I write to you from my octagonal dining table on a picture perfect saturday afternoon, listening to a Heartbeat CD that sends me flying back to my childhood. Should this posting actually be posted it will be a ground breaking achievement for those of us slightly less technologically competent than others.

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I am disappointed to report that Nathan Gallagher was not required to undergo any humiliating, torturous or dangerous initiation processes to become a member of the elusive NCS committee this week. We welcome him as our new hug distributor, with open arms. Any suggestions for such processes in the future are welcome.

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Members of NCS, onlookers, blog readers, fellow students, gentlemen and ladies of the court, Einsteins by nature but not by name, we appeal to you. Get out your brainstorming hats-of which mine is a set of giraffe ears- as we begin to plan the week of news, of great news, of overwhelming mind boggling heart palpitating news, the week that we call…Good News Week. We want every idea that hinges remotely or not so remotely on making NCS, and through it Jesus Christ, known to campus.  Do not be limited by tradition, in particular our infamous sausage sizzles which drain enough oil to keep chux in business, or our not so infamous bucking bull party. We want creative, we want daring, we want radical, we want conversation starting, we want thought provoking, we want funny, we want absurd, we want mass involvement, we want extreme impact, we want you.

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I have written, I have spoken, until next time.

photo credit: jenny downing

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For those of you who know me, you’ll be familiar with my love of the wonderful sport of Ultimate (Frisbee), and you may even know that I’m currently in the middle of a season of ultimate with the Newcastle men’s team, I-Beam. What this involves is several tournaments, and a lot more training, culminating at Nationals in about a month. This means that every Thursday at 5:30 am, I haul myself out of bed for fitness training, and ride to Shadders’ house so that we can get across to training for a 6:30 am start.

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This morning it was sprint training with a twist; the twist being that the sprint was up the steepest hill in the middle of Newcastle, the infamous Brown Street. It was decided that eight repetitions up the street would be enough, and we got going. Four reps in I was starting to feel pretty ragged (Martin was still going strong btw) and I walked over to one of the senior players to (wittily) comment on how much I was hurting. The reply I received was along the lines of “Come on Roger, it’s only pain…”

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This got me thinking.

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What is the point of fitness training?

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Put in its simplest terms, fitness training serves the purpose of physically preparing us for the big tournament to come. Hard work now will mean that we as a team will be better placed to still be running hard three or four days down the track; we will be better prepared for the task that is before us.

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(Here comes the point of this blog… it had to come sometime) It’s very similar for us as Christians, and for us as Newcastle Christian Students. We have a task before us, and it isn’t a small one either. There are several thousand students who attend Newcastle University, most of whom don’t know the saving grace of Jesus Christ our Lord. We as brothers and sisters in Christ are called to make sure that by the time they walk through the doors of the University, out into the world, they do know about Jesus, and have been able to make a decision on where they stand with him. Like I-Beam, the more training we put in now, the more time we spend in prayer and in reading our bibles the better we will be placed when the ‘tournament’ arrives. The better we will be placed to answer our friends when they ask us that tough question about what we believe, or contribute to a conversation when the topic of Jesus comes up in our friend groups or classes.

How convenient is it then, that NCS provides training courses aimed at preparing us for these scenarios? *Hint Hint*

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Cheers,

Ronas

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The Night Train (TNT) runs on Wednesday afternoons from 5:30 – 6:30 (After the bible talks) and offers a range of courses, from personal evangelism, to Engaging with Islam.

photo credit: Sebastian Mary

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Today’s committee meeting was, shall we say, atypical. It took place over breakfast  at the 3 monkeys and consisted largely of eating and coin tossing and trying to best each other at mindless iphone games.

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Many exciting factoids were gleaned from this experience, such as:

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* Jen and Martin are unsually obsessed with Survivor and watch the ads for it in slow motion to exclaim over the participants.

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* Nathan is particularly adept at coin catching.

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* Martin is not. His formidable talents lie elsewhere, namely at the top of the leaderboard in iphone toilet paper unrolling!

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* Centrifugal force does not exist (thankyou Sam).

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* Heather does not like breakfast food.

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* Roger’s pancake inhaling ability is world class

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AND

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* Libby is, for a very small person, amazing at going halves in breakfast delicacies such as those pictured.

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On an almost entirely unrelated note, but not quite, I learned not to park my car in the gutter with the steering wheel upside down, because it will not start and I will freak out and think my world is ending, and we will need to squish 5 of us into a volvo for a very cosy ride into breakfast. Thanks to Sam & Roger for setting the world back on its axis, by the way.

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So that’s really it folks. This is how the NCS committee functions when the madness of O’week is over and that of Clubs and Societies (wk4)  and Good News week (wk7) has not begun. You will be pleased to note that we will be back to normal come next Friday at 9am, at which time there will be less tomfoolery and more organising and praying and fellowshipping. Just as soon as someone can beat Martin’s freaky toilet paper score, that is…

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The ncs committee meetings are up and running again for the year, with our first full meeting happening last Friday at Shadders’ house. Because of the very busy but also very smooth and successful start to the year, we spent a large portion of the meeting praying and giving thanks to God for the great start he has given us to the year (A list of what we gave thanks for is at the end of this post so you can pray about it too!).

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Praying is a mussive part of what committee does in meetings, but we also talk alot. This week, the subject of committee roles, what we do as a committee and as individual parts of the group, was firmly on the agenda. How this panned out was that we looked at all of the different jobs that people on the team do, looked at which ones are currently filled, and which ones need someone to do it. The result of this was that all of the most important jobs now have people doing them, which is something that we can add to the list of things to be thankful for. We also decided that committee meetings will now be held on the wrong side of midday on Fridays.

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Much of the rest of the meeting was spent discussing social conventions on stationery, and the giving of said stationery, and as we do every week, enjoying Jen’s hospitality. This week, we’re looking forward to a committee field trip to Derby St, which looks like it’ll be pretty tops!

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Sweet as! (Committee in joke)

Ronas

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What we prayed about:

- Lots of new people to public meeting, and general contacts

- Returning NCS’ers stepping up to serve in and around O-Week

- The weather for all events

- Responses to, and work on the website

- Welcome dinners

- BDO attendance (particularly first years, already an improvement on Getaway)

- FOCUS

- People investigating Christianity

- Followup continuing to be done

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photo credit: jurvetson

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