pancakes and communion

So I am kind of having a moment right now. I am the only one in the house, an occurrence which is extremely rare and therefore very exciting. We went to church this morning and now the other girls have gone out to a pub for lunch, but I felt like I needed some time alone to think and pray and process and hopefully do a little reading. So I came home, made myself an omelet sandwich and am now sitting by our bay window...having a moment.

Yesterday was full of people. As I mentioned before, we had an open invitation for people to come to our house for American pancakes on Saturday morning. If I remember right, there were 19 people, counting myself. I have no idea how many pancakes I made. Let's just say that I was cooking one and sometimes two pretty continually for somewhere between 2 and 3 hours. I made banana pancakes, blueberry pancakes, and of course good old plain ones. As far as I can tell, no one there had ever had American pancakes before, but they were a big hit. Hehehe, I am infiltrating their society with American culture!

After eating, we hung around for a while playing trivial pursuit (which by the way, is very difficult because the questions are mostly British). Then we headed out to the park to play tag and football and lie around on the grass. After that it was off to another student house for one of the girl's birthday party. We rounded off the day back at our house with a nice "sleepover" in our living room. Five girls were lined up on the floor and I got the couch because I had made pancakes. Altogether it was a relaxing day in a very social way, but I am glad to have some time alone right now.

As I was making my omelet, I was thinking about communion. At the college, we have communion at least once a week during our chapel on Thursday. I love the way that they tie in communion with community. Sometimes the leaders have had us take some bread and then go find someone to share it with - someone we haven't gotten to know as well or just need to pray with. One time they had us share communion as houses and last Thursday it didn't really fit into the flow of chapel, so we just had communion in the middle of our community lunch. Before this, I used to think of communion as being a very personal thing, a time for just me and God. Now I see it as being between me and God and my Christian family, particularly my KBCTC family. It is amazing how much you bond with people by sharing communion in this way. One of the days, I shared it with Meg, one of the other students. I felt like I only knew her in very superficial way and needed to get a little deeper. We ended up just standing there and talking about how amazing it is that Jesus came to earth as a human being and died for our sins. I have had a different perspective of Jesus and of Meg ever since.

I was just thinking about how, in a way, yesterday was a day of communion. We were eating together and learning together and just living life together. Sometimes we directly talked about God and sometimes we talked about everything else under the sun, but it is all part of Christian community. Somehow my relationship with God is intimately connected to my relationship to all of these people.

Just some of my thoughts.

By the way, my moment is over. While I was writing that last paragraph, eight chattering girls burst into the room. There are now about three conversations going on and music playing. Oh but I do love them! (By the way, they just found out that I am writing about them and Sarah made me promise to say hi!)