Eau de Anchovies

My husband has recently discovered that he likes anchovies. He has taken to asking for extra anchovies on things like pizza. For Christmas I tracked down a tube of anchovy paste, something that looks like a toothpaste tube, and he spreads it on his toast in the morning.

The tube is in the fridge. I wouldn’t say that it is a smelly tube, or that when I open the fridge door, a waft of anchovy smell floods out, but there is some kind of smell exchange going on.

My lunch the other day consisted of a tin of soup, a pot of yoghurt and a pear. The soup was untouched by the smell of anchovy, but the pot of yoghurt, not the yoghurt itself, just the pot, reeked of anchovy, and the pear, which hadn’t been in the fridge, but had nestled up against the yoghurt pot in my lunch bag, also stunk of anchovy!

The fragrance of anchovy was everywhere lunch connected – on the yoghurt pot, on the pear and on my hands! I don’t like anchovies!

One could move on at this point to talking about the woman who broke the alabaster jar and poured perfume over Jesus’ feet. The fragrance filled the room and clung to the fabric of everyone’s clothes. People were marked out, not by anything they said, or did, but by the fragrance that they had been with Jesus.

The fragrance that seems to mark me out these days is sorrow. This week sees the final hurdle, my brother Mike’s memorial service in Rugby. Few of the family were able to travel to Fuengirola for Mike’s funeral and cremation so a memorial service has been organised for family and friends to say their goodbyes. Joe and I still have travel arrangements to make but we will be there.

I would like to think that this memorial will mark the end this year’s difficult time, but I think that would be naïve. Sorrow doesn’t seem to be a clean or precise emotion that is attached to a single event, but much like the anchovy paste in the fridge, it has touched all sort of things and permeated them particulalry in my relationships with firends.

It feels like sorrow can be a lonely road. Prolonged sorrow changes a person and the way he or she look at things. I am still on that road and looking for a way out. Is there a short cut I can take? I don’t actually believe in short cuts. As much as I would like the sorrow to end, I believe that there is precious treasure along the path to collect. By finding a quick ay out, I don’t get to claim the treasure.

I might have longed for the company of more people to walk with me and to comfort me along the way…but God has never been absent. His fellowship has been always sweet. His fellowship has been my treasure.

Covering Up

I often imagine that I am on one of those TV morning chat shows – the ones that leaf through the newspapers and pick out interesting stories of the day. As I leaf through my morning paper (a very rare event seeing as we don’t have morning papers delivered!) I mentally select the ones that I would highlight, and rehearse the comments I might make.

The article I came up with was a commentary on the way in which X-Factor selects the auditions that it televises. Some of the acts, without doubt, are not really up to scratch. We have all seen them, cringed at them or laughed at them maybe. There are some things that aught not to be televised.

Why do people do it? They really haven’t got an ounce of talent for singing, dancing, spinning plates or whatever it is that they are doing. Why do they insist on parading their lack of talent in front of 4 million viewers? Do they really think they are good? Have they not asked an objective observer to check them out first before they head for the stage?

I am glad that I am as old as I am, and that in my day they didn’t have these reality shows. I have a feeling I might have strutted my stuff – or my absence of stuff – before an audience of 4 million had I had the chance! Youth has a way of convincing us of things that just aren’t true. Since I am now grown up, I now see the stuff in a mature and sensible light, and know that the 4 million who saw would have cringed, or laughed at me.

Why do other people who should know better allow them to do it? It seems to me that we live in a world where some people take delight in exposing, and laughing at the weaknesses of others. Someone else’s humiliation should not be another person’s entertainment.

Somewhere in the Bible it encourages us to cover one another’s weakness up – not one another’s sins. Way back in the Old Testament, Noah’s sons walked backward into a room, holding a blanket, to cover up the nakedness of Noah who had got drunk and exposed himself.

If only the producers of X-Factor would walk backwards across a stage, holding a blanket, to cover up the lack of talent in some of their contestants and prevent them from exposing themselves!

The Need to Connect

Yesterday was not such a good day. I have felt so isolated from people. With my church family it is not so much isolation in terms of yards or miles. It isn’t that I have isolated myself and not talked to anyone about the traumas of the year so far. It is just that it’s not their sister, or their brother that has died. Hugs may reduce the yards or miles to nothing at all, but there is still distance. They may imagine how I feel, but for many imagination is all they have to play with. Their families remain whole and complete, struggling perhaps, but not broken into bits. I have very specific needs that it appears they just can’t meet! They congratulate me for being strong, and they don’t see how perhaps on the inside I am not strong at all.

My own family lives hundreds of miles away. They are close enough to each other to meet up (which they don’t take advantage of), to offer comfort and solace. They feel the empty spaces left behind by Linda and Mike and they can talk to one another.

Last night I just wanted to be down there, with them, gathered together, knowing that they knew how I felt because they felt it too. And I was miles away…isolated.

And then my youngest sister phoned!

Suddenly I felt connected. It was just such a blessing to talk to someone who really knew what I was going through, someone who knew what they could say to me that would really touch my heart and bring comfort and encouragement.

I was smiling by the time I put the phone down at the end of the conversation.

I was reading 2 Corinthians 9:8 - “And God is able to make all grace abound to you, so that in all things at all times, having all that you need, you will abound in every good work” The timing of the call was so spot on – that was God’s “all grace” abounding to me. All the things we spoke about were all the things I needed to hear. I felt less alone.

How It Makes Me Feel

It would appear that in the Bank Holiday TV ratings, ITV with its lavish production of “Wuthering Heights” lost out to the BBC with its one off drama “Framed”. I just happened to be watching “Framed” and I have to admit that I thoroughly enjoyed it.

The story began with the National Gallery being flooded out due to a leaky roof. They decided to temporarily store the gallery's precious paintings in a disused slate mine in Wales – which is what Churchill did during the war – and I have been to said diused mine! The curator, played by Trevor Eve, had the job of living in a nearby cottage and looking after the artwork and choosing one of the paintings to be sent back to the gallery in London for viewing every month.

The curator saw the paintings in terms of the quality of brush strokes, the clever use of colour, the arrangement of objects on the canvas or unusual perspectives.

Later on in the drama, the butcher from the little nearby town was allowed to see some of the paintings in the mine. A picture by Monet of a boating lake reduced him to tears, and it turned out that his son had died in the village boating pool and he had been responsible for having the place closed on health and safety grounds. Seeing the picture brought back all the memories. The picture made him feel, not the loss of his son, but the loss of something in himself, a kind of gradual shutting down of so many aspects of his life.

I can remember having “Art Appreciation” lessons at school. Yes, in art classes, we got to play with paint and other forms of media, but there were times when we got to look at famous pictures. They were just prints of the pictures – not the real thing. I just remember that I didn’t get it. I couldn’t seem to see the quality of the brush strokes or the clever use of colour! I failed to appreciate the art!

Looking at the butcher, looking at the Monet picture, and looking at the tears flowing – I got it! Art is about how it makes you feel!

A friend and I had a long discussion over a delicious (and expensive) slice of cake the other day. We were talking about religion. He is not religious and went to great lengths to explain why he believed the Bible was outdated, had been changed often to suit the politics of the day and did I know that men had swapped and changed bits of it to keep the poor, or the women, in their place? I have done a theology degree and I know such stuff. The one question that I didn’t ask was “How much of the Bible have you actually read?”

It seems to me that my friend was rather like the art curator. He could talk about textual criticism and translation and the politics of the day. Me? I am like the butcher. I read the Bible and it makes me feel things.

I see aspects of my own life reflected in its words. I see challenges to tackle. I see solutions to the problems I face. I see questions I don’t know the answer to. I see things that make me cry, sometimes with joy, sometimes with sorrow. Sometimes I feel that I will never measure up – and sometimes I realise that I don’t need to. I see God’s grace on every page.

Where Eagles Soar

In the final weeks of his life, there had been lots of heated discussions about my brother, Mike.

One discussion was about whether sometime in those final weeks he came to faith in Christ. In the red corner were his friends that said, “Definitely not!” If he had made some proclamation of faith, it was the pain speaking, or the drugs. In the blue corner were the evangelicals. They had talked with him and prayed with him. They were there when he took a first, and perhaps only, step of faith.

Another discussion, linked to the first, was about Mike’s funeral. In the red corner were his friends. Having expressed no sense of religious faith to his friends they wanted a funeral where religion was absent and unacknowledged. I can see their point. Whatever else Mike had been, he had not been a hypocrite. He would have despised something marked by hymns and bible readings. In the red corner were the evangelicals. They wanted something traditional, with a church minister presiding. They wanted something sombre and sober, something quiet and respectful.

The red corner won. Mike had chosen the music – Eric Clapton, The Who and some other favourite band. The congregation were invited to write on Mike’s coffin with a selection of coloured pens, and to cover it in flowers before it was taken away to be cremated.

Outside, we made our way back to the cars, ready to drive down to “The Pig and Whistle” for drinks and a buffet. Out of the chimney from the crematorium a trail of smoke was pouring. I wasn’t watching the smoke, but something else in the sky. It was an eagle soaring high that held my attention. In slow, silent circles, the eagle surfed the air currents.

Did you know that as a Christian symbol, the eagle represents salvation, redemption and resurrection?

