Slowing Down

What was I doing at 4.00 am yesterday? Go on, take a guess. Asleep perhaps? Actually, no. I was sitting outside on the garden bench listening to the dawn chorus.

Where did I intend to be at 4.00 am yesterday? Go on, take another guess. Asleep for sure. Actually no. I intended to be down by the Caledonian Canal with a bunch of other people, listening to the dawn chorus with an expert telling me which birds were singing. Apparently it’s not an every-bird-at-once-top-of-your-voice celebration of a new day. There’s an order. The blackbirds tend to be first up and then some other bird’s next and then another one and so on until eventually every bird is singing. I wanted to be there with the experts but driving with eyes half open and body half dozing didn’t seem a safe option.

“They’re claiming ground, Mel,” said God. “Why don’t you claim some ground too?” I don’t sing at 4.00. I snore perhaps. I wasn’t about to wake up the neighbours with a loud, off tune warble but I did pray. I don’t claim that my prayers shook the gates of hell. Eyes half open, body half dozing – it didn’t match up to that generation of powerful men of prayer who also prayed at 4.00 am.

The Dawn Chorus thing at the canal was one of the opening events for the Scottish Mental Health Arts Festival Highland. They had pancakes afterwards.

What was I doing at 6.00 pm today? Go on take a guess. Watching TV? Tackling the ironing pile? Actually, no. I was down at the Bike Shed in Grant Street at the Scottish Mental Health Arts Festival. They were hosting an art exhibition on the theme of New Beginnings. The people who produced the art were mostly beginners, and mostly
using art to express feelings and emotions.

There were one or two people that I knew. Creativity in Care have been involved in the project and it was good to catch up with folk. I also bumped into a writer friend whose opening conversation starter was “Have you done your homework?” Eh? The homework might refer to homework given at a Thursday creative writing class which I sometimes go to.

There was coffee to drink, pictures to look at and people to talk to. I did all three but not in equal measure. I brought my empty paper cup home seeing as it’s the first time anyone has written my name on a paper cup before. I’ve seen it in adverts but never thought cafes did it for real. The pictures? You know, I have one picture that would have fitted in. One wall was dedicated to people’s Picasso portraits. Maybe I ought to frame mine I did years ago. There were other paintings too. Some real things like lions and tigers (and bears), and some landscapes, and some other stuff and I really don’t get.

Having done the socialising, we were invited to listen to a few speeches. Nothing long. Just information really about what different groups did about mental health. As ever, the hearing aids were left on the sideboard at home so the head was tilted slightly to favour the good ear.

A man was invited to give a longer talk about mental health. He was fiddling with something the whole time as he read his speech. There wasn’t much in the way of eye contact.

He was talking about the need to slow down our lives. The stress that we deal with is often as result of the hectic pace of living.  We are like those pinball machines – like the bouncing around, pinging this or that, lights flashing, sirens going off, levers pulled and snapping and everything frantic. We need to slow down.

His first suggestion was learning how to juggle. It’s apparently a Samurai thing, the hand and eye co-ordination and concentration. I once tried to learn to juggle with a trio of apples. The apples got bruised but there was a wonderful apple fragrance in the room afterwards.

His second suggestion was fishing. It’s not a Samurai thing this time and has more to do with quietness and peace and watching the water for evidence fish presence than anything. This I have done twice. The second time I caught a fish – it was a baby fishing pool, so crammed with fish for beginner fisher-people, and sweetcorn on the hook rather than anything exotic, that you would have to be very unlucky not to catch anything.

His final suggestion, and what he had been fiddling with the whole time, was making flies for fishing. Somewhere in this house there is a box – a red plastic box divided into little compartments. It contains flies for fishing – hooks, feathers, wires and stuff. The speaker made a fly by twisting fine wire, snipping here and there and adding strands of colour. It was pernickety stuff and not something you could do while watching an episode of Coronation Street. A friend of mine is learning the skill of paper folding. Not origami. Flower and stuff. It is mind-focussing. She also knits jumpers with complicated cable patterns. I write poetry.

