Change of Scenery

Lee Abbey has a ground floor, five numbered floors, and a basement. I live on the 2nd floor, filled with 19 resident rooms and 3 community rooms. Its slightly isolating - most of the community live in the basement, there are only 6 community rooms scattered throughout 4 of the resident floors. The inevitable result is that I spend very, very little time in my room. I never see my roommate and we have a long-standing joke that we are strangers because we are never in our room at the same time.

This week, 10 community went on retreat to beautiful Lee Abbey Devon - vacating 10 beds, including the roommate of my dearest friend Alice (if you haven't heard me pronounce her name, its Ah-LEE-see in Portuguese). So . . . I moved down the basement for a week and had a wonderful time experiencing basement life. The only problem is that Samuel and Pedro live on the 4th and 2nd floors respectively, so it was sometimes more inconvenient than before to go wake them up for lunch (on their days off :) or grab them for a movie. But overall, I really enjoyed getting to see community members that I rarely talk to and of course LOVED to live with my dear sister . . .


Office Team! My co-workers from Denmark, Brazil, Britain, Poland, Latvia, Taiwan, South Africa, and Pennsylvania :)

Quick resident update - have had two very interesting conversations this week. Alice and I have made friends with two guys who room together, David (from Belgium) and Scott (from US). They are a hilarious pair, talking with them is like watching a sitcom. Somehow the subject of how Americans use the word "love" came up, and it was such a great opportunity to talk about the worldly idea of love versus a Christian perspective on love, and both of the guys were really intrigued. It was one of the first really deep conversations we've had, and I'm sure it won't be the last as the four of us have planned to spend all of Saturday visiting Portabello Market to buy fruit and see some art galleries.

The other conversation was with another American named Adam who is an atheist Philosophy major. We had a somewhat puzzling, but I think good, conversation about the ways to discuss faith. He had mentioned how much he loved his Philosophy of Religion class the previous day, so I was a little surprised to find that he appeared uncomfortable and a little defensive when the subject of faith came up (and in a very broad sense). But I hope that our short conversation too will lead to others in the future.