It's All About the Journey

It was a small scene in a much larger dream that has caught my imagination today. 

The larger dream involved driving the car over a patch of sandy ground with lots of marram grass to cut a corner that had a traffic light.  I have seen people on bikes cut corners all the time, but not people in cars!  The car got stuck in sand and I had to get the bus.

I was in Nairn and the last bus to Inverness had long gone.  There was a bus beside the stop and the bus driver leaned out of the window to tell me he was going to Tore on the Black Isle.  For those that know our local area, the geography at this point breaks down.  To get from Nairn to Tore one would have to go through Inverness – but you know what dreams are like.  He told me that there were busses every half hour from Tore to Inverness.

I got on the bus, bought my ticket and sat down.

“So, you are trying to get to Inverness?  There are busses from Tore to Inverness every half hour.”  It was a nice young man standing next to me.  He was repeating basically what the driver had told me.

“You’ll have a half hour wait,” said another passenger.  He was quite a burly chap. “If you visit the Tore Arms bar, you have time to hear my band play.”

“He’s the drummer,” added another voice.

“It’s a rotten band, mind…”

The banter on the bus was really friendly.  It turned out a woman on the bus was in charge of the light buffet and began asking people to do little things for her like collect the paper plates and plastic spoons from the shop.  She also checked whether anyone minded but she was planning the use the spicy recipe for the chicken drumsticks.

A boy on the bus asked if anyone could help him with his homework.

It wasn’t a quiet bus.  No one disappeared behind a newspaper or a book cover.  No one searched for an empty seat all by themselves.  It was a collection of people who knew each other well to the point of teasing one another.

We piled off the bus at Tore, outside the Tore Arms bar.  There was a collection of people milling around outside.  Some of them were the band members with their musical instruments in cases.  They waved to the bus driver as he left.

There was lots of conversation beside the door of the Tore Arms bar.  No one seemed to be in a hurry to set up for the band or sort the buffet.  They stood beside the door and chatted.  It was not a warm night, but with all the people by the door, it felt warm. 

Someone spotted the Inverness bus.  It had a bit of a circuit to do before it came back to the bus stop which wasn’t outside the bar, but a short walk away. 

“We’ll walk you the bus stop,” said the first man that spoke to me.  At some point I had acquired a cat and a seven year old boy.  Someone picked up the cat.  Another man picked up the boy and we all started the journey to the bus stop.

I woke up at this point.  I felt a little bereft.  I wanted my journey to the bus stop.  I wanted to stay in the company of my new found friends.

Before I had even begun to puzzle out some kind of interpretation, those words that instantly came to mind were “It’s all about the journey”.

The word “journey” seems to be tainted with the reality show experience and contestants talking about what they learned along the way or what they will take with them as they get voted out.  This was not like that. 

The friendliness and familiarity of the people on the bus reminded me of my home church.  We are a very small church, but much like a family.  I don’t have my own teenage daughters so I count it a privilege when a young girl tells me about her growing pains.  I sit beside another young girl dissecting poems and counting syllables.

Throughout life there are people who share a part of our journey.  Some walk beside us, or sit on the bus with us, for longer than others.  For some, I think we can make that journey quite unpleasant or a bit of struggle.  Other times, we make the journey a welcoming and comfortable one.  We include rather than exclude people. 

Too often I am the person disappearing behind the newspaper, isolating myself.  By doing so I miss those opportunities to journey beside someone for a while.  The words I could have said to encourage them were never spoken.  We continue to travel in our lonely orbits and that was never God’s intention.  

I time to fold the newspaper and put it away.  It’s time to start telling people about the band at the Tore Arms bar, warn them about the spicy chicken drumsticks and ask them to help us with our homework.

Moving the Furniture

I’m trying to work out when and why I stopped moving the furniture. 

I seem to remember moving furniture around a room was just a natural part of my growing up life.  Every year one room would be re-decorated and the furniture would be shifted accordingly.  Inevitably here were times when the furniture would end up in the same place it started.  The size of the furniture and the shape of the room didn’t always give many options for variety.

Moving furniture was also a part of my university life.  It just seemed natural every so often to have a shift around.  It wasn’t just me.  We all did it.  We might even have had room shifting parties where we all pile into one room and the room occupier would direct people to move the bed under the window and bookcase beside the door. 

When I had my own place I shifted the furniture regularly.  The people I shared the house with were not furniture shifters and couldn’t understand my need to move things.  It wasn’t a compulsive thing or weekly or monthly thing.  I would just wake up one morning and know it was a furniture shifting day.