Some people just saw an eagle.

Some people missed the eagle and just saw the smoke coming out of the chinmey

Me? I saw the eagle and I heard God’s message to me – Mike saved, redeemed and, one day resurrected.

Mad Mike - (What I Said at the Funeral)

My husband, Joe, has this thing that he says to me when we are away on holiday. “What do you prefer?”, he says “Cruising down Loch Ness or teaching third year RE?” or perhaps, “What do you prefer? Walking along the Champs Elyses or teaching third year RE?” The answer is usually a no brainer. Today, if someone were to ask me, “What do you prefer? Speaking at your brother´s funeral or teaching third year RE? The answer for once might be “Teaching third year RE:”

If you are hoping that I will be able to fill in some of the blanks of Mike´s life, you will be disappointed. I believe that many of you know him better than I ever did. Growing up together I was never curious enough to ask questions and he was not often around to supply information. Besides, I am a girl, and his sister!

When Mike was first diagnosed with cancer, I came over to spend time with him and give him some support. He had been admitted to Costa del Sol hospital waiting test results. One Sunday I had taken the local bus out there. I assumed that Mike was fielding a dozen visitors and I could cadge a lift back. It turned out to be just Mike and me, for six and a half hours, sitting on the terrace, drinking coffee by the cupfuls. He was in the mood for talking and I was curious enough to ask questions. On the bus back to Fuengirola, two thoughts came to mind.

Firstly, I really didn´t know my brother at all. Even the things I thought I knew turned out to be very different. After six and a half hours I might have known a few more facts, a few opinions, but I really didn´t know him.

Secondly, after six and a half hours of talking to him, I wasn´t even sure that I liked him very much.

Three or four months down the line, I can still say that I´m not sure that I knew the man, but I am sure that I liked him.

Life, for Mike, at least in the UK, was like wearing poorly fitted clothes. Too tight at the neck. Too short at the arms. He didn´t appear to be comfortable. However, there were one or two exceptions.

He loved school and won a scholarship to Lord Wandsworths College. He was a boy with the brain the size of a planet, and went on to join MENSA. The teacher in me disapproves that such a boy, with such a brain, never really put it to good use!

Michael loved music. He had a ear – two ears, in fact – that lead him to teach himself to play the piano. He eventually joined a band, as all musicians do – a Genesis tribute band. I heard him play once. Mike´s taste in music was very different from my own. I was into Donny Osmond and swooning over Puppy Love. Mike was into something heavy, which played at the right volume, shook the floorboards of the house. He tried to lure me away from Donny, spending hours compiling a tape of music tracks from his collection that he thought might appeal to me. I would like to say that I still have the tape, but I suspect that I wiped it and used it to record a Barry Manilow LP.

Michael loved his son, Elliot. It was his second spell of fatherhood. He was a little older for sure, a little wiser, debateable, and tried not to make the same mistakes as before. He loved Elliot dearly, and was immensely proud of him. He didn´t feel quite the same way about Elliot´s mother. It broke his heart when they parted and he lost touch with Elliott.

Then there was Fuengirola. If ever there was a perfect fit for anyone, for Mike, this was it. The years that he has spent here have been his happiest. The beaches, the bars, and the beautiful women – what more could he ask for? Feungirola became his home, and all of you became his family, and writing became his passion.

Richard and I, on behalf of the rest of the family, thank you for looking after Mike so well.

Finally, a last memory, and one of the most enduring. The year was somewhere between 1976 and 79. I was at university in Durham, Mike was at art college in Gloucester studying photography. The students union has bussed me down to London, to join a protest march. I was not political, I didn´t know what we were protesting about, so I went shopping instead. I was on Regent´s Street, on a busy Saturday afternoon. It was swarming with people! Suddenly I was accosted, attacked even. A bear of a man wound his arms around me and pulled me into a strong hug. It was Mike, perhaps also supposed to be marching, but skiving off.

“Hello, Mel,” he said, “Fancy meeting you here.” The odds against our meeting…well, I´ll leave you to work them out.

I am convinced that, in heaven, just beyond the pearly gates, somewhere along the heavenly equivalent of Regent´s Street, I will yet again be accosted, attacked even. A bear of a man will wind his arms around me and pull me into a strong hug. Yes, it will be Mike again.

“Hello, Mel,” he will say, “Fancy meeting you here.” The odds against our meeting…in my favour this time!

Thank you, every one of you, for joining us to celebrate Mad Mike´s life and to mourn his loss together.

A Great Wall Builder

It has been almost twenty years since I moved up to Inverness. I left Rugby to work on a gospel outreach team, a Go Team, in 1989 and arrived in Inverness sometime in September or October. It was a challenging year and so absolutely the right place to be for me at that time

I remember a visit from Andrew Owen, who was the pastor of a church planted in Glasgow (who has gone from strength to strength forming the whole Destiny Church movement). There was a GO team in Glasgow at the same time, so I guess he wanted to try to build bridges and offer support and encouragement.

At the end of one of the teaching sessions we had an opportunity to ask questions, not just about what he had been talking about, but about his own personal walk of faith. I seem to remember asking him about what word of scripture he was chewing over and being challenged by. I can’t remember what he said because as soon as he had finished telling me, he turned the question back to me. What word was I walking with right there and then?

If someone asked me that question today I might flounder a bit, but then, there was only one word.

“You have not gone up to the breaks in the wall to repair it for the house of Israel so that it will stand firm in the battle on the day of the LORD.” Ezekiel 13:5

Quite how I had come across it, I don’t know, but it burned in me. So many Christians are not able to stand firm in the battle because of holes in the walls, holes in their knowledge of God. The battle rages and they get injured. Some leave the faith completely, all because of too many holes in what they know about God. I was determined that I would fill in the holes, that I would make the wall strong, so that when the battles were fought, people wouldn’t be needlessly injured.

I would like to think I impressed Andrew!

I didn’t want to just fill in the holes for people, although it did lead to a lot of preaching and teaching, but I wanted to teach people how to fill in the holes for themselves. That approach wasn’t always successful. I had a long history of bible studies and intense prayer meetings gifted me by the Brethren Church. I had a natural ability to study, to read and meditate and shape the right bricks for the right holes. I found the whole process thrilling and stirring, and few people I knew shared my passion.

This morning I sat down with a cup of coffee to just be with God.

“Can you feel the wall against your back?” said God.

“What wall?” said I.

“The wall, that over the last twenty years, you have strengthened by filling in the holes.” He answered. “All that time you thought you were filling in the holes to keep other people safe, you built yourself a solid wall. For the last six months a battle has raged, a serious battle. The wall was built so well, so solidly, that nothing has been able to breach it or to bring it down. You have been safe!”

If God had had a glass of something, water from a rock perhaps, He might have raised it in my direction with the salutation, “To a great wall builder!”

Thank you, God, for teaching me to build walls.

The Empty Chair

There ought to be three places to sit in our front room. There is a sofa along one wall, comfortable green leather. It a sofa that is not really for sitting on, but begs to be lain upon, all stretched out. There are two arm chairs, one of which reclines when you pull a lever.

Three places, but only the one, the sofa is really used and most times usable. One chair has been bagged by the ironing. The pile expands and contracts are regular intervals, as ironing is done and distributed to cupboards and drawers, only to be replaced by the next batch off the line. The other chair, the reclining one, is often the dumping place for coat hangers, bags, coats, read and unread newspapers and other stuff.

Yesterday I made a special effort to clear the clutter from one chair. I wanted one of the chairs clear in case of visitors. I had had an especially distressing day. News from Spain was grim. The doctor from the hospice had been in touch to say that Mike’s condition had further deteriorated and the weeks or months we had anticipated had dwindled down to merely days. He told us that it was perhaps time to come out.

I have always known that there will be an end to face. I just hoped it wouldn’t come. I cried, cleaned the kitchen, cried some more, half cleaned the bathroom, cried some more…you get the picture. And I cleaned off one chair, just in case I had a visitor, who would come to cry with me.

My mother used to have a particular bee in her bonnet. She is quite obviously disabled, partially sighted, partially hearing, very shaky on her legs. The church knew that she was not able to make her own way to church, but there was always this insistence that she phoned someone to ask for a lift. My family are usually very good at looking after mum, but things happen, and the shopping doesn’t always get done. When friends in the church find out that she is not being looked after they ask, “Why didn’t you phone?”

Why didn’t I phone and ask someone to come around and sit with me, cry with me? I think it’s because there are some things you shouldn’t have to ask for. It should just come under the label of “family”. If should simply be offered because you care enough to offer it. I am fed of carrying my sorrow to someone else’s doorstep.

The chair remained empty.

An empty chair is not necessarily a silent chair! It just seemed to be telling me how little I was cared for. By the end of the day I had wound myself up tightly into a ball of hurt and resentment.

God talked to the ball!

First of all He reminded me that, sad as it is, people will inevitably let you down. As much as we would like to lean on people, sometimes the fall over and take us with them!

Secondly, in Matthew 5 it reads “Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.” I liked that! It’s not “might be” or “should be” but “will be”.

Thirdly God spoke about the other empty chairs in other people’s homes. Did I think that maybe I could go and sit in those chairs and cry with other people?

What a challenge! What a ministry! I’m still working on an answer.

