Powerful Words

A friend and I were discussing the misuse of vocabulary.  Earlier on in the week I had been talking to someone about a particular challenge I had been facing.  It was a stressful situation and, for the most part I had been careful to pray about it and seek God’s perspective. What others might label as coincidence, I took as God’s answer – the situation changed.  It became something well within my scope to deal with. The story and its resolution was greeted with a single word, “Cool.” Too much was wrong with the world when "cool" describes something other than an ice-cream.

The English language is rich and varied and, I know it is in a constant state of evolution.  New words are added to the dictionary and old words get tossed out and other words take on another meaning.  I sometimes think our use of words can be really lazy.  Perhaps that’s what I like about poetry – the use of good words,

I love words.  I love hunting down a word that carries the exact meaning I am looking for and I will not settle for a convenient word.  It’s the writer in me.  I’m not sure that I am capable of dumbing down the words I use, or willing to do so.  Do I distance myself from my listener, or my reader, if I use a word they’re not familiar with? Perhaps. I asked group of young people this week whether, if I called them apathetic, I would be complimenting then or insulting them.  Some thought about it.  They knew the word “pathetic”, and knew it wasn’t a good word to be called.  Did the “a” at the front make it a better word or a worse one? They plumped for the compliment – though they ought to have factored in past history and the things I had called them on previous occasions.  Praise was something hard won and didn’t slip so easily from my lips.

This morning I was reading the end of Numbers ch6.

“The Lord bless you and keep you; the Lord make his face shine on you and be gracious to you; the Lord turn his face toward you and give you peace.” (Num 6:24-26)

They are words given to Aaron by Moses to bless the Israelite nation. The heading in that section of the page says “The Priestly Blessing”. 

Having a chequered history of going to a variety of churches throughout my almost forty years of being a Christian, I have heard the words spoken lots of times. Although the Bible tells me that I am part of God’s royal priesthood I can’t think of any time that I have spoken those words to anyone in that particular order.  I have asked for God to bless people on a number of occasions.  I have asked for His grace and His peace to be poured into people’s lives – but never quite using those words.

Aaron had God’s permission to say that blessing.  It wasn’t something to say to make people feel better – some kind of spiritual placebo.  The words were God’s intention and purpose, His promise.  There is a blessing to be experienced and the assurance that God keeps us in His hand.  He doesn’t let go of the things He treasures – and He treasures His children.  There is grace to underpin our lives – grace not to be just saved by, but grace to live by.  And don’t we all need peace?

The blessing isn’t a three wishes thing.  It’s not the words of a spell. It is a powerful blessing – words that are spoken that have the power to truly transform the life of the hearer. And because of that they should not be spoken casually or out of habit.  I wonder if the church minister who ends the church meeting really intends that people be blessed and know that they are kept.  As he says the words does he, in his heart, call God to keep His word?  How different would our faith walk be if someone spoke those words over us in faith, and we received those words in faith and lived those words each day accepting them as true and letting them transform our daily lives?

Father,

Thank you for Your blessing.

Help me today to speak those words, in faith, over myself.  May my spirit take hold of these words, in faith, and live in the expectation that I will be transformed. Tomorrow and the next day help me do the same. I am tired of telling myself something other than the truth.

Encourage me to speak those words, in faith, over my friends and family as I pray and give thanks to You as I see their lives transformed.

Amen  

Tweets

I woke up this morning at about half past two.  Waking up is not unusual for me.  Sleeping through the night is. It’s probably an age thing and a post-menopausal thing.  I probably need less hours sleep than I used to but still try to insist my body has its seven or eight hours.

It surprised me to hear a bird singing at that time in the morning.  The bird had no right to be singing at such an ungodly hour.  Dawn was three hours away.

The creative mind switched on as it does at times.  I admit I am not fluent in bird but a couple of bird conversations came to mind.  Maybe it wasn’t just the one bird:-

 Scenario 1

The scene takes place in a nest in tree beside bedroom window.  Robin flutters down to the nest quite unsteadily.

Jackie: (Jackie Bird, Scottish news presenter, get the connection?) And what time do you call this? It's half past two in the morning! I was worried sick. Anything could have happened to you! You should have tweeted!

Robin:  Not right now, love.  Can we save this for the morning?

Jackie:  And just where were you?  I have been sitting on these eggs all day.  Your shift began hours ago.  I’m starving and I need to go to the bathroom.  It’s not as if I could leave the eggs, could I? Blooming cuckoos have been seen in the area. 

Robin: The lads over at The Oak were talking about immigration.  They’re letting too many birds into this country.  There's aready enough competition for worms and insects. They better not be jumping the housing queue!

 

Scenario 2

The scene takes place in a nest in tree beside bedroom window.  Jackie is sitting on the eggs fast asleep.  Suddenly…

Jackie:  OO! OO! Robin! Quick – come here!