There was something refreshing about seeing things in different places.  I liked the variety of what I could see when I was in bed – sometimes I would be facing the door, other times the window.  Sometimes I could see the wardrobe, other times I couldn’t.  I liked it that way.

Did I stop because the furniture just got too heavy to shift?  Or was it me getting less fit as the years progressed?  I think part of it was marrying a non-mover-of-furniture.  My husband once wrote a motivational message on his whiteboard at work that said, “No one moves…No one gets hurt,”  he could quite happily have corned beef sandwiches every lunchtime and not feel the need for variety. 

I am a furniture mover at heart. 

I was talking to a young friend earlier in the week.  I suspect she is not a furniture mover.  She doesn’t like change.  It’s the change inflicted upon her that she doesn’t like.  She has reached that age in life where change is inflicted upon her in the form of hormones.  It seems like a stranger has hijacked her life and started to move the furniture around.  Nothing is in its proper place any more.

Change is being inflicted upon me also.  Being issued with hearing aids involved changes and my brain having to adapt to sounds it hadn’t heard for a long time.  Every so often as my vision changes I have to change my glasses.  I begrudge the expense and wish I had twenty-twenty vision.

My working hours are going to change in the not too distant future.   The changes in my view are not for the better, but the bull-headed managers are not listening to my concerns.

It all got a bit much for me yesterday.  Life felt like a pinball machine.  I was not the hand in control of the buttons and levers, but definitely the ball knocked from one side to the other.  Lights were flashing, buzzers buzzing , bells ringing and it’s was all too frantic.  It was just one change too many as far as I was concerned.

I sat on the sofa at the end of the day feeling quite trampled on and bruised.  It wasn’t a bible that I opened but a book of devotions. 

“Lord… are you not the God who is in heaven? You rule over all the kingdoms of the nations.  Power and might are in your hand, and no one can withstand you…for we have no power to face this vast army that is attacking us. We do not know what to do, but our eyes are on you.”  2 Chronicles 20:6, 12

Sometimes I have a tendency to forget that there is a ruler over all the kingdoms of the nations.  Sometimes I think that it is all down to me to sort it all out and find a way though.

Someone else seems to be moving my furniture about – not in my house, but in my life.  I don’t particularly like where they are putting things, but I they don’t listen to me.  It seems like I am powerless to do anything about it. 

What a comfort it is to know that I am not powerless at all!  I have on my side the ruler over all of the kingdoms of the nations.  I don’t feel quite so pushed about.  The furniture may not be moved to where I want it to be…but that’s OK.  My eyes are on God and I am safe.  The challenges ahead are not insurmountable when I have God’s resources at hand to deal with them.

Now let’s think about shifting the bed…

Poetry That Demands a Response

It was a first, apparently!  The response to a poem I read at the Poetry Club on Saturday was met with something more animated than a round of applause.

The previous week, my first joining-in experience, there were a lot of church people.  I had read a couple of easy-on-the-ear-and-brain ones.  One was slightly autobiographical recounting my time in a Roman Catholic convent – the orphanage side of things.  Another one was a poem I had read at my brother's funeral.  Things seemed to be going well, and, as I said, they were mostly church people, so I tossed in a couple of Christian poems.    They were well received.

So I tried it again.  I had a mixture of poems, some less spiritual than others.  Easter is a matter of weeks away so I read an Easter poem based on Jesus’ words on the cross “Why have you forsaken me?”  It was written from the standpoint of God.  How much it must have cost God to turn aside from his Son.

Someone sitting next to me didn’t like to poem.  It’s OK not to like my poems.  Sometimes I don’t like my poems. 

He said he was a Christian and he used to be a church minister.  He had gone to university or college to do a degree.  He had been confronted with so much evidence that made it difficult to maintain his faith.  Science proves that the opening chapters of the book of Genesis are not true.  He talked about the big bang and how science had proved it all.  He went on specifically to say that he could not respect a god who had sacrificed his son.  Punishing Jesus for sins He never committed?  What kind of God was that?  Not a loving and beneficent God, that’s for sure.  He moved on to talk about natural disasters and said that if God was really powerful and really loving He would intervene.

It wasn’t new stuff to me.  I’ve heard the arguments before.  The rest of the Christian contingent had also heard the arguments before.  It erupted into  a free for all – a chance to dig out the Bible verses in the head and other stuff.  Sometimes these arguments were flung like grenades across the room. I’ve heard all of those arguments before too.  I am not always convinced by them either!