12,000 Hours

According to one of the newspapers today the average woman will spend 12,000 hours, the equivalent of one year and four months of their lives, crying.

I guess that makes me not average! I feel like I have notched up a goodly number of hours of the last six months or so in tears on a fairly regular basis. Does it make a difference too if those tears are gentle weeping that you can mop up with the back of your hand, or the overflowing dam of body wrenching sobbing? The way I have cried recently doesn’t qualify as anything less than a monsoon!

I was talking this morning with a friend, trying not to catalogue all the sad details of Mike’s cancer. She already knew about my sister, Linda and all the heartache of her loss, but she wanted to know so that she could know what to pray for.

As well as myself, my mother and my eldest sister are the only others in the family that enjoy a vibrant relationship with God. I am not sure how well they have weathered the storms of the past six months. There are been no shipwrecks, but a few masts have fallen, and a sail or two has got ripped. It has not been a comfortable ride.

Neither my mum, nor my sister, has had the chance to go out and see Mike and I am not sure if that is a good thing or a bad one. Sometimes what we imagine turns out to be a lot worse than reality.

For my mum it’s not an option. She is not well enough to travel and I think that seeing Mike the way he is would bring back some very painful memories. My dad died of a very similar kind of cancer. For my sister, it is a choice not to go. She thinks that she would cry too much and upset Mike. She doesn’t think she could handle it. Personally I think we are always a lot stronger than we imagine ourselves to be.

Anyway, at the end of talking all these things through with my friend, she reached over and gently touched my arm.

“You do know,” she said, “that God loves you very much.”

I have to confess that I bit my tongue hard. Words would have spilled out!

If this…nightmare…this six month stalking by disease and death is about God loving me…what would it all look like if God didn’t?

OK I know that all this stuff is not happening because God loves me! It’s happening because I live in a fallen world…because these kind of things just happen…because…I don’t really know why it’s happening.

What would it look like without God’s love? I would feel very alone, completely broken up inside, hopeless and helpless.

As it is there are times when He graciously blows away the clouds and the sun shines!

Butterflies That Flutter By

Pretty, fragile butterfly
Why do you just flutter by?
I look and ponder, wonder why
Next door’s flowers catch your eye!

I have to admit that the man next door has done a wonderful job with his garden. It is real display of vibrant colours from a million bedding plants. It’s a garden that I wouldn’t mind sitting in.

Yesterday, walking from the car to my front door, I espied a trio of white butterflies flitting from flower to flower in my next door neighbour’s garden. There was so much colour and variety to catch their attention and keep them flitting around there all day.

Walking up the path to my own front door, I was aware of the lack of butterflies in my own neglected patch of grass and weed-infested borders.

“Where are my butterflies?” I whined!

“Where are your flowers?” said the voice in my head.

This year has been not a vintage year in terms of gardening. So much time and energy has been spent on other things that I have not got around to the garden. Holidays, and what I do in them, have been hijacked by one family crisis after another.

Make no mistake, my garden will never have the million bedding plants that next door has…I am too miserly to spend that much money at the garden centre! I wouldn’t be able to create the vision of beauty that exists next door. But…normally it’s not so bad.

So I spent an hour or two digging up two small flower beds. I pulled out the weeds, and made a million spiders and beetles homeless. All the best plants at the garden centre had been snapped up much earlier on in the summer, but I found a few daisies, carnations and Latin-named beauties on the sale shelves.

It’s not really the garden that I worry about. It’s the metaphorical one…the garden of my soul. I am not sure there is much planted their either. There is nothing there to attract the butterflies…those people seeking something that sustains and nourishes them.

And yet the spiritual garden isn’t as empty as it seems. Other people seem to see the flowers there that I can’t see. I didn’t plant them…but them I am not the only one who tends my garden, am I?

Let Daddy Deal With It

One of my nieces has just posted up a rant, for want of a better word, on her facebook page. It’s the summer break from her university course, and I suppose that seeing as she is not using her room, the landlord has rented it out to someone else. However, she had paid August’s rent. It turns out that the July tennants are still there although they were meant to leave at the end of the month. My niece is paying her landlord for someone else to be in her room...so she’s not happy.

Her post ended with the words “I don’t know what to do:( xxx”

My adivce was to ask the landlord for a refund!

Sometimes I forget how not everyone is as old and cantackerous as I am. I have no hestitation in recognising those times when someone has stamped on what I think are my rights. Some people call it assertiveness. At times I have it in bucketloads!

My niece’s response to aksing for the refund was “daddy's gonna call up and have a go”.

“What?” thought I. “Fight your own battles, girl!”

Quick as a lightning flash, the Holy Spirit spoke.

“Why don’t you let ‘Daddy’ call up and have a go?”

I have been in too many battles over the last few months – not with landlords and rent refunds. My battles have been the spiritual ones. They have been about how to hold on to joy in the midst of so much pain, or how to hold on to hope in the midst of so much suffering. I had thought it was all about being strong and not letting go.

I see now that perhaps it is not about that at all. It is about stepping to one side and letting my heavenly “Daddy call up and have a go.”

Let Daddy deal with it!

The Un-rescued

“God knows there's a purpose,
God knows there's a chance,
God knows you can rise above the darkest hour
Of any circumstance.”
Bob Dylan

I was listening to a sermon earlier today on Act 5, the bit where the apostles are put into prison by the jealous leaders of Israel. An angel rescues them. Next day when someone is sent to fetch the prisoners, they discover the door still locked, the soldiers on guard still doing their job, but the birds have flown the coop.

The preacher lamented that in today’s world, there are no angelic rescues.

Even in the early church, not everyone got angelically rescued, or rescued at all in fact. The apostles in chapter 5 got rescued, so did Peter later on, but James didn’t get rescued. He was put to death with the sword.

If I had been James, I might have been a little put out – that is before being decapitated.

Why do some people get rescued and others don’t?

It’s all about what serves the purposes of God and what brings him the greater glory. Yes, it has got to be pretty glorious to testify to opened prison doors. Maybe that is the kind of testimony that appeals to people – deliverance and freedom.

I think that the un-rescued, the ones that get put to death with the sword, speak a testimony that may not appeal to people who prefer to be delivered, but to the unseen heavenly hosts, to the rulers and principalities in the spiritual realm.

My brother finds it difficult that I can still believe in an all powerful, all loving God despite all the horrors of this year – my sister’s illness and death, his own advanced cancer and soon-to-be death. If God loved me, why did he allow these things to happen?

If God loved James, why did he allow him to be beheaded? Did he love Peter more?

I trust that the events that I have lived through these last few months, and my faith, battered rather but still there, serve God’s purpose. It’s not that I have not had my tantrums, not shed my tears, not questioned the reason for it all, not beaten myself on occasion for not praying more, for not stretching out a potentially healing hand – I’ve have done that and more. I can remind myself that this short stretch of tough times doesn’t outweigh the thirty years or more of fellowship and friendship with God and that there is joy yet to come – in this life and in the next, but it doesn’t stop me hurting now.

The powers and principalities would like to see me throw in the towel. They would like to remind me that I didn’t sign on for any of this. All credit to me that I lasted as long as I did. I fought a good fight. I can walk away with dignity!

Where is the glory to God in that? Do I just hang around with God because of the perks? Isn’t that what Satan said of Job? That he was just sticking with God because God treated him nice? Take away some of the treats, Satan challenged, and you wouldn’t see Job for dust. And Job’s reply (amid all the tears):-

“Though he slay me, yet will I hope in him; I will surely defend my ways to his face.” Job 13:15

Sorrow - Up-Close and Personal

I am not a happy bunny right now. We have just returned from a visit to my brother in Spain. The week before we arrived he had been transferred to a cancer hospice in Malaga. None of his friends knows whether this a permanent move, or just a period of respite care to put him back on his feet.

He is looking very fragile, very thin, very cancer-ravaged. He has good days and bad days, times when he seems a little lost to himself, other times when he is his usual rude and irreverent self. Whatever…it all spells out a gradual decline. He is hoping he will still be around for his birthday in October, but others aren’t so sure.

Seeing it all happen and being so very far away leaves me feeling very helpless. Tack on to that my sister’s very recent death and it’s not just helplessness that I’m dealing with, but often hopelessness too.

I know that, as Christians, we are never without hope, but that doesn’t mean that we don’t feel it sometimes.

Yesterday at the church meeting people had opportunities to share testimonies. Many of the folk have just got back from a church holiday. A friend of ours spoke about his mother’s illness and how they thought that there would be an operation involved, and how there had been a dramatic improvement in her condition. The operation wasn’t needed and it opened to door to praying together.

Why, I wondered, do these things happen to other people’s families, but not mine?

Another friend earlier on in the week had tried to encourage me with the words, “Everyone dies some time.” But they don’t! Many of the friends I know may have family who are seriously unwell, they may have spells in hospital, they may fear that the end is near for them, but each and every time, there seems to be a dramatic recovery involved. That does not seem to be the way for my family. It feels like everything is unfair. I want to rejoice with them in their victories but it feels like it is all being soured by my own family’s deaths and illnesses.

Why are these things happening to me and my family? Why does it seem like I am being singled out? Why isn’t some of the death and suffering of the last few months being spread around rather than just piled one me? I have never been so up-close and personal to constant hurt and sorrow before.