Robin: Huh?

Jackie: It’s the eggs!  I think they’re hatching!  I can feel them wobble!

Robin: The eggs hatching?  That doesn’t sound right!  It’s far too early for hatching.  I’ve not finished decorating the nursery yet.

Jackie: OOO!  OOO! Something is definitely moving under my bottom.

Robin: Shift over and let me have a look.

Jackie: Oh Robin.  What if they’re born premature?  They’ll never survive!

Robin: Move over, Jackie! Let me have a look!

Jackie moves.  Robin inspects the eggs. Only one, a large one, is wobbling.

Robin: It’s just the one egg – the big one.

Jackie: What big egg?  We don’t have a big egg!  They are all neat little things. 

The big egg splits and a cuckoo emerges.

Jackie: He’s a big fella! I think he takes after your Great Uncle Eric.

 

Circle Poem

This is not a circle poem.  It is a poem in the form of a circle.  By this time next week I will know what a circle poem is.  The Bike Shed on Grant Street, Inverness is hosting a poetry writing day - circle poems. The plan is to use some of the poems to decorate the wall near Merkinch that forms a part of the river defence system. The selected poems will be engraved on to the wall. If you are local to Inverness and want to get involved it's not to late to sign up at the Inverness Museum and Art Gallery for the workshop.
 

Padlocks on the Bridge

The voice of reason in my head told me that there would probably be no poetry meeting at the Sunset Café on Saturday.  A fire earlier on in the week has seen many of the city centre roads closed off.  I had done too many three point turns at various “Road Closed” signs during the week but I was hopeful that the smoking embers had been made safe.

A different voice, the whip wielding one, the one that reminds me of my obligations, persuaded me to go “just in case.” I spent an hour or two in the afternoon hunting down poems – some of my own, and others that had been steered in my direction by other poem lovers.

The road closures forced me to park in a supermarket car park on the other side of the river.  The city’s river defence system is being updated.  The council has started building a wall along the river so that when the water rises from tides, the spring thaw or a downpour of rain that lasts for weeks, the houses along the river will not be flooded.  My husband used to live beside the river and was issued with sandbags every year. 

I walked across the footbridge – a suspension bridge my mum called The Wobbly Bridge.  I don’t know whether it is wise to cross the bridge when one is inebriated.  Staying upright when one is sober is a challenge enough.  It’s not so bad if one has the bridge to oneself but when there are others and the younger generation insist on bouncing at every step.  For those of us plagued with travel sickness it adds another difficult dimension.

I should have listened to the voice of reason.  There was a notice on the door of the Sunset Café announcing it was closed till the end of the month.

Making my way across the bridge I noticed the padlocks.  There weren’t a lot of them, a dozen or two perhaps.  Names were scrawled on them in black marker.

My first thought was that perhaps someone had jumped off the Greig Street Bridge committing suicide.  It wasn’t unheard of, although the water isn’t really that deep and the drop isn’t that steep.  There are better bridges around if death is your intention.  Just like people put flowers by the roadside when someone dies in an accident I thought the padlocks might have been something similar. 

My second thought was about bikes – a bizarre idea that someone, or lots of people had padlocked their bikes to the bridge and someone else had come along with a steel cutter and stolen the bikes. I told you it was bizarre. 

One of the padlocks was different.  All the others were padlocks that any hardware store would sell.  Names were written in black marker.  The different one was not plain steel with black marker, but white with hearts stamped on black and red all over.  I was back to my first idea and thought that it must have been a close friend.  I didn’t remember an article in the local paper about anyone launching themselves from the bridge.

I googled padlocks and bridges and all became clear.

Apparently, lovers leave behind a “calling card” in places that they visit – padlocks on bridges with their names written on them. The Greig Street Bridge is not the best example though it may be early days yet.  There are other places in Paris or in Venice where the padlocks are in their hundreds and thousands and elbowing other padlocks for space. Every so often some city man comes along with his steel cutter and removes them all much like someone at the Western Wall in Jerusalem cleans the crevices of all the prayers and petitions written on scraps of paper and a new wave occurs.

What happens when the couple fall out of love? Do they return to the bridge with their steel cutter and remove the padlock solemnly tossing it into the river below? Or do they just leave it there perpetuating a lie? And just how many padlocks does it take to affect the safety of the bridge?

In Paris the city’s culture secretary Bruno Julliard, is hoping to find “artistic, unifying and ecological alternatives” to the love locks and has called for artists from around the world to suggest “a place or a piece of art that would welcome all these love locks.”

In New York the love locks have attracted the attention of the Open Organisation of Lockpickers who have lock picking events and practise their craft. The locks are carefully removed and put somewhere safe so that at a later date they can be used in a permanent display. 

