Welcome to Capernwray

Well it has officially been one week at Capernwray! If you have seen any pictures of Capernwray Hall you will notice that it is a big beautiful manor house, sadly I don’t get to stay there, I’m in a smaller building called the Conference Hall which doesn’t look nearly as cool, but does get better Wi-Fi (yay) so I can post updates more often (that is if I ever get around to writing them).  I have 5 roommates, and four of them are from Canada, I just might come home with a Canadian accent rather than an English one! Hahaha, but all together there are about 174 students here, ranging from Canada, USA, Germany, Belgium, Romania, Denmark, South Korea, Japan, Scotland, Ireland, England, and Switzerland. What an international group! And yet we all get along through some of the hilarious culture clash moments, and our lectures without any problems.  My day here at Capernwray consists of breakfast (generally toast. Lots and lots of toast) then I go and clean our bathroom for my daily duty, and then we have two 45 minute lectures. We just finished a great lecture on prayer by one of the staff members named Kim. She highlighted for us the role of the Holy Spirit in prayer, that when we feel like we can’t pray for ourselves or aren’t doing a “good job” the Holy Spirit intervenes and prays for us.  I also learned about the different forms of prayer and while I might just like having conversations with God when I feel like it, prayer also needs to be a discipline, something that I need to work at daily to build my relationship with Christ.  Then after our two lectures we have a coffee break, meaning we get a biscuit and a cup of tea or coffee, and then we have two more lectures and then lunch. The funny thing about lunch here is that it is what we would normally call dinner. Our first lunch here was roast beef, potatoes, gravy, and Yorkshire pudding followed by a desert of apple crumble with custard, Jamie Oliver style (thank goodness they have a fitness course!) basically the equivalent of my Christmas dinner. But then tea, what we would call dinner, is a light meal of leftovers or soup and salads.  Something to get used to.  Let’s see some of the other stuff I’ve done, well we went on a beautiful hike in the Lake District near Ambleside on Saturday which was then followed by a Scottish Ceilidh, which is basically square dancing to upbeat bagpipe music, which was so much fun, and I have been learning how to ballroom dance, courtesy of my roommate and one of the students here. I now know how to waltz, and do the rumba! Oh the things you learn at Bible school!