God’s answer? “Why not you?”

There are some that think that faith in God, a vibrant relationship, is like some wonderful vaccination against hurt and injury. That’s what we tell the world sometimes, that if they come to Jesus he will sort out all their problems and life will be so much better. There is a truth in that – life is better, problems do get sorted, but there is no immunity, no wrapping up in cotton wool. We are not untouched by sorrow. .

I know that through my sorrow, God is present.

Thou Shalt Not Eat Your Neighbour

I was watching a documentary last night. It was exploring parts of the Pacific Ocean, predominantly an area of dead sea. It isn’t dead sea as in the Dead Sea, where, apparently there is so much salt in it that you can float and your newspaper doesn’t get wet, but dead in the sense that there is very little surface plankton. We all know that plankton is like the one ingredient of the food chain that nature, as far as the oceans go, just cannot do without. It’s what the small fish, and the big fish feed on, and then the even bigger fish eat the small and the big fish. Without the plankton, there’s no small fish, big fish or even bigger fish.

To grab the viewers interest the programme began by describing a whaling ship from long ago. Although the dead sea part of the ocean is not where lots of fish make their home, lots of fish have to pass through it to get to where they want to go, whales included. Where there are whales, there are sometimes whaling boats. The oil produced from whales was valuable and worth the effort taking a boat out into the middle of nowhere to get the whales. The whalers targeted the calves knowing that would draw the bigger ones in closer.

In this particular voyage, the whales retaliated. One big bull of a whale rammed the ship and sank it, leaving all hands on board to get into the life boats. There were three lifeboats that set off. There was land, not exactly close by but accessible, had the prevailing winds been in the right direction. They headed off for the coast of South America a few thousand miles in the opposite direction.

Had they not been in the dead sea part of the ocean, being very good fishermen, they might have been fine, except for a lack of fresh drinking water. But the dead sea bit of the ocean was fish-less, because it was surface plankton-less, so they caught nothing. Had they known more about that area, fish-wise, they might have known that at night time, what little fish life there was rose to the surface. We are talking about little fish…very little fish.

Only one boat eventually arrives in port ninety days later carrying just two people. It would seem that they came up with a solution to the food crisis. They cast lots to decide who to kill and eat. Yes, they resorted to cannibalism.

I would like to say that I am one hundred percent sure that when faced with inevitable death that can only be surmounted by eating someone, I would prefer to die. I can’t imagine me eating anyone. I am more likely to say “Kill me, Eat me”. I don’t mind being dead and getting eaten. Eaten alive? No. It’s probably the dying part of it that I wouldn’t look forward to. I wouldn’t want that bit of it to hurt.

Would anyone criticise the survivors for surviving in such a way? Under normal circumstances most people don’t eat other people, but these were not normal circumstances. The rule, “Love your neighbour…don’t eat them”, no longer applied in the conditions they found themselves in.

It is easy to look at the lives of other people from the viewpoint of the conditions that we find myself in, rather than the conditions that they find themselves in. We don’t always know their conditions, and yet make our judgements about people. We think, often wrongly, that with a little bit of hard work and effort they could change their conditions for the better. With a little bit of hard work and effort, we could be the ones that change their conditions, or at least help them to change it themselves.

Uniquely Me

As if I actually needed any more books, but there was a sale on! Books that had begun their shelf life at a respectable £7 or £8 were now on offer for a lot less. Sticky labels, one on top of the other marked the gradual drop down in price until it reached ridiculous, pocket change numbers. I guess they are just not the flavour of the month in terms of authors or subject matter.

One of the books, “Devotion – a Raw-Truth Journal on Following Jesus” is a month’s supply of devotions looking at the character traits of the disciples. I picked it up this morning to test drive the first day.

The opening chapter was all about being aliens and sojourners in this world. As Christians our values are not the same as the world’s and we are somehow out of step in our thinking. We are the odd ones out, or rather we should be, but all too often we are indistinguishable. We don’t always like to be different.

Today’s Top Ten encouraged me to write a list of things that make me different from everyone else.

1. I have my own unique history – no on else has lived my life
2. My relationship to God is uniquely mine
3. My fingerprints are different
4. My reactions to situations are different
5. I have my own cocktail of strengths and weaknesses
6. The prescription for my lenses are unique to me – my glasses are useless to anyone else but me
7. My DNA is individual
8. The particular combination of things I like and don’t like is different
9. The freckles and moles that mark my body are not like anyone else’s
10. The gifts and talents God has given me, and the opportunities to use them are different.

I could have written that I look different from anyone else, but that isn’t really true. There is the well known idea that we all have a “twin” somewhere in the world. Mine happens to live in Northampton-shire and, although not an actual twin, my sister and I do get mistaken for one another.

Every snowdrop is unique. God made them unique. I am unique. God made me unique. It’s time to enjoy my uniqueness!

Oh Deer!

It is just typical, isn’t it? We spent the last couple of weeks in work melting with the heat pouring through windows, and as soon as my holidays kick in the clouds gather, the rain falls, thunder and lightning storm across the sky. OK I realize that I am living in Scotland and one cannot guarantee good weather, but it just seems a little unfair.

The same batch of washing went back on the line this morning, after having been hauled in twice before. The cloudless blue sky, according to the weather forecast, wasn’t going to last.

I completed a few essential tasks and then decided to pack a picnic lunch and head for the hills while it was still dry. Just above Loch Ness there are a number of smaller lochs away from all the Nessie hunters and tourists.

There was a sign just before the road dwindled into a single track which informed me that work was being done up ahead. I assumed it was resurfacing or something, but overhanging branches were being cut down, left by the side of the road, to be picked up later. Single track roads are not very wide to start with, so trying to manoeuvre around piles of debris was a challenge. Passing the lorry that was cutting down the branches was even more challenging.

I parked in a long lay-by beside Loch Dunchelchaig and headed off down the path that followed the shoreline and plunged deeper into the surrounding woods. I had the camera fully charged and ready. I always hope to catch a glimpse of something interesting but lack the skill to capture the moment on film.

Imagine my surprise to encounter the smallest of fawns tottering around on the path just ahead of me. It wasn’t big enough, or wise enough to disappear into the forest, and just looked at me. Eventually it stumbled over to the edge of the path and into a nest of heather.


I half expected mummy deer to appear out of somewhere, and do the mothering thing of scaring me in some way or another, but the baby seemed to be on its own. I wondered if mummy deer had got shot, or had an accident. Perhaps the fawn was orphaned. The one thing I needed, but didn’t have in my rucksack was a feeding bottle filled with deer milk, and I thought for a while about dismantling my chicken sandwich and sharing it. I wondered whether I ought to call someone, a rescue home for lost deer.

I so wanted to pick up the fawn and take it somewhere safe.

Common sense prevailed. Just because I couldn’t see mummy deer, didn’t mean that she wasn’t around somewhere. Picking it up, feeding it my chicken sandwich, was probably the worst course of action I could have taken. What might work for a human baby (feeding it a chicken sandwich?) doesn’t work for every other species on the planet.

How little I know about the workings of nature! How much I am divorced from it all, living in my terraced house, driving about in my red car, buying my food cellophane wrapped from the supermarket!

And how little I know about the Creator of all this nature! Am I equally divorced from him too?

The Essential Difference Between Dr Who and God

I sat down last night to watch the final instalment of the Torchwood series that has been showing throughout the week. It was compelling viewing, but I have to admit that it was dark and very disturbing. It seemed to portray the very worst of humanity, particularly from those who make the decisions that affect everyone else. I hated the way they decided which ten percent of the nation’s children would be offered up the aliens so save the other ninety percent.

I seem to remember that in the fifties and sixties the films about alien invasions that were around were not really about alien invasions at all, but commentary on political matters. The aliens were communists, or asylum seekers, or refugees. You just needed to decipher the code. One wonders what the axe the writer was really grinding – the unfairness of school league tables, and how their use can be abused perhaps.

One scene that stood out for me was when Gwen and the children were hiding in the barn. She was making a last film for future generations to find that would explain what went wrong with the world. Talking of Jack’s friend, the Doctor (akka Dr Who), she wanted to know why he wasn’t there. The way she understood it was that the Doctor turned up in the bad times to rescue people. He was there when all hope seemed to be extinguished. He dropped in from nowhere, pointed his sonic screwdriver at the bad aliens and saved the day.

So why not this time? Perhaps this time, Gwen mused, they didn’t deserve saving.

Earlier on the government had decided that there were some people who were potential parasites in society. There were some children who would never have a positive contribution to make. They would be the ones on benefits, the ones who couldn’t get a job, the ones who were more than likely to end up in prison. There were the ones who were worth less than others, the ones they could afford to give up on.

How opposite to the gospel! The truth is that none of us is worth saving – regardless of our potential earning capacities, our talents and abilities, or the lack of them. We love to construct league tables and make comparisons. We love to line ourselves up and shove other people to the back of the queue. It makes us feel better to think that we are better than someone else.

Gwen thought there was some requirement for Dr Who to rescue everyone, because that is what he did. In the same vein, I often think that God ought to drop in more often and intervene. There are so many times when I feel that I am on my own, that the help I expected hasn’t turned up, even at the eleventh hour!

