummy!

Leader: Yes, we should say thank you for our parents, shouldn’t we? Who else?

Boy 1: Kate!

Leader: Yes, we should say thank you for our brothers and sisters too!

Boy 2: Charlie!

Leader: Yes, we should say thank you for friends as well. Let’s pray, shall we? (Checks to see all the kids are concentrating.) Are we all listening? Good.

Girl 2: Thank you God for boys!

They start earlier and earlier.

The teaching in the evening was on Matthew 8:1-9:13, which were incredibly familiar passages to everyone, so it really showed that there are some good preachers and some excellent preachers when everyone felt challenged and that they’d learnt something, even with such familiar texts.

The final night involved a couple of walks around the lake with a sheet in tow (it gets cold at night and I forgot to bring trousers/long-sleeved t-shirt), a viewing of Napoleon Dynamite, a rendition of Tom Lehrer’s Irish Ballad to a sleeping Welshman and an exploration for a Classical ruin that ended in failure.

During the week we managed to have conversations ranging from creation to the end times via “being filled with the Spirit” and literary deconstuctionism. I didn’t manage to see quite as much of certain friends as I would have liked, but on the whole it was good and I had some good conversations. The week gave me a lot to think about, and once that’s all been thought about some more I may well write about it here.

So yeah – another good year at Ashburnham, but I expected nothing less. Now I’ve got a whole load of other camps I’m helping on, this time with no one I know other than the camp leader. By a strange co-incidence, the camp I go to on Saturday is run by the guy who gave the talks on Matthew this past week. (His son was in my group of three-year-olds – I wonder if he’ll recognise me.)

…and into the third paragraph in which I try to end this rambling entry. For some reason the last sentence of the previous two didn’t quite seem enough like an ending. Like this one’s any better.

Matthew @ 20:49, July 30, 2006 to Diary | Comments (2)