Unfortunately, my article for Gair Rhydd on whether Britain should have a monarchy was torpedoed somewhat by the news that Prince Charles and Camilla are going to marry, which was announced on Thursday just around the time of the deadlines for the paper, though I didn’t hear about it until later and since I’ve lost my phone, the Editorial & Opinion subeditor Alys wasn’t able to contact me because of my lack of a phone. So I won’t know what they’ve put in instead until I see the paper this evening – since I’ve submitted some other articles, I hope they’ll use one of them and I’ll still be in this week’s paper.

On Thursday evening, we debated the motion “This House Would Make Camilla Queen”, which was quite interesting, but it went rather badly as a debate, getting bogged down in technicalities and stuff, such as the precise definition of “head of state” (which nobody actually knew, I think) and so on. My team came third out of the four teams, though those judging it said I did a good summation, boiling it down to the main questions in the last speech.

Yesterday evening at CU, the meeting was taken by the “go.global” team, and was about mission. I didn’t think it was as good as the Navigators’ evening on mission a couple of weeks ago. They eventually got to having a Bible talk at the end, but by then it had dragged on rather a lot. Talking about it from the Bible ought to have come first – there wasn’t any context or reasoning given for the statistics, stories of people’s gap years and so on. The Navigators’ Mission Evening had a really good talk on the Great Commission which was very challenging. It just felt a bit, well, fluffier yesterday evening.

But that said, it’s really prompted me to think through my ambitions. I’ve been thinking that the best way for me to serve God is to use my writing skills and so on to engage critically with the culture here in the UK. But have I really thought that through, or have I just taken my ambition to be an author and simply added on “do it for God” as an afterthought? It is right to serve God in our own country, yes, but too many people don’t consider serving abroad where there is even greater need. So I’m trying to think and pray about what my ambitions are, what’s the best way for me to serve God with my particular abilities and gifts and so on.

Oh, and to veer off on another tangent, it’s a month today to the Cardiff Men’s Convention, which I’m planning to go to and I hope will be good. George Verwer is speaking there, and I found his books Hunger for Reality and The Revolution of Love very helpful and challenging.

I’ve also been thinking through issues of pain and suffering. Something like the tsunami really brings home the frailty of human life, and although I can satisfy myself intellectually as to how a loving God could allow such a world, getting to grips with it in my heart as opposed to my head is a whole other matter.