Sometimes it is tempting to draw the same conclusions as Gwen – I don’t deserve saving. I am so glad that faith tells me that isn’t so, in capital letters, written in think black maker pen, in permanent ink. OK I do not deserve saving, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t get saved! If it was ever about who deserved what, none of us would be around. God’s grace gives me what I don’t deserve – a vibrant relationship with the Living God, oft-times incomprehensible, sometimes silent, frequently unpredictable.

I don't always get rescued the way I want to be rescued, or when, but I do get rescued at the very end of the story.

My Day of Tambourines and Dancing

“Again you will take up your tambourines and go out to dance with the joyful.” Jeremiah 31:4

This small sentence caught my eye as I was reading through Jeremiah 31 because it contains so much promise and so much hope.

I actually own two tambourines. One is a small one, a kind of tourist souvenir of a tambourine that hangs on the wall in the down stairs toilet.

The other is a real musician’s tambourine. It was on one of my Christmas lists long ago. I was a part of the worship team in the church and lamenting that I didn’t play an instrument, apart from my voice, which on a good day, was passable. I had the heart for worship but had not yet developed the vocal chords to match. I thought that a tambourine would make me feel that I had something musical to contribute. My sense of rhythm turned out to be as hit and miss as the vocal chords. It isn’t the easiest of instruments to wield, not made to measure and a little too heavy for my wrist.

Just lately there hasn’t been that much that prompts me to pick up a tambourine and join in a dance with the joyful. I am more likely to be comfort eating in the café exchanging woeful tales with anyone that will offer a shoulder, or a box of tissues.

That’s what I meant about promise. God doesn’t offer empty words as comfort and encouragement. He knows that there will be a day for tambourines and dancing, because He stands outside of time and He sees it.

He sees what I cannot see right now and tells me that my day for tambourines and dancing is just around the corner.

(Picture from www.nataliedee.com)

Girlie Grunts

I don’t normally watch the girlies at Wimbledon. Mostly it’s the grunting and the squealing that puts me off. It just seems very unnecessary. Also most games seem to be over very quickly, with the winner winning very easily…well, one would assume it was an easy win with 6-1 6-2.

I watched the semi final between Serena Williams and Elena Dementieva. My husband has taken a liking for the other Russian…Safina, so I was killing time waiting for that game to begin.

I suppose if you watch something long enough you are bound to get involved. As much as admire the William’s sisters, I like it when they get beat. And it looked like Serena was getting beat at one stage.

There was one point in the match where the grunting and squealing transformed into something else. Whereas it had just been irritable background noise, in one game where Serena was serving and it was a deuce battle, the grunting almost became snarls and hisses. If you could have translated the grunts I really think a dialogue was going on between them across the net as the ball thundered past.

“I’ll be blowed if you are going to take this point off me!”

“You try and take this point and I will scratch your eyes out!”

“This is my game, get your stinking paws off it!”

“Take that (whack) and that (whack) and that (whack) and there’s more where they came from!”

“Over my dead body!”

I don’t think I have ever heard anything so intimidating. For that single game there was so much ferocity in the grunts and the whacks. It was scary. If I had have been on the receiving end…I would have run away. I would not have snarled back!

I was thinking about the verse in Romans 8:26 “but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groans that words cannot express.”

When I groan it tends to be pitiful stuff. Things are going wrong. I am on the brink of tears. I am feeling frustrated. It’s like I am on the verge of some kind of breakdown.

Imagine then if the groans of the Holy Spirit are like those girlie groans in the tennis match, those really intimidating ones. Imagine that you could translate them.


“You (as in the enemy) are not going to snatch this victory away from Mel!”

“You try and take away her healing and I will scratch your eyes out!”

“This is her time with God, get your stinking paws off it!”

“Take that (whack) and that (whack) and that (whack) and there’s more where they came from!”

“Because of Christ’s resurrected body you will not prevail!”

Wow! So much ferocity, so much intimidation...and the enemy on the receiving end of them runs away!

What does Grace Look Like?

“Let us then approach the throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need.” Hebrews 4:16

It’s a well known verse. You may be one of those people who learned it by heart when you were a child.

I have to confess that when I have read this verse I have always focused on “approach the throne of grace with confidence”. I have always thought of the attitude in which we come.

Once while on holiday in Paris, I was approached by a beggar. That’s not entirely true. The beggar didn’t do any approaching at all. I suppose I did the approaching since the beggar was in my path. She was kneeling on the floor before me with her hands held out in supplication. I was moved to compassion and thought that no one ought to be in that position, kneeling before another person, hands held out. There was something about the posture of the woman that stirred my spirit.

Thinking later about it, I was glad that I do not need to approach the throne of God like that…on my knees, my eyes to the ground, holding out my hands in supplication. That is not confidence or boldness.

This morning, it was the end of the verse that captured by attention, the bit that I know is there but don’t really look at “that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need.”

“Grace to help us” isn’t an escape hatch to avoid the troubles we go through. Too often what I am looking for is a way out rather than a way through the difficult times that I am going through. I want not to feel so torn up inside. I don’t want my brother to be have cancer, or to think about another funeral on the horizon. I want stop crying. I want my sunny days without clouds.

God doesn’t offer that. He offers grace to help us in our time of need.

What does that look like? We had a visit from a friend of ours last night. She and her husband have some kind of time share arrangement. An apartment near Feungirola, where my brother lives, is available to them for a week in July. They have offered the apartment to us if we want it, so that we can spend time with my brother.

That’s what grace looks like!

Approaching the Throne of Grace

Despite this being a weekend, my body was in wake-up mode. Last Sunday we were talking in church about being people who spent time with Jesus. When Peter and John came up before the Jewish council, what set them apart from just being uneducated men was the fact that they had spent time with Jesus. Too often, even in my quiet times, I am not spending time with Jesus, but just ticking a mental box somewhere, that I have “done” it.

I was reading the end few verses of Hebrews 4, about Jesus our High Priest, and the confidence with which we can enter the throne room of God. I was reminded of a FW challenge entry I wrote based on how Aaron, the first High Priest, entered into the Most Holy Place.

Into the Most Holy Place

Aaron rolled over, the faint light of dawn seeping through the window. The space where his wife would normally be sleeping was cold and empty and her lingering fragrance was absent. Soon the Day of Atonement would be over and their enforced celibacy would come to an end. Today he would enter the Most Holy Place making a sin offering for the people.

Aaron Phillips rolled over, the shrill siren of the alarm clock drumming through his head. Rubbing his forehead, he tried to massage away the beginnings of a headache. He couldn't remember how many bottles of beer he had drank last night. Sighing, he rolled on to his stomach. Getting up on a Sunday always seemed to be such a battle. He tried to remember last week's sermon - just in case the pastor asked!

Aaron stood in the sanctuary, a bowl of clean cold water beside him on the floor. The water against his skin felt refreshing. As he washed every area of his body he reminded himself that he belonged wholly to God. Reaching over, he carefully stepped into the linen clothes, inhaling their freshness. He tied the linen sash about his waist, and patiently wound the turban around his head. He flexed his shoulders, ready for the burden of the ephod.

The shower sprayed hot water in a power jet against Aaron's skin. He lathered a palm full of shower gel into a white froth and smothered his chest arms. He hummed tunelessly, trying to remember the songs from the live band that had been playing last night in the club. Wrapped in a towel, he opened the wardrobe door, flicking his way through the hangers. The dark blue weave of his suit would best highlight the blue flecks of his hazel eyes.

The bull stood patient and placid as Aaron ran his fingers down its legs, checking that there were no imperfections. He could feel the strength of its muscles beneath the hide. He imagined the swift slash of the sharp knife against the bull's throat, the warm rush of blood spilling over his fingers and gushing into the bowl. The ram was less placid ,rather skittish, shuffling about on its hooves and Aaron knew that it would take a lot of his strength to hold it still.

Aaron upturned the cushions on the sofa searching for his Bible. A glass of orange juice held at a hazardous angle drizzled a sticky trail down green leather. He yelled to his wife, asking her if she had seen his Bible anywhere. He pulled books from the bookcase selecting the ones with likely looking spines - anything with black leather and gold writing. Suddenly Aaron remembered that the Bible was probably still in the boot of the car, nestled up against his tool kit.

Aaron walked towards the entrance of the most Holy Place. Lighting the incense in the basket, he watched a cloudy mass fill the place where he stood, and twitched his nose at the strong fragrance. It was essential that he wait long enough for the smoke to fill the room before he entered. Aaron knew well enough that no amount of smoke could hide him from the awesome God, but the smoke was there to remind him that he could not look upon the face of the Almighty God and live. Just before he stepped into the smoke filled room, Aaron checked the rope tied about his ankle. If anything were to go wrong, and God found cause to destroy him, at least his body could be pulled out of the room. Aaron felt his heart shiver fearfully as he entered into the Most Holy Place to an encounter with the Living God.

Aaron pulled neatly into the last car parking space outside the church. He dismissed the thought that he aught to show consideration to the couple following behind him. He didn't recognise them and thought they must be visitors. Aaron glanced at his watch, calculating the possible timing of the meeting, hoping he would be home for the start of the game. He ran his hand over the gleaming red bonnet of his car, thinking it might be an idea to take it over the car wash later this afternoon. There was a slight chill in the air and Aaron shivered as he opened the church door. He never entered the Most Holy Place and missed an encounter with the Living God.