Some people support the romance behind the love locks.  I am not “some people”. Some people might suggest I am sour because I don’t have a padlock declaring my love for my husband.  To those people I say they must look at the life my husband and I live together.  We demonstrate our love in a myriad of ways.  We cook each other meals, we iron each other’s clothes, I nudge him when he falls asleep in church and is about to start snoring, he tells me I have toothpaste on my lip…

A padlock on a bridge is no indicator of tried and tested love.

How God Knows Me

He knows me

not by the green flecks in

my hazel eyes or the

strands of silver in my hair

He knows me

not by the soft angles of

my smiling face or the

warm glow of my complexion

He knows me

Not by my size or shape

or by the framework of my friends or

the lifestyle choices I’ve made

He knows me

By the weight of my heart

Light as I lift up my hands in worship

Heavy as I lift up my neighbour in prayer

1 Samuel 16:7

God's Broken Ones

Poll results published yesterday show the UK to be one of the least religious countries in the world. Only 30% of the people polled claimed a religious faith.  Other countries that scored poorly include China, Hong Kong and Japan.  It came as a surprise to see Israel in with the bottom five, along with Sweden.

It would be interesting to see a poll that reveals the happiest countries in the world and to see whether the religious belief and happiness correlate. My own view for what it’s worth is they probably do.  I don’t think for a moment that the most religious countries are the most miserable.  I have my theories that the UK is a very unhappy nation, not merely because of the current political or financial state it finds itself in but also because of an abandonment of faith in God.

Faith lived properly is about outward-looking service to others – loving your neighbour as yourself.  I am not saying you need a faith to do that.  Faith isn’t always lived properly.  Not-yet Christians are sometimes kinder and more self-sacrificing than those who claim a faith.  Sometimes a faith community can be the most destructive force going.

Faith lived properly is a challenge. Belief in God isn’t some kind of vaccination against the things that torment and trip us up. Happiness isn’t the absence of conflict but having a secure path, God’s path, leading through that conflict.

Last night at the Women Aglow meeting I listened to the testimony of a woman. 

Pat shared her life.  She talked about her adopted children.  She confessed that perhaps if she had known about the struggles ahead with them she might not have adopted them at all.  She wouldn’t have seen herself as being equipped, but discovered the equipping came with as the journey progressed.

She talked about her elder son’s trouble with drink and drugs.  I thought it would have a happy ending.  When Christians talk about these addictions they talk about God’s miraculous deliverance and how everyone lives happily ever after. I don’t know when I realised that there wasn’t a happy ending.  She talked about the struggles of his being at home and the final realisation that they had to tell him to leave. She talked about treatment of alternative drugs the medical men prescribed, and the flashes of sunlight that deceived them into thinking he was on a road to recovery. Then the narrative slowed down.  Her eyes were fixed on her notes.  She stopped.  Tears started to fall. The words “He was dead,” were almost whispered. 

Almost immediately Pat addressed the words we were all thinking – “Where was God?  Where was the miracle?  Why did God not step in?” God didn’t take away her son, the drugs and the drink did that.  Where was God? With them, giving them strength and courage to take the next step forward. God respects our freewill even when it leads us to hurl ourselves off a cliff. 

Being a Christian is not about God putting us on a yellow brick road that leads to an Emerald City where someone tells us to click our ruby slippers and we go home to somewhere nicer. 

It is about learning to live in a hostile world and always, always holding out peace to people that have none.

Pat spoke about the difficult months that followed. There was no breathing space as life lurched from one crisis to another.  Through it all God was the Rock they clung to.  People looked on amazed at how they lived under such tremendous pressure.  Yes, they broke.  They are people, not Kryptonite-enhanced super-heroes. God restores what has been broken.  People are being broken by life’s storms every day. There is little they can learn from Christians who have never been broken. They need to know there is a path to repair and restoration for them. Telling them there is such a path is good but it has its limitations. Watching a Christian who has been broken walking that path with God is a powerful testimony. 

I reflected on my own life and testimony. I thought how pale and insipid it was in comparison.  I had spoken at meetings myself but suddenly felt that I didn’t have the right to speak because I had nothing that really mattered to offer people. 

God laughed gently.

“Oh, Mel,” He said, “how quickly you have forgotten…”

Memories of my own broken days flooded through my mind.  They were not merely days, or months, but often years - one after the other - when I had walked through such dark days grimly holding on to God’s hand, letting go sometimes and falling.  I sometimes think my pain, visible like some weeping wound, embarrassed people. I felt alienated a lot of the time. People looked for the happy ending then, but the narrative of those events slowed down, and then I stopped and the tears started to fall. 

I had forgotten that I was one of those broken ones too – one of those God-repaired and restored ones.  God reminded me that my life has been anything but pale and insipid.

The key to learning to live in a hostile world and always, always holding out peace to people that have none is to hold out my own hand first to God and to not let go.

