Well, I am into three months of leading Breathe Writers. It
sounds busier than it is. We have met just the three times.
The venue is the Bike Shed café on the other side of the
river run by a groups of churches. The time is two hours on a Saturday morning,
the third Saturday of the month. The place is open to customers. Some days the
place has been very quiet. Other times it’s a little more lively.
I’d been listening to a podcast earlier in the week. The
interviewed poet was talking about gleaning ideas for writing from all around
for her. Not everything will make it on to the page, Not everything will be out
own personal experiences. Writers need to be observers as much as anything.
They need to be always taking note of things they see or hear.
With this in mind we took a few minutes to read through
newspapers.
I know people that don’t read newspapers. There’s so much
negative press that reading about it just makes them miserable. The world,
according to the press, is a hostile place. There are very few articles that
lift the spirit.
The task was to find an article that resonated. Mine was a report about recent wild fires. I’m
not entirely sure about how wild some of these fires are. There’s a tradition
of burning of the bracken. Sometimes it
is just about dry days and hot ground and a discarded cigarette stub tossed
from a car window.
Here’s my take on fires:-
A fire covered
five square miles of forest. Fire engines from surrounding areas were called
into deal with it. Prevention as much as the cure was part of their strategy –
pouring water on warm ground that had not yet ignited.
It reminds me of what
the book of James says about the tongue and the fire it can start:-
“…the tongue is a
small part of the body, but it makes great boasts. Consider what a great forest
is set on fire by a small spark.” James 3:5
One hot spark of
criticism, an insult or just something taken the wrong way can start a fire. I
know myself to be a woman of words and. At times, a woman of passion. What must
I do to dampen down the warm ground in me before it ignites? Saturating myself in
the Spirit-directed word is a starting point. I will be judged for the nonsense
that spills from my lips. Best not to say too much and think first before I
speak.
A further exercise involved mind maps or cluster
diagrams. A single word evolved into a spider that just kept growing outwards.
Words and phrases, thoughts and connections crawled over the page. I’d chosen
the word “fruitfulness”. My favourite
word on the page was “pie”.
Here’s mine take it:-
The world,
society, demands that we be fruitful, that we contribute. We don’t to be in a
job that fulfils us, something that satisfies our inner man or settles in the
spirit as something a person was born to do. The world insists that we should
be useful.
The world frowns
on those who they see are not playing their part – the barren ones, the ones
who contribute nothing, not income tax or making improvements to society.
Sadly we have
allowed that kind of thinking to seep into the church. Too many programs and
ministries are crested to provide opportunities for members to contribute. “Doing”
has replaced “being” and “action” has replaced “waiting”. As a business the
church works. As a body of Christ it fall
short of what God intends.
Drawing close to
God, seeing the Christian life as an adventure, finding joy far outweighs
ticking any boxes.
Over coffee the other day a friend and I reminisced long
ago days of form filling in our local church. It was all about working out what
gifting you had and how best to make use of it. It was a good business strategy that should
never have been applied to a church setting. It left little room for God to
position people where He wanted them to be.
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