(I am glad that we don't need to enter God's presence the way that Aaron, the High Priest, had to. But neither should we enter with the mind-set of my character Aaron Philips)

Hands Held High

I was reading this morning from the account in Exodus of Joshua fighting the Amalekites down in the valley while Moses stood on a hill with the staff of God in his hands held high. I wondered if Joshua could actually see Moses. Come to think of it, it doesn’t matter whether Joshua could see the hill or not. In the midst of the swing and clash of steel he couldn’t really afford for his eyes to stray to a hill behind him. A glance backwards to the hill might have been enough time for the fatal thrust of the enemy blade to kill him.

Did Joshua know what was happening on the hill? Had he made the connection between what Moses was doing on the hill, and how the battle was turning for him, or for his enemies? I suspect not, seeing as the account ends with God telling Moses to write down what happened and to make sure that Joshua gets to hear it all.

Joshua might have thought it was all up to him and his troops to save the day. Those times when they were winning might have been just because of effort on their part, of a second wind blowing in their direction. The times when they were loosing might have been down to weariness on their part as they had been fighting for the better part of the day. It is only in hindsight that he can join all the dots together to see the picture of God’s intervention.

Sometimes I think that I must be like Joshua right now. My battle isn’t physical one. Much as I would like to have a flesh and blood enemy that I could see, and a gleaming sword to swing at them, that’s not the case.

I think that my enemy is a big black hole of sorrow that would love to just suck me in. The Amalekites appear to me as dark thoughts, or a sense of helplessness or a wave of anger at the way in which what is happening to my family is unfair and God chooses not to intervene to stop it all.

I picture another man with His hands held high.

”Who is he that condemns? Christ Jesus, who died—more than that, who was raised to life—is at the right hand of God and is also interceding for us” Romans 8:34

There is nothing to say what posture Jesus has adopted as He intercedes for me, but just as Moses stood on a hill with his hands raised high, interceding for Joshua on the battlefield below, something in my spirit tells me that Jesus is standing with His hands held high in heaven, before the throne of God. He doesn’t hold a staff like Moses, but clearly visible are the scars on His palms which remind God that Jesus died for me, that He has a claim upon my life.

I can’t see this particular hill, or this particular man. Like Joshua I am too busy with the clamour of the battle, but He is there nonetheless. And with him rests my victory.

The Hug

Have you ever felt in need of a hug? It has to be the right kind of hug! Too many people who hug me are too tall and I find myself almost nestled beneath their armpits. We are not like two jigsaw pieces that slot neatly together. I want to be able to rest my chin on someone’s shoulders but to do that they would need to be kneeling down!

I dreamt about a hug one night. I am not even sure that it qualified as a dream because I wasn’t quite asleep at the time.

I had been thinking about my brother. I wasn’t asleep. The rumble from the air conditioning unit on the wall was keeping me awake, as was the slightly louder rumbling from my husband stretched out next to me.

I was thinking that my brother was probably lying awake too. The tumour on his back doesn’t really allow him to lie down in a comfortable position. Sometimes the morphine has worn off and he the pain is gnawing away at the edges, or not so much gnawing as biting viciously.

I thought to God that it would be nice if someone could just hug him so that he would feel better. Wouldn’t it be nice, I thought, if I could just hug him and some of my strength could just pass through my skin and through his and into his body and just ease the soreness he was feeling?

I had a picture in my head. It was as if I was watching. I saw God give my brother a hug. It wasn’t an embarrassing pat on the back, and over and done with in as short a time as possible. It was a solid hug, and through it, God imparted strength and comfort. There was nothing awkward in the giving or the receiving.

As God hugged my brother, I couldn’t help but smile. I felt more at peace than I had done for a long while.

God’s a good hugger!

The Time We Have Left

There is one prayer meeting, and I have been to few, that really sticks out in my mind. I suppose that if I could describe it in one word it would have to be “right”. There was no hype about anything, no whipping up emotions. It could have been a departmental meeting I was at. It was about conducting business…business in the heavenlies!

What happened was that there was a list, an agenda, if you will. They would take an item from the agenda, and then pray about it. They would get passionate in their prayers, but then, during a natural lull, someone would ask, “What do you think God is saying about this?”

They would be quiet for a while, and then someone would give insight into what they thought God was saying, and then they would all begin to pray again, taking a slightly different direction or focus. At the next lull, it would happen all over again, someone asking what God was saying, the silence, the insight, they continued prayer in the slightly different direction.

It was like correcting the cannon direction in a war. Moving it slightly to the left, or the right, or upwards, or downwards.

Eventually they reach a point where there was nothing left that needed to be said and move on to the next item. It was not your run of the mill, predictable prayer meeting, and you really felt that you were conducting holy business. No words were wasted. There were no long stretches of silence, but nothing said was irrelevant or waffle.

I suppose that to do that you would have to trust the sensitivity of the people involved in the praying. I am not sure that I would trust myself that much!

They came to one item which involved a young boy diagnosed with cancer.

They began praying fervently for God’s intervention and his healing touch. I am sure you can supply the words! They were looking for the cancer to be stopped in its tracks, for tests to come back clear.

The lull came, along with the question, “What do you think God is saying about this?” The answer supplied was that the boy was not going to recover. There wasn’t a day of recovery written in his book.

My jaw dropped! I thought that it was a given that God healed. You prayed for healing, sometimes you got it, sometimes you didn’t.

The nature of the prayers changed dramatically. The prayers were about comfort, and strength, and inner healing for the boy and his family through the time ahead. This was not a demonstration of a lack of faith, but a response to a word of knowledge.

I learned something about praying that night. It is not just what you say that counts, but what you hear from God. Too often I am more concerned about what I say on the matter rather than what God has to say on the matter.

There have been times when I have shared with friends that my brother is dying of cancer. There have been some that have not known what to say. There have been others who have been quick to testify of other people they have known who have been diagnosed with cancer, given months to live, been prayed for and then in a subsequent test, there is no sign of the tumours.

I prayed a lot for the recovery of my sister when she was unwell. I rebuked the illness. I found words in my daily readings that built up my faith. The times when I felt faithless I felt that I was letting her down, or letting God down, or just plain jinxing her recovery. So much energy expended and she passed away. I wouldn’t say that I stopped believing in God, but I was wary.

I should have spent more time asking the question, “What do you think God is saying about this?” rather than just presuming the given that God healed, that you prayed for healing, sometimes you got it, sometimes you didn’t.

I spoke to a work colleague yesterday about my brother’s diagnosis. It is cancer, in its later stages, inoperable, terminal, with a six month use-by date. My colleague’s response was to ask what my brother intended to do with the time left to him.

I had been so focussed on praying for healing, or praying for salvation, so that if the healing doesn’t happen at least he gets to go to heaven.

Inside of the question of what my brother is going to do with the time left to him, comes another question.

What am I going to do with the time that I have left with him?

I want to enjoy his company, share a tinnie or two, to laugh with him, to cry with him, to tell him funny jokes, to sit on the terrace and watch the sun go down of an evening!

Climbing Mountains

“Who may climb the mountain of the LORD? Who may stand in his holy place?” Psalm 24:3

I read the whole of Psalm 24 this morning, but the bit that caught my eye was this verse about climbing the mountain of the Lord. In the NIV it’s called a hill rather than a mountain. A hill doesn’t seem so daunting. You can climb a hill and maybe you get out of breath a bit, if you’re me. Mountains are a different type of climb!

As I read the words, they reminded me of an article I had posted at faithwriters.com on the topic of endurance. I likened it to a mountain climbing experience I had when I was on a Geography field trip at school. One big mountain, one short Mel, one ever-stressed heart, one huge distance lagging behind everyone else, one very red face and one kind teacher who dropped back to walk with me and encourage me that the view from the top was worth the climb.

Thinking in terms of spiritual mountains and challenges in the article I wrote these sentences: “Some mountains move when I apply my mustard-sized faith in prayer. Other mountains are for climbing. True wisdom is being able to distinguish between them.”

How much effort is wasted when we try to climb a mountain that God had ear-marked for moving! How much angst we go through trying to move a mountain that God has set aside for climbing! “True wisdom is being able to distinguish between them”

I am not sure if I am half way up a mountain that I ought to be moving out of the way by faith, or half way up a mountain that I am supposed to climbing! If I am supposed to be moving it, I am not sure that I possess the mustard sized faith to do the job. I have taken a bit of a battering faith-wise over the last few months. If I am supposed to climb, I am not entirely convinced that the view from the top is going to be that spectacular!

Guess who needs wisdom?

My Life in Plastic

I have just decanted the plastic cards out of the purse. I learnt the hard way, when my purse got stolen in Rome, that not all those plastic cards that I carry around with me will be that much use in Spain.

Library Card You don’t actually need to go to Spain to discover how useless it is. The library in Rugby will not let me use it to log on to their computers to access the internet. It would probably be cheaper to use an internet café if Rugby had one!

Blockbuster Membership Card There is a scene in Notting Hill where Hugh Grant flashes his Blockbuster Membership card to get into a press conference. The shop in Rugby obviously doesn’t have the same issues as the library. They let me rent out “The Bells of St Trinian’s” to keep my nieces entertained one evening.