"Walk With Me"

It was Monday afternoon.  I had spent half an hour or so watching as the Rev at the For The Right Reasons printed off a sizable pile of home-made poetry books for my KYFO Easter challenge.  While I folded them into A5 sized booklets and he stapled them in the middle, he held a conversation over my head with a lady who had popped in for a chat.

I dropped off the poetry books at the Inverness Cathedral.  A friend was curating an Easter art exhibition “Walk with Me” in the lady chapel at the top left hand corner of the cathedral.  It was due to open the next day.

“Do you want the guided tour?” she asked me as she waved me forward.

I am sure she could see it all in her head.  She knew exactly what piece of artwork was going where.  It just wasn’t there yet.  I found myself gazing at big pieces of white board – just the boards but no pictures.

“Remember the archway picture? Well that’s going to go here…and there’s a sculpture that’s going to go in this corner…” I nodded vaguely.

Throughout the week she has been posting photos of the exhibition and writing commentaries on who has been to visit and the conversations she has had with people about the artwork.  There was an audio guide and some of my Easter poems have been included. 

This morning I went to see the exhibition.  I was down to man the help desk later on in the day but wanted time to look at the pictures, listen to the commentary and sit quietly.  I had managed to download the soundtrack onto an MP3 player but it had helpfully rearranged the tracks alphabetically.  It wasn’t the chronology of the gospels.  Things were just a little out of sync and I found myself retracing my steps once or twice.  I had permission to take photos, but not full head on.  Actually, my curious angles and close-ups made for an interesting result!

I’d seen some of the pictures in last year’s “Art of Easter” exhibition.  The much smaller selection of pictures and the more intimate space gave more time to really look at the details.  I think last year I wasn’t impressed that Jesus in the picture "Gethsemane" was naked.  So, I’m a bit of a prude!  This time though, what occurred to me was – isn’t that how we all approach God? Naked? There’s really nothing we can hide behind, no amount of designer clothing that covers us up before God. To consciously remove the camouflage – isn’t that our challenge as we come before God and present our petitions? I think we do far too little of our praying on our knees and face down. Posture says everything.

There was a small sculpture of clay and wood on the same subject matter – Jesus in Gethsemane.  There should have been a notice propped up against it saying “Please touch!” The colour and the texture appealed to my tactile gene.  Clay can sometimes look fragile – and it seemed an apt medium – Jesus praying in Gethsemane had to be his most fragile moment in that fully human body of his.

Sieger Koder is a favourite artist of mine.  A really well placed pew to be still, a powerpoint display of pictures taken from his stations of the cross and some excellent poetry on the audio tape combined to make it a highlight for me. OK, I admit I was listening to my poetry! When my friend asked me to record the poems, she seemed concerned that I would get choked up and emotional and it would take us ages to do.  Reading them was not a problem.  Listening to them being read – listening to me reading the poems – I got seriously choked up.   I suppose when you are reading there’s the next word to think about and the inflection of the voice.  Listening - there’s nothing to do but listen and lose yourself in the moment.  It was an emotional moment. I knew the familiar words I’d written and yet I almost didn’t.

 

Another picture “Three Days Later” depicted the upper room days after the Passover Meal. I had worked out the bit about the table cloth being a prayer shawl long before the artist told me on the audio guide.  The water in the bowl Jesus had used to wash the disciples feet seemed a little too clean to me and I had small issues about the shadows made by light hitting the various cups on the table.  Fundamentally, even though housework and I are not close companions, it irked me that no one had cleared the table in three days.  Were they not in that same upper room hiding before Jesus appeared?  It is precisely when I am upset that I bang about in the kitchen doing the washing up.

I liked the exhibition a lot.  I liked the intimacy of it.  There were enough pictures to focus the mind and the spirit, but not too many that you felt you were drowning. 

Did I like the Cathedral setting?  Sitting at the help desk, fairly immobile, I felt the cold creeping slowly into my bones.  It was a grey day outside so the stained glass windows didn’t light up with colour splashes on the walls or the floor. 

I liked being in the city centre and the visitors that accidentally found the exhibition really loved the time and space to think about Easter.  I know it’s never about numbers but for much of the time I felt the emptiness of the building was an indicator of how far removed the church has become from many people.  Even at Easter, a time of reflection, of sober thought about the crucifixion, of celebration of the resurrection – for most people, it doesn’t really touch them.

But then, one of those “most people” walk through the door…and they are touched, most unexpectedly…and God draws near.

And So God Turns Away

This is my art work from Sunday's retreat at the Abriachan Forest classroom. I am amzed what soft pastels and charcoal stained fingertips can accomplish.

The Last Line

I know my story

and how this chapter ends

I watched as the pen seemed to

weigh heavy in Your hand and

the words struggled to be written

Other words fell like laughter

from your lips as they shaped an empty void

I, the Living Word

with overflowing joy

sculpted mountains and carved out seas

This day, this last line is upon me

The ink smears as tears fall

Final words will tear my skin and unhinge my bones and

place sorrow on my shoulders

A felon’s death I can bear

But Your silence?

