If Christ has not been raised we are to be pitied more than all people. Why? Because these decisions are utterly foolish if there isn't more to this world than all we can see, taste, hear, smell and touch.

7And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins. 18Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ are lost. 19If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are to be pitied more than all men.

20But Christ has indeed been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep. 21For since death came through a man, the resurrection of the dead comes also through a man. 22For as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive.

Phew. And so we carry on. I'll carry on waiting for the dust to settle on my emotions and my random headspace right now. We'll carry on working through the hard sorting out stuff of moving and trust that Someone else has schemes and plans that we can only wonder about. We are just creatures in the hands of One who really does know better than us. Mere dreaming? Or the result of an empty tomb 2000 years ago...?

With all this going on it's a good job Hebrews 13 is in the Bible. And an even better job that it keeps on cropping up. It says: "Be content with what you have because God has said, "never will I leave you, never will I forsake you." So we say with confidence, "the Lord is my helper, I will not be afraid what can man do to me?"... Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today and forever." We have a Rock in such times. We have one who remains with us, and so we can be content and confident. That's a pretty good thing in this crazy, ever changing world around us.

I like boys. (see not profound at all).  My life has become lacking in boys recently and I'm glad to see that trend being reversed, on the whole they are lots of fun.

I love praying when it really is just about talking to God and not impressing the people around you. Times when you laugh a lot at the random stuff that comes out of our heads sometimes and people do things as simple as tell Jesus they love Him. (note to self, start really praying like that more often.)

I'm not sure REM's new album is a return to form. It's better than the in parts tedious Around the Sun, but it's nowhere near as good as In Time and Automatic. I could be wrong. The guitars are loud and fast and that is swaying me to be kind to it.

It turns out there is a God who is at work in this world. Three conversations already this week have made me smile at seeing His work in peoples lives and hearts. I sense the words privilege-to-do-this-job rising to the surface so I'll hastily carry on before I skip further down the path of jargon phrases.

This one is for Anna H: We've got to bring people to the fountain of life, and we've got to be drinking deeply ourselves. There is no point just running cups of water to people without drinking ourselves, there is no point people being dependant on us. There is every point in bringing people to Jesus and watching as they encounter him and are changed.

There really is no better way to spend your Saturday than a walk in the wind on the downs, downing cups of tea, watching Top Gear repeats and then feasting on a banquet of lush food. Mmmm.

I wonder why we ask the question, whether it's born out of wanting to prove to either ourselves, God, friends and the people we work with that we have done a good job. It's also the natural question to ask in a job that has few boundaries or limitations. In the endless quest to make the brilliant news of Jesus known, and remind all of the reality of God it's hard to know what really is 'enough'. Who can tell? Who can really say? And will we ever know?

I sense we might be asking the wrong question though. Enough for what? Enough for who? Surely not enough to get love, surely not enough to stop, not enough to earn a reward. What is this enough we crave? We aren't living this life to find the answer to that question. We are living in response to the answer given to us.

Jesus is our enough. Without him we can do nothing, we can never on our own do enough. He is our enough. He is our fullness, our answer, our safe refuge, our rock, our joy, our crown, our life. We need to open up our hands again and receive the enoughness of Jesus. And from that place serve in the strength he provides, with the opportunities he provides, to the people surrounding us. It's good to stop and think about why we are here, what we are doing in this crazy thing we call life, whether we are doing the right things, but none of it comes down to 'am I doing 'enough'?'. Jesus fills that. We need to direct our thoughts to 'who can we best love today?' And at the end of each day repent of where we have not loved, thank our God for where he has enabled us to love and sleep resting in the knowledge that tomorrow there will be new mercies. Now that's 'enough'.

Tonight I sat in the pub with my Drum group talking about a variety of random things, religion included. Sad to hear Christianity associated with just a strict moral code and the restrictions of a patriarchal society. The greatest truth of all is the one we seem to find it so hard to communicate. That we are not about trying to be good, but freely, openly admitting we are broken, alienated from this world, each other and our Maker, and that the way back is through one mans sacrifice. That I am accepted as I am, transformed to be what I was meant to be all along, and that I no longer have to try to be anything anymore. I am my Makers, I am in His family and I am free. That's what we remember today and all this weekend. The immensity of God stepping in to love and bring his enemies home.

The questions ring around in my ears, do I live this freedom? Do I love this freedom? Do I embrace the freedom on offer and live a dangerous, risky life of love utterly secure in who I really am? And am I joyfully
thanking the one who bought this freedom with his life? Am I displaying this freedom to the world around?

This is friendship that goes beyond our illusions of perfect lives that we like to try and maintain, and even goes beyond our acceptable sins, right down to the core of the stinking mess that we like to hide from everyone, including ourselves. For someone to see this mess, and then to not turn away horrified but to continue to love and hold out the message of hope is what the reality of the gospel brings in our lives. We have a God who called us when we were his enemies, and who knows the real state of our hearts, and yet still lavishes his love on us. Our friendships need to reflect this.

