Encouraging One Another
4 November 2018
It’s lovely to be back at Christ’s for today’s special evensong, and it is particularly good to be back in Christ’s chapel; I sang in the college choir throughout my time here and loved it. The combination of the wonderful words of evensong, the beautiful music we sang, and the people who became very good friends to me was hard to beat.
I had a very happy time at Christ’s generally. I studied English and had fantastic supervisors, including Sophie Read and Ned Allen who continue to teach here. They were formative years, as my ideas about literature took shape and grew. I read and loved medieval romance, John Webster’s revenge tragedies, Victorian serialised novels, and 19th Century American poetry. I was challenged and stretched by the discipline of practical criticism: one memorable supervision on Lavinia Greenlaw’s poem ‘Silent Disco’ involved my launching off on a long explanation about how the whole disco was an elaborate metaphor for the experience of chronic illness before my patient supervisor suggested that it was probably just about a silent disco… As an English teacher now, I have realised how well I was taught and encouraged at Christ’s. I was given confidence in my abilities and in myself.
If you asked alumni for the highlight of their time at Christ’s, I’m sure many would say their friendships. My friends from here are amongst my closest friends today and I found the community of students at Christ’s hugely welcoming.
One group of friends I am particularly grateful for are the members of the Christ’s Christian Union. We met each week to read the Bible together, encourage one another and think about how we might give those who were interested an opportunity to explore the Christian faith. The reading we just heard from Hebrews reminds me of those weekly meetings: the writer to the Hebrews says ‘Let us hold unswervingly to the hope we profess, for he who promised is faithful. 24 And let us consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds, 25 not giving up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but encouraging one another—and all the more as you see the Day approaching.’
I certainly found myself spurred on toward love and good deeds in those meetings: as the word ‘spurred’ might suggest, this was not always a comfortable experience! I was very challenged in those meetings as I got to grips with different Bible passages and considered the implications of those truths on my life. But the challenge was never without encouragement. The group was a source of huge reassurance and comfort during my three years, and they helped me to keep a healthy perspective.
I am still in touch with the vast majority of the group and I even ended up marrying one of them! They remain great encouragers and have helped me to keep walking with the Lord Jesus. But I know that the true value of that group was not just the combination of people. We were a group of normal people gathered around an extraordinary person in the Lord Jesus Christ. The writer to the Hebrews puts it like this: ‘we have confidence to enter the Most Holy Place by the blood of Jesus, 20 by a new and living way opened for us through the curtain, that is, his body’. The most valuable thing that this small group did was pointing me back to this truth time and time again. What an amazing thing for me to be able to personally approach the Ancient of Days, Almighty God, with confidence, even though I had utterly rejected him: a way opened to us only because of the death of his Son, the Lord Jesus.
Christ’s was formative for me in many ways, but I will always cherish the way that at Christ’s I grew in my knowledge of a promise-making, faithful God, and the way that that small group of Christians encouraged me to live whole-heartedly for him.