The man had suggested that to be a person of faith one must surrender reason and intelligence.  He wasn’t prepared to do that.  Under normal circumstances I would agree with him in the sense that faith cannot always be reasoned out.  I have known many Christians who are very suspicious of knowledge and intelligence.  They say that you can have too much of it and it’s dangerous. I believe it’s not what you know or how much of it you know but whether you lay it down before Christ and are prepared to surrender it.

There was a pause in the discussion.   

God doesn’t make it easy for Himself, does He?  It seems to me that not only does the devil get all the best music but he also gets the lion share of reasonable arguments.  It is more reasonable NOT to believe in God and when you look at the state of the world and God’s apparent absence from it – it can be a challenge.

I stepped into the pause. 

God did not send Jesus to die on a cross, I said. The trinity is a tricky thing to untangle.  God and Jesus are not two unrelated beings.  God took on human flesh.  That human flesh was called Jesus.  God didn’t send Jesus anywhere.  God went, in the flesh, as Jesus, to the cross.  He took on our sin, as an act of love, to release us from a slavery we could not free ourselves from.

The man looked at me.  This was new to him.  He hadn’t thought of things in quite that way. He nodded a little and agreed that it had its appeal. 

And as for natural disasters, I went on, I am not sure that many of them are that natural.  The human race has created many of the conditions under which tsunamis, flood and droughts happen.  The way that we have abused the earth, cutting down forests and over farming have led to places becoming deserts where crops cannot grow. 

We touched briefly on free will and whether the freedom we had was worth it.

Had the conversation happened twenty years ago I would have been churning out the tried and tested answers that I had been drilled in.  I can remember role play activities in our home groups pretending to witness to a non-believer.  We practiced what to say.  In those days I was one for winning an argument, but frequently lost the person.

It mattered this time that I didn’t lose the person.  I wanted an answer that would make sense, a gracious answer that leaves the hearer free to take it or not. 

On discovering it was a first, I was careful to ask later whether it was best to avoid bringing overtly Christian poems. 

If poetry doesn’t stir a response in the hearer, it’s not good poetry I was told.  When you read a poem, you launch it into the world and it ceases to be yours.  Other people take ownership of it.  They hear what they hear which might not be what you thought you wrote.  It becomes something other than what it was when you wrote it.

Bottom line – keep sharing

Defending the Castle

I came across a news article the other day about a town in America that intended to pass a law that required every household to own a gun.  There have been other towns that have passed similar laws.  One such town boasts a drop in the crime rate since they implemented the law.  They admit that the crime rate wasn’t very high to start with. 

Taken to the extreme one could imagine people ending up in jail for not having a weapon in the house.  One could also imagine a gun-less homeowner being sued by the criminal.  If the gun had been there, and been known to be there, the criminal would have been deterred from entering the property.  The lack of a gun could be construed almost as an invitation to rob the house!

The “required to” part of it has its exemptions.  If you are a felon, mentally disturbed or object on religious or moral grounds you are not forced to have one.

I would choose not to own a gun.  I am not a felon or mentally disturbed (often) but I would object on religious grounds.  Jesus lived in a violent world where life under Roman rule was fragile but he didn’t carry a gun, or its equivalent for those days, and neither did his followers.   

I’m sure the issue is more complicated than that.

I stirred myself to write a poetic response.  It touches on gun ownership, but also about where you draw the line when it comes to how far you can go to protect yourself.  When does the force you use to defend yourself become excessive?

Defending the Castle

A letter most official sat

A landmine on the doorstep mat

MacLean and Sons, the letterhead

I read their missive filled with dread

It seemed that I was being sued

By M. J Grant and his evil brood

M J Grant?  His face I sought

A witness at the justice court

Some months ago, his eldest child

Drank too much and then went wild

He broke into my house one day

To take my treasures far away

A baseball bat beside the door

I wielded and he hit the floor

And as he fell he broke his nose

And well deserved one might suppose

He claims I used excessive force

I will plead innocent of course

My home’s my castle I’ll defend

Intruders I will apprehend

How fortunate I had no gun

And shot to death that father’s son

A broken nose will one day mend

A bullet won’t your life extend

It seems to me a sorry case

That I, the victim, must embrace

A lawyer now to plead my cause

And fight against such irksome laws

Asking Questions

Having had my hearing aids for three or four months the people that gave them to me wanted to know how I was getting on.  An appointment was arranged to talk through a checklist of questions and to find solutions to some of the problems I was encountering.

Was I actually wearing them?  That was the first question. 