How can I endure that?

(Psalm 139:16; Isaiah 53:5; Mark 16:34)

Liquiglide

I’m not a Jonathan “Woss” fan and I hope that his afternoon slot on Radio 2 is just holiday cover.  Maybe it’s the “w” thing that replaces the “r” thing.  He is a lazy elocutionist.  Laziness in any forms offends me – except when I’m being the lazy one, of course.

I was on the point of turning over to Radio Scotland when Woss began talking about sauce bottles.  He referred to the advert where someone gives a couple of sound slaps to the bottom of an invisible bottle and out pops the ketchup, and the bottle materialises.  He talked about his preference for a glass bottle over the squeezy plastic one.  Personally the slap on the bottom of the bottle has never worked for me, particularly to get the last dribs lurking at the bottom.  Vigorous shaking and poking a knife into the neck of the bottle has been my preferred solution.

Liquiglide is the answer.  Massachusetts Institute of Technology has come up with Liquiglide - the first and only product "to create permanently wet slippery surfaces".  The plan is to coat the inside surface of bottles and jars with Liquiglide, so the sauce slides out easily.  If this was April 1^st I would classify it as a very good April Fool’s joke.  Woss’s worry, or should that be wowwy, was that the sauce would slide out of the bottle so quickly that his sausages would be like sharks swimming in a sea of ketchup. 

I am getting further behind with Bonhoeffer in our 40 days walk.  He is not quite out of sight but we are not walking shoulder to shoulder.  Life and other commitments have interfered.

The focus was on giving in one of the devotionals.  I had checked my bank balance the day before pay day and was pleasantly surprised to see it wasn’t empty.  It was more a shock to see so much left over at the end of the month that I began to think about an unpaid bill somewhere.  Giving and some money left over at the end of the month seemed to go hand in hand.  It was as if this particular devotional, the time I got around t reading it and the presence of some money were like planets aligned.  I couldn’t operate on a fall-back position that I couldn’t afford to give.  As Bonhoeffer put it so well – even when I can’t afford to give I can’t afford NOT to give. 

I am very unlike my husband.  If there were canny Scots in our houshold with their presumed frugal habits, carefully counting out the coppers, it’s not him.  I must be that Scot by marriage not birth.  I am a rainy day kind of girl and the rain needs to be the Noah’s Flood variety before I part with my spare cash.  I am getting better over the years and blessing people around me, but only after intense dialogue with myself and with God.  It encouraged me the other day when I discovered the leftover money in the bank that my first thought, accompanied with joy, was about who I could bless.  OK so I haven’t blessed anyone yet – one has to wait for the weekend to do that! Does one really? Is this yet another procrastination in the life of me?

So, there I was, listening to Woss harp on about sauce bottles, sausages and Liquiglide.

“It’s a pity,” said God, as we safely negotiated a very small roundabout on the way home, “that something like Liquiglide didn’t occur to me when I created people.  If only the giving heart in you was coated with Liquiglide, the compassion and the mercy would flow out so easily instead of stubbornly lurking somewhere at the bottom.  I could just tip you up, and out it would all come.  People would be swimming in a sea of love! There would be no waiting for the weekend to bless people.”

I didn’t point out that it’s not only compassion and mercy that reside in the heart of me, simply because I didn’t think about it as the time. In the heart of me, living uncomfortably side by side with compassion and mercy, are the grudges and the complaints, the petty resentments and, at times, the unforgiving attitudes.  They shouldn’t be there, but they are because I am human.

Maybe I ought to live my life as if my heart was coated in Liquiglide – perhaps then I would deal so quickly with those negative things, taking them before God to deal with, and stop allowing them to live side by side with compassion and mercy.  I would be swift to encourage and I wouldn’t have that extra money waiting for the weekend to bless someone with.

But then, where does obedience come in, the sacrifice that hurts, if everything just slides out unhindered. 

Maybe it’s best to leave Liquiglide to

the sauce bottles.

Talking About Jesus

I’m close to three quarters the way through my 40 days with Bonhoeffer.  When I get to heaven he will be one of the people I seek out first – that’s after Jesus, and God, the Holy Spirit, and my mum and dad, and my two unborn children, my sister Linda and my brother Mike and Joe’s mum and Laddie dog, and William Wilberforce and a host of other great names. 

The topic for today is the Word of God.

I feel myself to be on fairly solid ground when it comes to the Word of God.  I’ve read it, preached it, acted some of it out in various scenarios, written poetry prompted by it, prayed it, written devotionals inspired by it, drawn pictures of some of the stories, chewed over bits of it, spat out other bits of it, rewritten bits of it to suit myself and, sometimes allowed it to soak into me and become part of who I am and what I do. I have been transformed by it.

We cannot do without the Word of God. 