RBS Highline There’s no money in the account. I keep intending to close the account on account of their manhandling of money in general and having to be bailed out by the government. They can’t look after money properly. They can’t be trusted!

Gallery Hairdressers appointment card No time or date filled in, just the name Toni, with an “x” instead of a dot over the “i”. She is responsible for my Mary Quantish look.

Matalan I have absolutely no idea why they require a card for you to buy something out of their shop. It doesn’t serve as a credit card, or a loyalty card. It’s just a very silly way of doing business.

Gala Casino Yes, now you know my secret vice! Roulette is my game! Actually, it’s not my vice at all. A dozen chips each worth fifty pence doesn’t really add up to any kind of vice, particularly when the man you are sitting next to is playing with chips worth fifty pounds a shot. In Northampton I had need to go to the loo, and when I need to go, I need to go. We were parked in a car park in a complex that housed a Gala Casino. I thought they might let me in to use the loo. They didn’t, even when I showed them my card They wanted me to fill out a form and get another card from them. I just held on and found a loo that did not make me fill in any forms.

An Orange Top Up and Go card I have never topped up and went seeing as I don’t know how. The man in the Orange shop tops us and goes on my behalf.

Look Who's (Not) Talking!

I thought that if I maybe spruced up the outside of me, it would have a knock on effect of cheering up the inside of me! It didn’t work. I may have a very nice Mary Quantish hairstyle, and no grey roots, but inside I feel more like Quasimodo, lurching unsteadily about.

The train ticket to Edinburgh is purchased. I didn’t reserve a seat since they are now charging for the service. I also bought my air ticket to Malaga. I think I shall be the only person going there without the holiday mood and the suntan lotion in tact. A quick look at the website that deals with weather all over the world tells me that I am in for a week of sunshine and temperatures in the 80s. I am not a heat seeking body. Give me an igloo any day.

I find that what worries me most, apart from chaffing thighs, is talking to my brother. Talking for me is not built into my DNA. I am not one of the great talkers of the world. You just ask my friend Gill how much talking I do. Zilch! It’s not that I can’t talk, I can. It’s not that I don’t want to talk. I do! It’s just that I worry about running out of interesting things to say. I have not seen my brother for a few years, I have read through many of the backdated copies of the articles he has submitted to the magazine he writes for…but all of that doesn’t help. I am deep waters, not a chattering brook!

Most of the people that I talk to any great length with are sitting in a classroom behind desks and have to listen to me because I am the teacher. What we talk about is not personal stuff and they take tests that tell me whether they have listened to me at all. The other group of people I talk with are Christians in my church. The topic may be some wonderful insight into scripture. Over a cup of tea we talk about personal stuff, but not always that personal, and it’s never for very long!

There are few people that I talk to for hours on end. I am just not one of the world’s talkers. A Thinker? Yes, I think often. A writer? Now we are talking comfort zones! Talking? AARRGGHH!

Take for example, the hairdressers I have just come from. Isn’t it supposed to be that the reason that women are prepared to pay over the top prices for some of the treatment isn’t always just about the hair? Hairdressers may not be trained counsellors, but they end up listening anyway. That is…unless the client is me. I don’t do “hairdresser talk”. I am not sure if my kind of customer is not valued simply because I don’t talk. I will maybe exchange a few pleasantries…I am not rude by any means. I just don’t talk much.

I have to admit that my reluctance to talk this morning was justified. Who wants to hear the catalogue of troubles that I have faced and continue to face this year? I can’t keep up a string of irrelevant and irreverent observations on life – mine in particular. I don’t lead a life worthy of comment.

I am not sure I need to worry so much. My brother is more than capable of keeping up an entertaining monologue. He talks a lot. My only problem is more than likely how to get a word in edge-wise.

Maybe, apart from looking up websites about the weather in Malaga, I should be checking out “Five Steps to a Really Good Conversation”.

Ezekiel's Heart

“The word of the LORD came to me: "Son of man, with one blow I am about to take away from you the delight of your eyes. Yet do not lament or weep or shed any tears. Groan quietly; do not mourn for the dead. Keep your turban fastened and your sandals on your feet; do not cover the lower part of your face or eat the customary food of mourners. So I spoke to the people in the morning, and in the evening my wife died. The next morning I did as I had been commanded.” Ezekiel 24:15-18

The Bible contains some incredibly sad stories. I read this one many years ago. It is one of those bits that many people would never know was there unless, like me, they had followed one of those programmes that encourage you to read the Bible through in a year, assigning you a couple of chapters from the Old Testament and a couple from the New each day.

I read it and it broke my heart. It just seemed so unreasonable of God to do that to a servant. It was bad enough that he commanded Hosea to marry a prostitute to get a message across, but this was a different thing. It is hard enough to find the “delight of your eyes” in the first place, that to lose it is harder still.

I haven’t been given a day’s notice regarding my brother’s cancer. The doctors may be thinking in terms of months rather than years of life expectancy, but not days, and not hours.

I have also not been told that I can’t shed tears and I have shed a lot over the last twenty four hours. I haven’t been told to avoid mourners food, so chocolate is still on the menu!

Mike may not be “the delight of my eyes” either, but that doesn’t make it any less traumatic.

I wrote this poem, in response to the story, some five years ago. Trying to capture an emotion that belonged to someone else was a word play exercise. Now I feel it. Now it hurts. Now I wish it was just Ezekiel’s heart and not my own.

The last two couplets are particularly hard. If this is God’s will – it’s not a very nice will, and maybe, dare I say it, He’s not a very nice God to let it happen. Trust is no longer just a word that you casually toss into a conversation but a mountain to climb.

Ezekiel’s Heart

This time you ask
Too hard a task

To take my wife
My heart, my life

You say “Don’t cry.”
My tears deny

My pain, to hide
My grief inside

If I could pray
“Not her,” I’d say

To you alone
I sigh, I groan

Do as you will
Your plan fulfil

I trust in you
Your will I do

Talking with MIke

You know those movie scenes where the difficult telephone call has to be made. She picks up the phone, dials the first few numbers, puts the phone back down, walks around the room, stops and looks out of the window, takes a deep breath and picks up the phone again? Well, I played out the scene last night.


Between the hours of 8-10 pm was the best time to phone my brother, Mike, in hospital in Spain. So I waited until 8.00.

What if I have nothing to say? “Sorry” doesn’t take so long to say. The whole awkwardness of talking to someone you haven’t spoken to for years, and who has cancer, and who is dying doesn’t make for good conversations.

A Spanish lady picked up the phone. I don’t know how to say, “Can I speak to Michael?” in Spanish, and she had no clue and put the phone down.

Next minute he is there pouring a mouthful of abuse down the phone – not directed to me, but to the Spanish woman. He can’t speak Spanish either, so I doubt she has any clue what the problem was.

The problem, once Mike realises that he has a connection and he is not holding a dead phone in his hand, he tells me, is that the ward that he had all to himself, he now has to share and the other occupant, being Spanish, is ruling the roost, and he has been relegated to one tiny corner.

There’s nothing like a mouthful of abuse to open up the lines of communication. I don’t think I even got to say sorry, not that Mike would have listened. He refuses to be sorry for himself. The deed is done and dusted and who cares who is to blame and whether it is fair or not?

“At least they’ve not dropped me from the operating table!” It’s a reference to my sister’s recent illness, death and catalogue of hospital errors. Apparently Mike had been fretting that he never got to see Linda, or attend her funeral. He thought that others thought it meant he didn’t care…and sadly some thought exactly that way. The ones who knew, myself and my eldest sister, had kept it from them, at his request. To him, to tell them how ill he was, would be like the bridesmaid turning up at a wedding far outshining the bride. So he requested silence on the matter. I suppose we also agreed to keep quiet because at that time neither of us knew the true diagnosis. We didn’t know he was dying too.

I asked for a conversation with Mike, and I got one. Liberally sprinkled with colourful language he told me what life was like in the hospital. While he was speaking, the nurses were changing drips and giving him medicine and he was interrupting his discourse to say ”Ow”.


We laughed a lot. I cried a lot, though I tried not to let him know.

It was so different from Linda. I didn’t realise how difficult it had been talking to an unconscious body wrapped in a ventilator, keeping up a steady flow of comments and not having her respond.

Mike’s raucous laughter and pithy observations of Spanish hospitals was entertaining. It wasn’t a performance put on for me, to cheer me up and make me feel better…it was him being genuinely him.

Conversations With my Brother

My brother, Mike, has written himself into the role of the black sheep of the family. I am not sure that he is any blacker than anyone else…and we all have our black moments. He is living in Spain at the moment, and it is only in the last six months or so that he has got in touch. Conversations over the facebook chat line are less than satisfactory, but better than nothing.

