The weather never changes? What if every day is as hot as this, and as dry as this, and as polluted as this, until the planet chokes? It's eerie - the forecast on BBC weather for the next 5 days is exactly the same as today. At what point would we start worrying?
Wow! So much can change in a fortnight. His name is Tim.
Last night we had the dreaded conversation, the one that begins with "so these few weeks have been amazing" and ends with "oh God". To cut a long story short, he has promised God he won't start a relationship in 2007. I'm am at once happy, sad, excited and peaceful. This year is going to be ridiculously hard. The least patient girl in the world is going to have patience built into her DNA and the most wonderful man in the world will have the joy of knowing he's following his father. Wow!
My housemates don't get it. They're really worried about me. They're saying I'm going to get hurt, that it's ridiculous the way Christians do these random denying-yourself-relationships things. But I realised as I spoke to them that even if this is actually wrong, and even if we're being ridiculous and in fact even if as a result of this we lose what we could have had, I'd still rather do this. Because in doing this I'm not putting me first, I'm putting God first, and then Tim, and so in some ways it can't possibly be wrong.
Oh but it will be very hard!
Sometimes patience is a long-term thing, but sometimes we need it in an intense way in the short-term too. A lot has changed over the past fortnight, the upshot being that Tim and I might get together a lot sooner than we had thought originally. This is the week of praying and fasting about it. What I want is to get hold of patience even in this short week until Sunday.
In other news, yesterday my dad had 6 hours of heart surgery and has come through it. Thanks everyone who called or texted.