It’s not that the problems go away, the man said. It’s just after this time out spent juggling balls, or fly fishing, or making flies for fishing – or paper folding, or complex cable knitting, or writing the poem – afterwards you come back to something fresh. What you couldn’t seem to do before you did the juggling, you can now seem to do much more easily.

The slowing down – if only the world would let us slow down! The world doesn’t have time for the time-wasters.  It’s all about setting and meeting targets and filling every second of every minute with activity.

Jesus went fishing. Perhaps he knew how to juggle. Mostly he just left the crowd behind, climbed a mountain and spent time with His Father.

We need to learn some slowing down strategies. For the sake of body, soul and spirit we need to learn some and put them into practice.

Prayer – 4.00 am with the dawn chorus playing at full volume? Maybe not.

The Man with His Hands in His Pockets

Praise the Lord, all you nations;
extol him, all you peoples.

For great is his love toward us,
and the faithfulness of the Lord endures forever.

(Psalm 117)

It was not just my reading for yesterday morning, it was also my doing. I dug out a songbook from a Christian holiday from years back, flicked back to familiar songs and belted out a few numbers flinging my arms in all direction.

This time last week, not this time exactly but a little later in the morning, I went to a worship meeting. My own church family is part of a home church network. We have our main meeting on a Thursday evening. I am a Sunday church lass at my core. I love the Thursday evenings, but I miss Sundays.

The church is a newbie. I often wonder why churches plant new churches in places where there are already similar kinds of churches there already. It feels a little bit like church empire building rather than kingdom building, as if no other church can measure up to their own particular brand or label.

Let’s talk about the man with his hands in his pocket, shall we? It seems my nit-picking gene had placed itself just under my skin. There was a man in the row of seats opposite with his hands in his pockets throughout the time of worship. He might even have been chewing gum. Is this the way anyone approaches a monarch, earthly or not? Hands in pockets? Chewing gum? I thought not!

Many years ago my church then was the Plymouth Brethren. Yes, perhaps the opposite extreme to the charismatic churches I inhabit now. Hands in pockets and chewing gum would not have got you through the door. I think I miss the whole Sunday best dressing up for church. When I first began going to a charismatic type meeting, I continued to wear my Sunday best, and my hat for a while. Some woman took me aside and said that “we don’t do that anymore”. Apparently my dress and my hat were identified as bondage to an old tradition and needed to be cast off. I was desperate to fit in and wore jeans the next meeting.  I was not comfortable with the move. Yes, God loves us the way the way we are, but have the things swung too far in the other direction? Does casual attire also mean a casual approach in worship?

Back to the man with the hands in his pockets, and chewing gum. He was there. Singing, yes – but with his hands in his pockets and chewing gum. My eyes kept straying towards him. I was trying not to get hung up on it – but I was hung up on it. I didn’t know the man. I couldn’t see the state of his heart but presumed him to be less “holy” than me. Ouch! I soothed myself with bland thoughts like “He is in church. He’s not mowing his lawn or washing his car or watching TV” or any of the other things people who don’t go to church do instead.

Imagine a whack across the head! I was born into a Roman Catholic household and whacks across the head were common events then to bring the diverted mind back to a focus on God. Then it was a mother whacking me across the head. This time it was God himself doing the whacking – albeit more gently than my mum.

“I can see he has his hands in his pockets,” said God. “What I can also see is just because you don’t have your hands in your pockets on the outside, it doesn’t mean to say that on the inside those hands aren’t in the pockets.”

My mum often commented on how her outside was not always a reflection of the inside. Just because she was smiling on the outside, it didn’t mean that on the inside she wasn’t weeping. What happens on my outside doesn’t always reflect what is happening on the inside either.

I could give you a list of why I was not really engaged in worship – one of which was the spelling error in one of the slides. My nit-picking gene was in overdrive.