There are a couple of conversations that other people have had with Mike that stand out in my mind. One was with my youngest sister. I can’t remember the circumstances that led up to the conversation, only that it took place in a pub and was liberally watered with a lot of alcohol! It was a conversation, that when she related it to me, I was jealous of. They talked about all sorts of things, and he shared with her his thoughts on so many of the events of our childhood that my sister was too young to remember. They talked in particular about our experiences in an orphanage. We weren’t orphans. Our dad had died and mum was really unwell and we had been shelved out to friends and relatives before that, and I think this was the only solution for keeping the kids together. It wasn’t a good time in our lives and it wasn’t the most loving or supportive of environments. He talked about the nuns picking on Linda, and saying quite cruel things. It might have been about her weight. Mike told Sharon how angry he felt because he thought Linda to be beautiful. I remember thinking as Sharon related the conversation that I wanted to ask, “What did he say about me? Did he think I was beautiful?”

The second remarkable conversation Mike had was with my mum just before her left for Spain. Actually, I am not even sure this one happened or whether I dreamed it did. He hated public school. He couldn’t see that Mum wanted him to have the best opportunity possible, but that she wanted him out of the house. Rejection, was how he perceived it and it coloured so much of what happened to the rest of his life. He blamed her for so much going wrong. Anyway, he went to visit her, his “last” visit before he broke off ties with the rest of the family. He wanted her forgiveness. He was sorry for all the trouble that he had been, or for all the bad mouthing, for being “a disappointment”, not just to her, but to my dad when he had been alive. I don’t know whether he would have expressed his change of heart in Christian terms, but God was at work. Some of the first people that Mike met in Spain were Christians.

I am envious of those kinds of heart to heart, masks off, kind of conversations. I wouldn’t say that I haven’t had them.

I must have been in my late teens, or early twenties, just recently come to faith. I had the Roman Catholic background, but it wasn’t until I was eighteen that my faith had become personal and real. Late one night Mike came into the room and knelt beside the bed. He took my hand and said he needed to talk. He wasn’t entirely sober. He wanted to know about the peace that had come into my life. So I told him about Jesus and about salvation. We talked for a while exchanging views about very intimate things. I felt awkward and totally inadequate for the task and I gave myself a hard time because the conversation hadn’t led to his salvation! I don’t think he even remembered the conversation the next day.

The other conversation I remember was much later, before I moved to Inverness, after I had returned from teaching abroad. That would put it somewhere between 1987 and 1989. It might actually have been as late as 1993 when I was recovering from a deep vein thrombosis. There was a healing ministry in the local town hall. It was an international speaker. I invited Mike to come along. He had been suffering from a bad back for a while and I told him that if he came Jesus would heal him. I expected his usual guffaws at the mention of God. His reply surprised me.

“I know God will touch me, and that He can heal me...but I don’t want God to touch me. I will have to change my life if He does, and I don’t know if I want to change.”

There is a more recent conversation with Mike. It took place last night about half past nine. It is not a conversation that I am jealous of. My brother, Richard, phoned him and I guess that some time today I will also be phoning. Mike never made it to my sister’s funeral. For most of my family is was not expected that he would come, but I hoped he would and had been gently nagging him. It turned out that the “wouldn’t come” was “couldn’t come”. He was due to go into hospital having been diagnosed with two tumours. There has been a biopsy done, and it turns out that they are both malignant. The word “cancer” has been tossed into the diagnosis and he has started radiotherapy treatment. Mike, on the phone last night was very positive. He was thinking in terms of success and the cancer going into remission. I just wonder when he finally put the phone down, whether he really felt so positive.

Me? Am I positive and thinking in terms of success? I am still trying to right my boat after my sister Linda died last month. I didn’t think that a storm would brew a second time so swiftly.

Leave Your Country... and Go

It is coming up to twenty years since I moved to Inverness. I came up in 1989 to serve for a year on a gospel outreach team. I came from Rugby. It would probably be about this time that I was being interviewed to see if I was a suitable candidate, although the only requirements seemed to have been that you were a “born again” Christian (how long you had been born again didn’t seem to matter…maturity in Christ wasn’t considered important) and whether you were the member of a vibrant Church (usually within the Covenant Ministries band)

I had handed in my notice for my teaching job at the end of the previous year. I had been teaching abroad for five years and there had been so many changes in the courses and exams that I was finding it hard to catch up. I had been taken on by a temping agency and was filing letters in a big industrial firm. It wasn’t rocket science and once the novelty of people saying “Pease” and “Thankyou” and opening doors for you had worn off I was really being challenged.

Someone came to visit our church to enlist support for people on the outreach teams. They weren’t looking for volunteers, just financial support and practical help like food parcels, but a couple in the church said to me that they would support me when I enlisted. I had no intention of enlisting. Then someone else said the same thing. Then the pastor of the church explained that he had written on my behalf to get the application form and had already filled in the bit he was supposed to fill in recommending me.

I weighed up filing letters against going to a town I’d never been to, to spend a year with people I didn’t know, doing something that completely terrified me – the safe option versus the scary option…and I chose scary.

I didn’t choose to come to Inverness. Along with his recommending me for the job, my pastor also recommended that I get sent as far away as possible. He didn’t want the church and the people I knew to be near enough to me that when things got tough I could just come home. Inverness was the farthest away they could place me.

Before I left Rugby, they prayed and prophesied over me…like they did. Someone made the comparison between me and Abraham, quoting Abraham’s call. Just like the great man, I was heading to another country, to a place I didn’t know, leaving behind the familiar (and the letter filing), leaving behind my family who all live within a twenty mile radius of my mum.

“The LORD had said to Abram, “Leave your native country, your relatives, and your father’s family, and go to the land that I will show you. I will make you into a great nation. I will bless you and make you famous, and you will be a blessing to others. I will bless those who bless you and curse those who treat you with contempt. All the families on earth will be blessed through you.” Genesis 12:1-3

Abraham was 75 when God asked him to move. Had he been living in the UK in our generation, he would have already moved 5.7 times by then…but he wasn’t. Moving just wasn’t done in Abraham’s day. It wasn’t part of the culture, it wasn’t practical.

Abraham really downsized. He moved from a proper home with proper foundations to a tent. He shifted regularly. He didn’t move within a ten mile radius either,

Leaving you native country, relatives…I did that, but there is a leaving of something else. Leaving behind the familiar doesn’t have to mean heading off to the Amazon and preaching to pygmies. It might mean leaving the spade in the ground and walking over to the fence to talk to your neighbour.

What made Abraham leave?

It wasn’t his knowledge of God because he didn’t know who God was at the time. He came from a nation that worshipped idols.

God said, “I will make you into a great nation”. To get the nation, you need the son. Abraham didn’t have a son. What God was essentially saying to Abraham was “If you want the son, then I can give him to you, but only if you move to where I tell you to go.” The son is tied up in Abraham’s obedience to move. If he stayed where he was, there would be no sons. Abraham wanted the son…he wanted it badly…so he moved.

What do we want so badly that we are prepared to move to get it? The trouble with us is that sometimes we don’t want things that badly. We tell ourselves that we can live without that one thing we want so badly. We change our thinking about that one thing to make it no so necessary. So we stay put. We end up with a life less extraordinary than God intended for us.

Peeling Off the Mask

I just didn’t give it a second thought. I printed off a copy of the all the poems I had written for the Writer’s Digest Poetic Asides Poem a Month challenge. (That was a bit of a mouthful). I gave a copy to a friend. I was delighted that I had completed the challenge and made the crossover from inspirational poetry to writing poems about dandelions and green blackboards.

I forgot that in among the short snappy two liners, and the complicated sestinas, there were a lot of raw poems about the grief of loosing my sister Linda. They were bleak, and dark and sometimes angry. Some of best poems are birthed out of some of the worst of circumstances.

What I had given my friend was an open window straight into my soul. It wasn’t pretty…and yet at the same time, in one of those most mysterious paradoxes we all encounter, it was beautiful. Very strong emotions had leaked out into the poetry. I had lifted the lid on what was really happening in my soul.

In church I wasn’t even attempting to hide my grief, but I made the effort to clean it up a little, make it presentable and palatable to people around me. In my poetry I didn’t. It was just straight from the heart.

Transparency is hard. We all wear masks and show other people the best of us. There is something quite awesome that happens when we peel back off mask and reveal the real us.

Coming Out of the Facebook Closet

I have only myself to blame! I got involved in a conversation with a group of young people about Buddhist enlightenment…as you do. I am neither a Buddhist nor enlightened.

I was trying to explain the concept of enlightenment, not merely as knowing more information, or knowing facts that you didn’t know before. It is, apparently, a new way of looking at things.

A Facebook friend of mine had posted an account of a near-miss with a neighbour’s bullet….that brush with death scenario. It has produced in her an appreciation for life and for all that Jesus had done for her. She was looking at things differently. So, I was using my friend’s experience to illustrate what enlightenment might be like – a new way of looking at things.

The young people were not as impressed with the account of the brush with death and all the repercussions, as with the knowledge that I had a Facebook page! This really impressed them! They wanted to how many friends I had, whether they were “real friends” or cyber pals.

I suppose I should have anticipated the next move. “So and so has added you as friend on Facebook.” is becoming a regular tag in my emails. They tracked me down!

Despite having a Facebook page (and a My Space page…and a Shoutlife page…and a blog…) I am a surprisingly private person. I can’t imagine that anything I get up to can be that interesting to someone young enough to be my granddaughter!

I am “friends” with some of my nieces and nephews. I have had my fill of the pouting poses of a zillion photographs! So you will understand why for the most part I am politely refusing to be friends.