then shall ye shout

My Thursday night ritual tends to be a good one. The past two weeks, since meeting new Christians at the pub, I've headed out at midnight to go prayer-walking around Founders and the rest of the campus. For those of you not familiar with church lingo, I'll summarise - prayer-walking is praying whilst walking. Or walking whilst praying, I guess.

You see, these Thursday night prayer walks have been going on for a couple of years, once every three weeks, same time, same place. Beginning of this term, this one guy gets a word that they should be every week, for seven weeks. It goes back to this bit in the bible, they march around Jericho once a day for seven days and on the seventh day they go round seven times, stop outside the gates and tear up the shit on their assorted instruments, drums, whistle-sticks and etc. Bosh, walls fall down, job done.

I joined the guys on their fifth week of walking round Founders. Last week was the sixth, tonight the seventh, meaning that instead of going once round Founders and then meandering off round campus, we trekked round that castle no less than seven times. Personally, I'm still convinced it was only six but by that time I was so massively disorientated I could have been walking along the turrets and not noticed. That's the thing with Founders, each wall looks much the same as the others in the fog.

Of course, it's not exactly like Jericho. In fact it's nothing like Jericho. For a start, we decided not to end our walk outside the gates, partly because we didn't want to disturb people too much, partly because security got wind of us and started grumbling. Also, as cool as it would have been, the complete destruction of a listed building wasn't what we had in mind. I think we were aiming for the metaphor; spiritual barriers rather than masonry being broken down. Mainly it was about obedience. This guy reckons this was what God wanted us to do tonight, so it's what we did.

This is where your opinions will start dividing, this is where we break into factions: those who think that this is admirable and those who think it's batshit insane. I think I fall neatly between the two. I think it's bonkers, completely and utterly bonkers to think that a God we can't even see would give such a specific instruction, and even more ridiculous that people would carry it out. Which is precisely why I think it's so admirable that they did.

The other difference between Founders and Jericho is that we didn't bring any instruments. Again, if I'd had my way, things would have been different, but this wasn't my party, so I didn't kick up a fuss. Instead, we moseyed on up to the top of the playing fields, right by the perimeter fence so that we had the whole of the building in our view. Alan counted down from seven and we all hollered 'JESUS' into the foggy night sky like banshees.

And someone shouted back. "Hello?!"

So we shouted back. "HI!"

And they said: "What?!"

And we just grinned a bit, and went our separate ways.

I love this. I love that I've found a group of Christians who are up for this kind of thing, for trying to follow God no matter how ridiculous they feel, up for wandering around in the freezing cold after midnight, praying for the crazy people at this crazy uni. I love that I can remember how to pray now, that I got to spend an hour and a half pouring my heart out as I wandered round Founders eating mince pies.

I worry that it's taken me a whole term to figure this out. I worry that I haven't been to bed before 12 since I got here, that I've barely had a decent night's sleep in almost three months. I worry that even now I can't find the motivation to do work, or to go to cell group, or even to pray sometimes. I worry that I've been to church four times in ten weeks. I worry when people look at me and think I'm joking when I say I'm a Christian, that it's so hard to put it into words. I worry that I've never told anyone the gospel. Sometimes I think maybe it's impossible to do this, to live in the world and keep everything clean, to actually be any kind of a witness at all.

But then I realise that I'm not worried at all, because there's nothing to be worried about. I'm so stupid sometimes, but I'm finally figuring it out. I'm not entirely sure who I am, I definitely don't know what I'm doing but I know where I am, and it's exactly where I'm supposed to be. I don't know how I got here, how I came to be in this room, writing about praying in the fog and shouting Christ's name at a sleeping building, but this is where I am, and it feels right. Finally, I feel right here.

So there's nothing to worry about.