I read Psalm 117 became a living word that sliced through to bone and marrow. If I wasn’t totally engaged in praising God then perhaps I would be better spending that hour or two on a Sunday mowing my lawn or washing my car. If God is not my focus, if the man with his hands in his pockets is my focus – than I have missed it.

This morning I shall tread carefully. I shall remember who it is I came to meet with.  My hands will not be in my pocket, inside or outside because they will be lifted to His throne. His great love toward me, His enduring faithfulness will be my celebration.

.

Columba

Colm Cille. "church dove" is my name

but I am no peaceful dove and

I leave Ireland trailing bloody footprints

clutching a book of peace I stained with war

my penance fractures the heart in me

this journey north across the sea in

a coracle crib of hazel and willow frame and

stretched leather, births me again

not mothered to sea or sail we fight the currents

to reach Rathlin. Stars shine down. Then

a hot day to Islay. Blistered hands. Sun-baked head

eyes drawn backward to the home that spurns me

wind tossed we spiral through whirlpools of Corryvreckan

sea and islands, wind and waves

I feel the untamed power of the Almighty and

know myself impotent in His palm

a foreign landscape smudges the horizon

a different language waits on my tongue

The weight of three thousand dead presses on my soul

His power to transform fills me

His purpose shouts with every roll of thunder, is

written in the chasing clouds, in strands of grey

new birthed by the coracle, baptised by the sea

I am, at last, His Colm Cille, His peace herald dove

Here, in Iona, I make a new home

Four and a Half Days

I forgot to take my heart pressure tablets yesterday. I needed them!

The article in the “I” was about a school in Northampton proposing a four and a half day week. Yes, Friday afternoon off. The headmaster said it was all about time for teachers to collaborate and improve the curriculum.

The Secondary schools in my city adopted the four and a half day week this session. Some schools had been doing it already. The Friday afternoon was about cost cutting I think. The council could  make a saving by switching off lights and heating a few hours earlier. It wasn’t something teachers opted for, although clawing back that Friday afternoon might now be a challenge.

The hours we teach haven’t changed. The pupils get what they are supposed to get. We start a little earlier in the day and finish a little later. They’ve pinched a little of the lunch hour too. It is a rushed four and a half day.

The argument against was presented by one woman not happy with the idea of finding money for childcare. One man did the maths and insisted that 9.5% of his children’s education would be cut. He went on to say that it was all about teachers needing more chill time. He pointed out the already long holidays and ended up with the challenge – “They should work in the real world and then they’ll realise how lucky they are.

Is that not a man that knows no teachers? Is that not a man that has no idea what happens in the classroom? Is that not a man that really doesn’t know about the average 60 hours a week teachers do to keep their heads above water? Is that not a man that has to take a holiday in school holiday time when every travel agent on and off line increases prices significantly?

Let’s start by saying that I have worked in the “real” world. It wasn’t all that it was hailed to be. I admit it was an office job, filing paper and occasionally updating how-to manuals. I loved the politeness of it all – people saying “Thank you” and opening a door for me. That’s not something teachers get a lot of. It was also me and my own desk and any encounter with another human being was entirely voluntary. That’s not something teachers get a lot of either. It was, on this one occasion, mind-numbingly predictable and not the least bit challenging. I’d been in teaching before then for a few years, worked abroad, come home to changes in the way schools operated, had a body clock that insisted it was time to get married. I took a break and office temped for a while.

It might have been someone’s real world but it wasn’t mine. Put me in front of a classroom of pupils, something to teach then – I quite like the Martin Luther King unit some of them are doing at the moment, and I thrive. I shine. I perform. I inspire. I laugh sometimes. I cry sometimes. I argue. I challenge. I mark stuff. I shift known a trusted Microsoft power points into the google drive and spend hours after school trying to make the links work!

That’s what I do. That’s not what “my clients” do. They play with their mobile phones on their laps and snarl at me when I tell them to put it away. They write down a single word, maybe two or three, if pushed, to answer a question that needs a paragraph. They flaunt the uniform rules and wiggle gem encrusted bellies and crop tops at me. They complain about the heat, open windows, close windows, open windows, close windows. They borrow pencils and don’t return them and get declare “Well, I just won’t do any work then, will I?” when you tell them there’s no more pencils left to borrow – not that having a pencil in the first place meant they would to any work. They watch the clock and they sigh.

