So the first night of the Alpha Course has now happened and I have just got back home. It started with the most wonderful meal cooked by some great people. We all sat and chatted and introduced ourselves and learnt about why we are there and I discovered that we are all there for completely different reasons. It's really nice to have so many different people there all looking at the same thing from so many different angles. They seem to remind you of things that you already know or may have forgotten from the past. Within the group we have some great leaders who are guiding us and asking opinions and thoughts without putting any pressure on us at all. I was welcome to join in and say as little or as much as i wanted to about any of the topics or things we had seen.
We were given a brief introduction and saw a video which showed a life flashing through in 60 seconds with the phrase "Is there more than this to life?" which lead me to a thought relating to whether there really is more. I also heard someone from a previous course give their experiences and ideas from how they perceived the course and what they thought of it and they thoroughly enjoyed it and admitted scepticism (sorry if the spelling is wrong!) which is reassuring.
The video from Nicky Gumbel was the first one in the series and set the scene for the rest of the course and to me the key thing that came out about it was when he said that we always strive for the next thing, and when we achieve that we wanted to go and find the next thing that was bigger and better. My life is constantly like that. There is always stuff going on and i am always trying to do better and do more... often with less time. Alpha is going to give me the opportunity to stop and take stock. Decide for myself what is the right way to go with my life. I will be able to have time to sit and decide and think and make decisions that ultimately may affect the rest of my life.
The second part of the video that I felt was relevant to me is that God is either extremely important or he is not important at all. This makes complete sense and i guess that really i am going to find it will be one or the other.
Thirdly there was a part of the video that made me feel quite uncomfortable. At the end Nicky started providing people the option for people to come before God and to close their eyes and I wasn't sure what everyone else in the room was going to do. I just looked around to see what was going on at the time, which probably isn't the right thing to do but i am just being honest.
After at the end we had a conversation about how we felt about the evening and I have heard all sorts of things tonight about what lies ahead. I am extremely curious and as Nicky says I put myself in the category that wants to find out more, but am not fully convinced as yet. I guess I have a lot of questions about a lot of topics and have not convinced myself about a lot of things but I have another 11 weeks or so to get to where i am going to be for now. Anyway I am signing off for tonight and am going to think about the things I have seen and discussed so far and will be adding some more to this over the next couple of days... Bye for now... :)
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