Too often I live to impress and think that if I impress enough people with my growth and improvement I'll have made it. The truth is that I am still a sinner. I still get it wrong, and I seem to find ever more twisted ways of rejecting my Maker. The way of living that lives to impress only serves to keep me living in illusion, I then must do all I can do maintain that illusion and so my soul shrivels. The kind of friendship that sees the flaws, the pride, the mess within and carries on loving and is committed to real change is so breath takingly freeing. We can then be free to be our messed up selves with no illusions, and free to face the reality of grace committed to us whatever. I count myself honoured to have seen that kind of friendship on display through the Relay programe, in the lives of Andy Shudall, Nigel Pollock, Marcus Honeysett and more. Hearing them talk about times when they've rebuked each other, and been rebuked by others and seeing that wasn't the end of the friendship or their story in life and ministry is brilliantly encouraging.

This kind of friendship involves trust, exposure, reality and awareness that we are works in progress, sadly it's always more surprising to me than others when I discover my sin, but to have people around who know the truth and still offer grace, mercy and love is the best way to reflect the character of our most loving Father.

Don’t pray.
Don’t talk about Jesus.
Don’t love people, have chats with them purely to win arguments and not cos you care for them.
Don’t enjoy it, it’s rubbish news.
Don’t live it out, get drunk down the bar each night so that people can see it doesn’t really make any difference to your life.
Give up
Hide away for the next two weeks
Feel guilty and rubbish, God doesn’t really love you and thinks you are a rubbish person, why would he want to use you anyway?
Think that it all depends on you.
Get fed up when everyone you talk to doesn’t get converted the second you start talking about Jesus.
Don’t listen to people, answer the questions you can answer, loudly, force your opinions on them.
Don’t bother inviting your mates to anything, they think you are weird as it is.
Don’t bother making friends with people you meet this week. They’re all a bit odd anyway.
Do things on your own, be a lone ranger, don’t encourage anyone, what use will that be?
Complain A LOT. About everything. Moan moan moan about the CU, about the committee, about how rubbish life is.
Complain some more, especially behind peoples backs.
Did I mention?, don’t pray, it doesn’t work anyway.
God doesn’t really want people to come to know him does he?
Be confident in yourself, you are great aren’t you? And certainly not weak and foolish, of course you can convert the world.
Think the message is stupid. Tell people something they want to hear. Tell them becoming a Christian will make them happy, healthy and rich.
Of course it’s not true for everyone, as long as people are happy, that’s what counts.
Stop praying, I thought I told you before. A waste of time in this random fate driven world.

Lent is one of those occasions in which the real meaning has been taken over others. Either by self help gurus to help us improve ourselves by being thinner (who decided thin was good and fat was bad in the moral code of life anyway?). Or it's one of those things that smug people like to deride in a I'm so free I don't need to be disciplined for 40 days kind of a way. Both approaches have little merit. Feel free to ignore Lent by all means, but try not to be smug about it. And feel free to observe Lent but please do more than give up chocolate. At least find a good reason for giving up chocolate. Maggi Dawn explains all this far more eloquently than I ever could.

"Lent is not about giving up luxuries, not about losing weight or gaining other benefits, not about food per se, not about de-cluttering or Feng Shui or about ay other kind of feel-good, de-toxifying exercise. In the end, it's about denying yourself some of the essentials of everday life in order to focus on the reality that we depend upon God for life itself; about re-aligning ourselves with God and his purposes in our world; about reminding ourselves that all we have is a gift from God in any case.

And neither is Lent about achievement. We cannot earn God's love, nor save ourselves. If our Lenten Fast is understood well, it will relieve us of the need to try harder, achieve more, feel worthy. It will ground us in the firm and unshakeable knowledge that we are human - we are but dust, and to dust we shall return - but that to be human is enough, under the loving gaze of God."

So, if you give up chocolate do it because Jesus is sweeter and we need him in our lives. Find it hard and feel your need of God. But here's 5 things that might be better than giving up chocolate this Lent and feeling fairly smug about it.

1. Turn off the TV for half an hour a day. Read through the gospels in that time.

2. Feast on chocolate each weekend and remember the Good Provider of it all.

3. Use your time in a different way, do something nobody sees or notices that really helps someone. Don't tell anyone about it.

4. Actually fast for one day a week. Let it remind you of how much we need God.

5. Wake up each morning and remember that you are a dearly loved child of God. Enjoy that for a bit. Smile. Tell someone else who they are.

Really, do anything that reminds you that you are a creature in the hands of a quite brilliant creator.

I'm told that's what to expect. But that doesn't make it any easier to deal with. Believing something that the majority of people in the same culture and country as you don't believe is hard. Living it out with integrity is harder. Noah must have had it so bad. But at the end of today I still believe. I'm stuck with the one who has the words of eternal life and I really believe that everyone needs to come to Jesus for real life. He is the author of reality and the only way to real knowledge. I'm starting to see why Jesus sighed a lot whilst he was down here in peoples faces and still facing unbelief. I'm starting to feel the heartbreak of the words of John. "Though he came to his own they didn't know him". At least there is hope for all that do come to the fountain of living water, we can drink and live.