today is our first wedding anniversary - very exciting indeed!

for a special treat, we took ourselves off to the St David hotel in Cardiff for the friday evening. we sat in ncie bubbles intheir spa and then had a nice massage each, ate some lovely food and chilled out in our room. tom had persuaded me to let him book what he wanted and so we ended up on the top floor of the hotel with a corner suite with two huge glass walls, a whopper bed and a bathroom that had speakers in it, so if you needed to go to the loo in the middle of a programme, you could still hear what was going on! (I wasn't overly keen on that - some places really do need to be tv free!).

then on saturday, after a nice sleep and a chilled morning, we headed into Cardiff centre and experienced the city which seems to have the worst puddle on thepath problem i have ever experienced! we did make it across town without drowning though and looked at the rather spendid gallery in the wales museum. this was followed by a short wait and then the Wales vs New Zealand rugby game. it was so exciting to see it live! i did get told off at one point though by tom, when rocokoko (?) was running amazingly to score his try and i got so excited that i jumped int eh air, shouting for him to run faster, forgetting that i was surrounded by gutted welsh people! oh well - i just couldn't quite help my enthusiasm!

it was a very good weekend : )

i had a great day on Saturday - watched morning Tv in my pyjamas, did some gardening, got some surprise flowers delivered from my lovely husband, went to Westonbirt Arboretum, went to watch rugby with some crazy kiwis and went to sing to God. It was great!!

Sunday wasn't so great. i had a rather confrontational phone conversation with my dad over that horrible decision as to who's going to spend Christmas with which parent when. Dad and i have never talked about his affair and break up with mum, due to his mainly being an emotional brick wall. it means that i still have many unresolved things in my head that i desperately need to let out, and he's decided that he needs to move on, without processing as it's in the past now, and that people need to just accept it and kind of fit into it. not really very helpful. BUT it has brought up a whole bunch of stuff i still need to give to God about it which is super-hard. does forgiving someone mean that you condone the situation they are in? what does it look like to forgive someone, when you really don't agree with what they've done and the subsequent situation they are therefore in? i don't know. i think i'm beginning to finally figure out that God knows though and can bring me to 'that place', wherever it might be and whatever it might look like. it's hard to let yourself be justified soley by God and not worry about people thinking they've got the upper hand and winning you over because you have forgiven them...

This is a bit of processing, so forgive the probably incoherance and possible lack of sensitivity.

Yesterday Tom and I went to the funeral of a friend of his from uni who died a week ago last friday of brain cancer. She had been battling it for 3 years or so and it had gone into remisison and come back a few times. Aside from the whole event being a very sad one as she was only 26, it was made sadder for us by the fact that she didn't know Jesus and none of her friends do either. This resulted in us wondering whether or not we could have done more and in them being totally lost as to know what to do or how to react in trying to process it all. We came away feeling like we understood a bit more what Jesus felt when he talked about looking on the crowds and having compassion on them because they were lost like sheep without a shepherd.

i felt quite ruffled by the vicar who led the service too. Having had some training in how to conduct funerals i totally understood how hard it is for those leading when the person who died didn't know Jesus. However what i came away wondering was the role of the minister actually is in that kind of situation. It felt like he was very much at the beck and call of the mourners - to give them what they wanted, rather than really help them in the true sense of showing them Jesus, obviously in a caring, loving, sensitive manner. It felt a little like he compromised himself, which made me sad.

that's it for now - i'm sure there will be more...