Journey mercies

Days like this makes me really glad to have found a church like IPC :)

I got into church just as they were starting the service and I quickly slid into one of the seats in the front rows with a few others who had just got to church as well. A few inside jokes here and there and a few of us snickered while looking at one another, which made me feel like the "inner group" in the know.

After service I started chatting with David L (the L family who has been really supportive of me since I moved to London) who I sat next to. And it was nice, because we knew each other well enough to have more of a conversation than we could a year ago and have more depth of a conversation than a superficial Hi, how are you - I'm fine thank you conversation.

But as usual, in church, you can rarely monopolise any single person's time, as different people will appear to want to have a conversation with you and then spent the next 30 minutes juggling conversations about.

Martin soon asked me if I wanted lunch to which in my usual dry manner, asked him if he ran out of people to ask for lunch. To which he grinned and confessed to. Then he launched to an explanation of how he and another guy was on the rota to provide hospitality lunch but Penny C, another Malaysian, was unfairly stealing all the people from church!

See, when you're on the rota for hospitality lunch, you're meant to invite the newer people over for lunch, and when he asked me and said he had asked a few of the more familiar faces around, I guessed he wasn't quick enough to snag the newer people.

IPC folks can get very competitive on getting people to go for their lunches. Some of the more veteran ones book their guests a week ahead. I've found if you don't plan in advance and book your guests ahead of time, you either get too few than planned or too many.

It's a refreshing thing to have a church fight to be friendly. I've gone to churches that tend to pretend they don't see you one too many times!