I have to admit that the hearing aids have spent a lot of time out of my ear. Like me, they keep to working hours.  I tend to take them out once I have left work.  I have an hour or two to myself where I’m not talking to anyone but God.  Hearing God or not is not a hearing aid issue.  I like my ears to get a break from having technology stuffed in them.  I sometimes put them back in when Joe arrives home. 

My brain has done the adjustments.   In the beginning I was bombarded with every sound possible – like everyone else.  Everyone else has had years of brain-training to know which sounds are important and which ones can be ignored.  Every rustle of paper, every creak of a chair, every whisper across a room, a strand of hair being twiddled with – I heard it all.  Now I have caught up with everyone else.  I am so comfortable with them that I have to check I have them in.

Are they helping? Duh!  The sound produced by amplifiers I suspect is not top of the range in terms of quality.  Sound can be quite tinny at times.  

What about television?  The volume had been quite high before the aids.  The people next door could probably mute their own TV and just listen to ours!  A man sitting on the wall at the end of the garden might have been able to hear it too or someone sitting on the park bench next to the children’s playground four hundred yards away.  Now we are normal.  Joe and I still fight over the volume control – he likes it a little louder than my hearing aids do.

What about telephones?  I told the woman that I took out my hearing aids to answer the phone.  Any handset with a shape was a challenge.  With my ear drum stuffed to capacity, I couldn’t work out where to place the handset.  Those folk with naturally loud voices were not a problem.  The quiet speakers?  Where before I used to tuck the handset close into my ear, now I didn’t have that option.

The woman pulled out a catalogue of gadgets that included hearing aid friendly phones.  They didn’t look that much different from what I had.  She told me that as a hearing impaired person I could get a discount on phones and that my work was probably responsible to meet my needs.   She also showed me where on the amplifier the hearing aid microphone was. 

How’s the tinnitus?  If only there was a way to pull that out of the ear and stick it in a little black case! When the hearing aids are in there is a continual buzz from the battery that would drive most people nuts but gives my brain something to focus on other than the whistles, beeps and buzzes that it thinks are there.  Once the hearing aids come out, the tinnitus is all that is left.  What had been a background noise for most of my life has shifted to up front.  Like the tuneless kid in the school choir right next to the microphone it’s not to be ignored.   It cannot be switched off and I cannot keep my hearing aids in at night.

She flicked through the pages of the catalogue pointing out various devices that could help and we arranged a meeting with a hearing therapist!  I didn’t know such a person existed.

What I really appreciated about my visit was that the woman asking the questions had her own set of hearing aids in her ears.  She was not an expert who had learned the stuff from a book but actually had not real experience of what I was going through.  Her own hearing loss was much more severe than mine.  My tinnitus was much louder than hers.  A lot of her answers began with the phrase “This is what I do…”

Since they have taken me and faulty ears on, the hospital staff have been excellent.  My transition to hearing aids has not been without its problems, but it has been made easier by the hospital staff.

I was thinking about that this morning. 

I wish my transition into the Kingdom of God had been as easy.  My first few years of being a Christian left me pretty much to my own devices.  I had come to new birth at a rally.  There was not church that I was a real part of.  I went off to university in a matter of weeks.  My newly found faith was tucked away in my heart and memories of Sunday School were tucked away in a distant past.

I joined the Christian Union and I joined a church in a nearby town so I wasn’t entirely the baby abandoned on the doorstep.  There wasn’t anyone in those first few years, though, that made themselves my mentor.  They never asked me how I was getting on in my new found faith.  They never checked the foundations of the building I was constructing.  They assumed that because I was a Theology student I knew it all anyway.

Was I going to church?  Was I enjoying going to church?  How often did I pray?  Did I know God was listening?  What version of the Bible was I reading?  Did it make any sense?  Did I talk to people about my faith?  What doubt did I have?  Did I know about the enemy?  Did I know how I could get the better of him?  Did being a Christian make any difference to the way I lived my life?  Was I getting to know God?  Did I love being in His presence?

I was struggling badly. 

I had left the church I had joined.  No one came looking for me.  There was a small Methodist chapel within walking distance.  I went there one Sunday.  A small elderly lady took me home for lunch and asked me all those questions no one else had asked.

Every Sunday, for over a year, she asked them until she got the answers she was looking for.

The ears and I have been led into the world of hearing loss gently and easily.  Someone has asked questions and shared their own solutions.  My struggles have been mostly short lived.

I am becoming a small elderly (?) lady.  I can take you home to lunch after church and ask you questions …if you like.  I can share with you my own solutions… if you like.