“But God put his word into the mouth of human beings so that it may be passed on to others…God has willed that we should seek and find God’s living Word in the testimony of other Christians…Christians need other Christians who speak God’s Word to them.”

I used to get into serious trouble every Sunday when I worshipped with the Brethren Church when I lived in Limassol in Cyprus. I don’t know whether the rules about women speaking in a meeting have been relaxed or not, but in my day they took Paul’s directive about women being silent very seriously.  It always surprised me that as a woman who rarely said much from Monday to Saturday when none would have complained, Sundays were a real battle to stay silent. 

There was always this bit in the evening service about testimonies.  A gospel message was always preached, despite everyone in the room having made a commitment to Jesus.  Visitors were rare and usually came with letters of recommendation from other Brethren churches.  When the invitation went out to share what God had done there was a heavy silence. No one was jumping the queue to get to the platform to share a testimony. There was no queue, just an awkward silence, before the speaker moved on.  I hated that silence.  God was not doing nothing! So I started to fill it.  I gave accounts of answered prayer.  I talked about encouraging conversations I had with my landlord about Jesus.  I described sunsets that had stirred me to praise God. 

Every Sunday I would say something.  It got to the stage where heads would start turning in my direction as soon as the invitation was given. I was admired by some but vilified by most.

Every Monday I would be called to the elder’s office and hauled over the stones.  Did I not know the Scriptures?  Did I not know that as I woman I was commanded to be silent?  I seem to remember some retort that went something like, “If the men in the church did their job properly I wouldn’t need to speak out!”

The spoken Word is not just about reading what is written in the Bible.  It’s also about testifying of how the Word in my life is transforming me.

The first of two journal reflections for today was about writing about people who spoken God’s Word into my life.

Have I mentioned my hermit tendencies and my self-sufficient streak before? I speak the Word of God into my own life!  I guess I’m not talking to as many people as I could, or I’m not talking about my Christian walk with them.  Sadly, I’m not even sure that I expect folk to speak from God to me.  It is not a good thing to admit.  I perhaps need to deliberately put myself in the path of His Word, and recognise and respond to it in all its forms.

The second journal reflection was about identifying the people I had spoken the Word to.  My problem here is, not exactly editing what I have to say, but saying the “God” thing and not just the “good” thing. Saying something is often not the problem.  Making what I say necessary is the challenge.

At a first glance I think I chastised myself for not being vocal enough and sharing my stories with others.  I have thrown enough pearls to so many pigs and seen it trampled into the mud that I am not always quick to speak.  But then I remembered the poetry that I write and share at the Sunset café, or at a Sunday meeting, or on the blog…and I know that I am speaking the Word of God to people.  It’s wrapped in verse, but it is the Word of God.

“One generation commends your works to another: they tell of your mighty acts. They speak of the glorious splendour of your majesty - and I will meditate on your wonderful works. They tell of the power of your awesome works - and I will proclaim your great deeds. They celebrate your abundant goodness and joyfully sing of your righteousness.” Psalm 145:4-8

Tell me about what you know of God’s mighty acts – truth I need to know.  Let me tell you of His wonderful works in my life – truth you need to know.

Let's talk about Jesus!

Community

A friend of mine has recently moved into a new house.  It’s closer to the children’s school so the family doesn’t have to wake up so early in the morning and there are no school runs to do with the  car.  There’s more space with an extra couple of rooms so people can spread out and not feel like they are tripping over one another.  Some of the plants from the garden also made the move with them.

I’m thinking about what I will buy as a house warming present.  It has been a while since any of my friends have moved anywhere.  We are a settled bunch. 

When my husband and I moved into our first house we were given a Visitor’s Book for people to sign.  It seemed to be the essential thing a house needed in the early days when the church was first planted in the late 1980s.  Everyone’s home had one.

I am not sure that there wasn’t some kind of unspoken competition going on.  Not just how many visitors, or how often they signed the book but also the “who”.  There were people who rated higher than others.  There might have been bonus points for unknown names – the true strangers who could have been angels in disguise, as against the usual names who couldn’t possibly angels at all! I don’t know where our visitor’s book is.

I am vaguely thinking about buying my friend a visitor’s book.  Will they see it as a hint that we want to be invited round?  Will they see something implied in it that I don’t think they are sociable enough? I just might go with a potted plant instead.

Day 22 with Bonhoeffer is all about community.  (It’s actually Day 26 if we’re counting from the day I signed up to the studies but, as ever, I’m in catch-up mode.) He reminds me that God never designed me to be a solitary figure but always in community.  Bonhoeffer doesn’t know that I have a hermit mentality but, it he did, he would still be telling me that I need to be in community.  God’s heart has always been for a people, not merely a single person.  Christ’s body is BODY not body part.  In the beginning in Genesis God said that it wasn’t good for man to be alone and created companionship and helpers.  He expects us to be our brother’s keeper. We support and are supported by our Cristian community.

