so here we are again!

It's a tough week for me personally. I don't think i need to tell you that there is a football match tomorrow, one that a few people (inc. moi) are not only excited for, but very nervous about. At the start of the tournament i was a new realist of an England fan. 'We were OK but we won't win'. But you get drawn in though don't you? You start believing what people say. That we are good, we can win the whole thing (It would be nice just to win a game to start with), and that we are one of the favourites. You keep with your view to start with, trying to bat away the optimism, duck the enthusiasm, keeping focused on not being let down once again. But then when you have your back turned, it creeps up on you without you knowing. You turn on the TV and then you realise, you have the virus. It is all over you and there is no way you can get away from it. I hope, i pray, i do everything i can to make sure England has the best chance of winning a football match. Tomorrow will also be the first time my kids will have sat with me during an important football match. They have heard me listening to Nottingham Forest, but this will be the first time they have seen me in full flow.

So reality hat on..... unless we go onto win it, i am going to be disappointed. Why? because I get carried away in thinking we are the best football team on the Earth. We aren't! But we can hope, we can dream.

Thing is being a Christian, I know what it is like having the highs of a great experience in Worship, and seeing young people come to faith, but i also have the lows of wondering why God let's some stuff happen, and not getting my head around things that are happening. But the low times, make my faith real. It makes it something that isn't a flippy floppy faith, it makes it a faith with substance and depth. Just like a football fan we can sometimes get fickle in our faith lives. If God isn't doing or reaching the heights we think He should, we don't want to know.

With the last in the series of Dr. who on Saturday i hope for little disappointments over the next week , but hey then we have Andy Murray in Wimbledon. Is there no hope? I think there is...