And why are they so rude? Because the man who did the maths and worked out that his child might be losing 9.5% if his family’s education doesn’t talk about teachers with any respect in the home.

I say to that man – you couldn’t do my job that’s why you pay me to do it.

BY all means step into my world and be me for a day or two.

You are right of course – I am lucky. Who would not want to be there when the penny drops and the child knows something they didn’t know a moment before and you made it happen?

Walking with God

In the absence of a set of Bible study notes I am working my way through a book I picked up in the sales sometime earlier this year.

The book, “Walking with God” by E A Johnston (I always liked the idea of publishing my poetry books under the name of M J Kerr), looks at the life of Enoch. I preached a sermon on Enoch a long time ago. I was kind of encouraged that it wasn’t until he was 65 that Enoch began walking with God. There’s a side of me that tells me that I have another five years before I need to take my walk with God seriously if I am to be like Enoch! There’s another voice that tells me not to be so silly – scripture isn’t meant to be read like that.

The book doesn’t just talk about Enoch but mines the seams of Christian history over the last two or three hundred years, picking out one gem after another. Christians can probably tell you a lot about Abraham and David, Nehemiah and Paul but I wonder if they could tell you much about Robert Murry McCheyne or C T Studd. I know them from my theology degree and the years I spent with the Plymouth Brethren Church where reading the latest best sellers in W H Smith was not encouraged. At the time I had collected and read every Dick Francis novel going. It broke my heart when I felt compelled to get rid of them.

The book doesn’t tell you much about these men and women who stand out as remarkable men and women. Each person gets three or four paragraphs. It makes mention of getting up at four in the morning, of asking God for a big heart, of looking at the sky and the clouds and having a greater sense of the divine, of spending time with others in worship and prayer and being refreshed, of crying out to God to be filled, of eloquence God-given in their preaching, of letting God do what He will do, how and when He wishes.

We have a habit of labelling these people, and the Bible heroes, as super-spiritual and out of our league but they were people who made the decision to walk with, talk with, chase after and catch God – no half measures. We are all capable of doing that.

One of the chapters in the book was dedicated to Duncan Campbell who was a part of the revival on the Isle of Lewis in the late 1940s and early 50s. To anyone who says that he started it, Duncan Campbell insisted that it was happening before he arrived and it wasn’t him at all, but totally God. He was just there. He also talks about the place of prayer.

Reading the book, so far, has made me dissatisfied. I would like to point a finger at the church today and say it’s at fault. I am sure they are out there, the men and women like Duncan Campbell and the like.  But that’s the problem – we look for the men and the women like them and fail ourselves to be those men and women like them. We think it’s someone else’s job, someone special, someone with the time to spend with God, someone not holding down a full time job, someone in full time ministry, someone obviously gifted – someone not me. And the enemy wins when he has us thinking like that.

I have a picture that often comes to mind when I think about Enoch. I see a boy sitting on a wall swinging his legs and looking down the lane. Someone, an old man, walks slowly towards him. A smile lights up the boy’s face. He jumps down from the wall and begins to walk in step with him.

“Can I walk with you a while, mister?” The boy always asks and never presumes. I’m not sure it the man ever answers, but the two of them walk down the path together talking sometimes, silent sometimes, but always together.

Every day the boy is waiting, sitting on the wall, knowing his friend will come by and wanting so badly to walk with him. Every day he jumps down from the wall.

There’s never a day when the boy is not made welcome.

That’s how I picture Enoch and God.

How I picture God and I is sometimes like that. Sometimes though, I’m not sitting on the wall waiting. Sometimes I’m doing something else entirely. I’m not looking down the lane. Sometimes God walks by and I’m not sitting on the wall. God misses me. We are not together talking sometimes, silent sometimes.

And my day is a little less bright because of it.