I don’t know about you, but sometimes I think that people just get in the way.  God and I get along really well together.  When it is just the two of us out fellowship is sweet.  It’s people that throw the spanner into the works.  I was birthed as a Christian into self-sufficiency.  I am the spiritual equivalent to a South American big city street kid who knows how to survive. Making connections, interdependency, relying on or trusting others, or have them relying on or trusting me doesn’t sit easily with me.  Community is good for me because it forces my gaze away from myself and puts it on God and on other people. It gives me the opportunity to be responsible for others and to speak truth into their lives.  It’s important to know that other people have my back and take responsibility for looking after me.

Community is more than just a group of people in the same place.  We can be like marbles in the same jar, making a lot of noise as we connect – but we remain unchanged. We are still the same ball of glass we were when we began.  Better, said someone, to be grapes – bruised by the contact, bleeding juice and staining one another with our encounters. Our willingness to surrender and to give ourselves to others is what makes the Christian community unique.  We need to give what we can’t really afford to give but give it anyway, give because we can’t really afford to hang on to what can meet another’s need and not waiting to some personal disaster in a person’s life to begin to give. 

Next week our church is planning a day retreat at the Abriachan Forest classroom.  We were there around about this time last year. We will be spending the day together being community.  We strive not to make it a highly organised affair and want to balance assigning hours and minutes to one activity or another with just a walk in the forest and time spent chilling out and talking.  

I intend to be a grape and not a marble.

Real Hope

What is hope if not

a tenacious plant
that blossoms with subtle colours
on the steep and rugged cliff faces
of affliction and pain?
What is hope if not
the stubborn refusal to grant a man permission
to hurl himself down?

What is hope if not
something more than blind optimism?
What is hope if not
the unmistakeable fragrance that
will not fade
beneath the moist threat of grey clouds or
the damp smell of heavy rain?

What is hope if not
deep, deep roots
grounded and secure in
something more solid than our own fragility,
words beyond pale platitudes
laced with careless sympathy
or the chin up and the drawn-on smile?
What is hope if not
more than the false dawn
from a dark night?

Hope, real hope, is
confident expectation,
a timely gift graciously bestowed
upon the hapless and the helpless
by a faithful God
who sees the near sinking boat
and responds

Moniack Mhor - the Sequel

It would appear that I really can’t write fiction to order.  

I was back at Moniack Mhor this morning.  Last week’s writing course on poetry left me feeling satisfied.  I has the bones and some of the flesh of poem and the fired up enthusiasm to tweak at it, pulling out some lines and chopping at others.  I don’t know yet whether I have reached an end result, but I like where it is at.

Today’s course was prose, using our experiences and observations to come up with a fiction piece, the beginnings of a short story.  What I would really like is for people not to say they have never written a short story before and then, at the end of the meeting, read out something really wonderful.  Surely their first effort could be a lot less than wonderful.  I, however, with a computer file of dozens of short stories find it difficult to spin a tale at times. I can’t seem to connect the dots.

Part of the problem was an underlying anxiety about getting home. A badly parked car had caused me to also park badly.  The car was pointing downhill, nose not far off a burn, on a stretch of icy mud. I had tried to reverse to a more secure spot but the wheels turned and car stayed where it was.  Floozy and her snow tyres were just not creating enough friction.

There was also the drive up the hill.  It had been a very warm day yesterday.  People in pale faces blinked at the unfamiliar sunshine and shed their winter coats and scarves.  There wasn’t quite the smell of sun tan lotion in the air, but it was warm.  At night time I suppose the temperature dropped.  There wasn’t a heavy frost, not at low levels.  Up in the hills where there had been floods last week, the wet patches on parts of the road had iced over.  Floozy slipped once or twice but nothing too dramatic.

How can anyone be expected to write fiction when reality had already been quite scary?  I was banking on another sunny day where by the time I drove home the ice would have melted.  Floozy and her snow tyres could cope with mud better than ice.

The tea, coffee and cake settling in was followed by the usual round-the-table introductions.  Only a few faces were familiar.  One side of the table was made up of member of the Black Isle writers group, many of whom were working on manuscripts which they humbly insisted were unlikely to be published.

We were given a proper guided tour this time and given a little more detail about the garden planted recently. Places that had been under water last week were dried out and accessible. 

No one asked me to listen to a plant speaking.  I have to say that having spent yesterday afternoon replanting the patio containers, the plant world and I might be on speaking terms now.  The task this time was to make notes, observe and use the material in a fiction story. 

I am a stone gatherer.  I like to bring something home after a visit somewhere, preferably a stone, but a bit of wood will do or a strand of sheep’s wool caught on a barbed wire fence.  I suppose these bits of things remind me that I went to these places.  Sometimes I remember what I did or saw, but most often the places merge.  That grey sparkly stone might have come from just outside a bothy in the middle of the Cairngorms or it might have come from a path beside a river in North Yorkshire.

