FAITH

During the week we held the first Christian Fellowship Meeting onboard. Alex did a wonderful job in setting it up and taking the lead. There were only three of us (all members of the NCF) but hopefully over the coming months we may get other members. Alex pays off next week so it will be down to Roger and I to keep the meetings going. I am pleased that we have started them up, as it wasn’t until I went that I realised how far I had drifted away from God and my faith. The meeting did much to bolster my spirits but I still find it hard, if not impossible to pray aloud. I don’t know if this makes me a poor Christian or just a quiet person. One thing that I did find helped was that we each wrote down something that we wanted to pray about and then we passed the sheets around so that we all prayed for each other. I have been praying a lot about Debbie of late, as I know she is finding things very hard. Not only is she in a lot of pain but we are skint this month. I can only afford to put £350 into her account, which by the time everything has come out leaves her with, very little. I had hoped that she would be all right this month as she had £650 last month but it is not the case. Hopefully things will go alright next month as I should get some back pay but there will be at least £200 come out of my pay for ships cash recovery. Anyway I am getting off the subject somewhat. The thing I really learned was that I need to make sure I pray, as if I can learn to put my faith in God I know he will look after us. We may go through testing times but he will be by our sides if only we have faith.

I have also been thinking about whether I should try and find a livelier church when I am at home next. I know I should support the church in my village but I find the services dry and there are only 5 or 6 people that go every week.

Well other than that the week has been reasonably quiet onboard; this has allowed me to finally get on top of my work and start looking ahead a wee bit. I have also had the opportunity to start reading a bit more. I finally finished ‘Old Ironsides’ (The military biography of Oliver Cromwell) which I thoroughly enjoyed. I have decided to take a break from the factual books and am now reading ‘Under Enemy Colours’. It is so nice reading a novel again and so far it has been very good. You can almost smell the sea air as the author describes sailing from Plymouth. Within the book there are also some interesting reflections on the social history of the time with comments about Thomas Pain and the leaflets he distributed. I will have to go back to my ‘History of Britain’ (book by Schama) to revisit that period in history.
I think this coming week will be reasonably quiet, I am going to make a real effort to get down the gym more to help blow away the cobwebs.