I picked up a stone from a pile beside a pond and secreted it in a pocket.  I wanted to write about a stone gatherer, like me.  A different age from me, a different gender, a different place but a stone gatherer like me, with a glass bowl of stones on the window sill, and a first stone in his hand and a memory - a boyhood memory of sitting on a bench in the sunshine, underneath an open window, listening to someone teach a group of students how to write poetry.

I’d like to say it was a great short story, or the opening few paragraphs to one, but it didn’t really take my imagination by the scruff of the neck and insist on being written. Where the words of poem would have leapt from the wings into centre stage, the short story was flagging a taxi from the corner of the road to go home to warm slippers and a generous thumb of a single malt.

Without the option to pass, my short story was inflicted on the other writers around the table. It was seriously cringe-worthy and didn’t even qualified as the poor cousin in the room.  How different from last week when someone said my poem was their favourite.  There were no plaudits this time, just a swift moving on to the lady next to me.

OK, so this one morning I couldn’t write a decent short story. 

Am I down-hearted?  Not really. I’m not about the surrender my pen and donate my thesaurus to a charity shop.

Tomorrow I might write a best seller!

Garden Poetry

It had been a year since I had been up at the writing centre at Moniack Mhor.  That time, I had printed off a map from the AA Route Planner.  There was a left and a right and another left and I ended up on a farm track leading into a ploughed field.  Do they actually send someone to locate these places or is it all done by satellites?  If so the day they did the map to Moniack Mhor must have been a cloudy day!  After an hour of single track roads with passing places, and the frequent passing of buildings I had seen before, I admitted the AA Route Planner was useless.  I phoned for someone to come and rescue me.

So, this time, before I was due to attend a poetry workshop, I did some reconnaissance.  I timed myself, made sure I had enough petrol in the car for mistakes and headed off into the back roads around Kiltarlity.  There was the one encounter with a tractor.  He must have recognised me as not local and pulled his tractor and trailer into a passing place designed for a mini!

Last year I had been on the right road at one point but after driving a while had come to the conclusion I was on the wrong road.  A few more twists and over a few more hills I would have reached the destination.  I remembered the turning back too early and was resolved to keep driving. 

There it was nestled at the bottom of a track on the right hand side.  Tomorrow would be a piece of cake.

Tea, coffee and ginger cake greeted us as we arrived.  The sun might have been shining but it wasn’t warm.  There was a stiff breeze.  We introduced ourselves.  A good number were retired teachers.  Many had never attempted to write poetry before but were ready to give it a go.  There was a good balance of ages and gender.  The youngest poet was a pupil from one of the secondary schools in the region.

Garden poetry?  The BIG project last year had been planting a garden.  Money was available to produce an anthology of poems and prose with a garden theme. 

“Go outside…walk around the garden…and let a plant speak to you!”

John Glenday had read a couple of poems that were about plants, but not really about plants at all.  The deeper stuff that poets are supposed to be able to capture in their poems – that stuff that really eludes me – was the aim of the exercise. The daisy in the poem is a metaphor for unrequited love or a deep resentment of a mother or father. Yes, that kind of deeper stuff.

Plants don’t speak to me.  There is a plant-wide resentment that has its starting point with the neglect my garden.  Obviously the Moniack Mhor plants have heard the tales.  It’s either that or the fact that it was not quite spring and there were no thriving plants.  There was a stack of plant books inside as backup.  Quite a few people not only knew plants but something of the stories associated with them.  Did that give them the edge on plant-abusers like me?  Perhaps not.  I had a feeling that they had come already armed with a flower in mind and were not relying on a plant speaking to them at all.  It could be construed as cheating!

I chose to write about a thistle.  I have plenty of experience with thistles. There were phrases in my head about thistles being the uninvited guests to a party.  I went with the idea and wrote a twelve lined poem.  I liked it.  I liked some of the lines very much and tortured myself over some of the others.  It wasn’t deep.  It had a metaphor or two but it wasn’t deep.  It was well received when I read it out.  The competitive spirit in me just has to note that at the end of the workshop someone told me they liked my poem best!

The second step of the workshop was to cut our poems down by about a quarter or more.  We were required to identify lines that we could afford to lose, a word here or there, a phrase that wasn’t paying its way. Some poems really benefitted from the cuts.  They were neater and tighter and powerful where before they had rambled on.   Some…I’m not sure but I liked them before the cuts. And, yes, they were deep.  Some were just four lines long and deep.

Our time was up, John told us to take the poems home and have another look at them.  Revision! Revision! Revision!  A poem, it seems, is never quite the finished article but always a work in progress.  There comes a time when you have to choose to stop revising and accept the blemishes.

Hugely satisfied with a productive morning I wound my way down the hill and back into the real world.