Clearing out

The first two or three days of the October holiday have been clearing out days. I took a black bin liner into the wardrobe and I filled it!

There are one or two things that probably ought to be in the bin liner but I talked myself into a stay of execution! I can’t imagine that I will ever wear them again but, they have memories attached.

There is a black flowery top and skirt of obscene smallness of waist that I wore to my engagement party. For a long time I entertained ideas of slimming down – but even though I am slimming down, the outfit is not your classic style that never dates. It has shoulder pads, Dynasty style.

There is also a kind of terracotta suit that I wore for my going away outfit after the wedding. The skirt part of it is pleated and quite short – those were the days when my legs were more shapely than they are now, no doubt. Yet again I can’t picture myself wearing it, but I am loathe to get rid of it.

There is a black T-shirt with Paris emblazoned across the front. We were there for my fortieth birthday and I actually may wear it one day. It is a weight loss goal that is achievable and the t-shirt is less liable to date.

Another T-shirt, a red one this time, marks an achievement in a health and fitness club – my attendance at 35 tummy tucking sessions! I am reminded that I was that disciplined once upon a time, that I took exercise seriously.

A jumper that I knitted didn’t make the path back to the wardrobe. (The black bin liner is still in the spare room, so a pardon is still possible!) It reminds me that I used to knit, once upon a time and I wore what I knitted with pride! I had one particular pattern that I used over and over again and adapted.

I confess to being a hoarder. As I have mentioned before I am one of those people who collect the plastic toys from Christmas crackers “just in case” they turn out to be useful! I have held on to clothes “just in case” I slim down sufficiently to be able to wear them.
I hold on to letters and notebooks that I never read “just in case” I want to walk down memory lane.

It all takes space up though. Put all the stuff in a box and you have to put the box somewhere. If that space is filled with boxes, then there is less space to put things that are currently in use!

If my physical life is full of stuff that I no longer need or use, or will ever need or use again – does the same apply to my spiritual life? Are there doctrines that are out of date, or revelation that his been superseded by something new? Am I resolutely hanging on to things, knowledge that I think might be useful one day when it clearly won't ever be?

Does theology become outdated? Do the things I believed twenty or thirty years ago actually have a “best before” date attached?

I find myself unwilling to take the black bin liner into my heart and fill it. There are no things in there that I don’t use. There is a verse somewhere in the gospels that talks of the wise man taking new and old treasure out of the store house.

I guess it takes real discernment to know what to let go of and what to hold on to.

A Glorious Fire

I know that I shouldn't really do this! I just have to hope that I don't get any FW visitors to the blog, and/or they don't tell one me. The Fathwriter weekly challenge topic was "Fire Fighters! I never thought that I would be able to come up with anything that I woud be proud of. I have written a few things that I really wish didn't have my name attatched! Then I had an excellent idea but not really sure that I could pull it off. I wrote a poem based on an story in Numbers.

A Glorious Fire

You should have seen the fire
It was glorious!
Blazing with a blistering heat
Furious flames
Choking smoke
And all it took was
Just a small spark

An abundance of
Driftwood in the wilderness
Exploding out of Egypt
It tumbled around barren places
Rebellious attitudes
Rumbling complaints
Snarling and sniping
Dry spirits
Parched hearts
And arid souls

And I lit my match
As I whispered in the shadows
“Why him? Why not you?”
And their covetous eyes
Gazed lustfully on Aaron’s staff
“Why him? Why not us?”
Their shout echoed among the sand dunes

The ground split
The earth opened its mouth
And swallowed the jealous ones
And fire roared from heaven
Consuming men who envied
And people ran from the flames
Screaming

Embers glowed dull red
Sparks quietly hissed
Not extinguished
The fire smouldered
I whispered again
To twitching ears
Fanning the flames of resentment
“They were the Lord’s people…
And Moses killed them.”
And they gathered
And they grumbled



God’s wrath was ignited
Flames of a different kind
Licked at His stiff necked people
Disease crawled over their faces
Gouging holes
Ripping flesh
Seeping poison
Weeping blood

And I danced
Among the fallen bodies
Skipping lightly through the flames
Laughing riotously
“Did You really think
You could do it, God?
Take a sin-stained people
And find your image in them?
Look at them!
Look at you!
Yet again I win
You lose!”

Then I saw a man running
Into the flames
Was it water he carried?
Aaron
Armed with incense
And fire from the altar
Ran into the plague pocked crowd
Making atonement
He stood between the living and the dead

And a shadow fell
Hinting at
Another time, another fire
Another place, another plague
Another man running into the crowd
Making atonement

And the fire stopped burning
The plague ceased
And all wounds were healed

It was a glorious fire
While it lasted!



(Based on Numbers Chapter 16)

One thing you lack

I decided to catch up with my City Gate friends and their daily bible study. They are working their way through the gospels in chronological order – so you get to read different perspectives on the each of the stories as portrayed in each of the gospels on consecutive days. Frequently I think “I read this yesterday.” and I did, but yesterday I read Matthew’s version and today I am reading Mark’s view!

The story is about the rich young ruler. Mark doesn’t call him a ruler – just a man. He doesn’t even call him rich – just a man. Mark is the only one that says that the man ran up to Jesus just as he was about to leave town. He is also the only one that says the man threw himself on the ground before Jesus. It made me wonder if there was anything that would be so urgent in my life that I run after someone and throw myself on the ground in order to ask my question. There ought to be!

The bit about selling all that he has, giving the money to the poor and following Jesus cropped up in a third year lesson not so long ago. We were exploring Jesus teaching about poverty and riches. We had discussed the difference between treasure in heaven and treasure on the earth. I had described treasure in heaven as acts of kindness, though I am sure that it involves a lot more than just being kind.

One pupil turned to another pupil and commented that she thought that his treasure in heaven was non-existent because she never saw him do anything kind for people. He looked quite alarmed by her words and it seemed to have struck a chord. For the rest of the lesson he was kindness personified – picking up dropped workbooks, offering to sharpen pencils, run errands and refusing to become involved in other people’s silliness. At the end of the lesson, he turned to the girl who had challenged him and asked whether she thought his had earned any treasure in heaven yet!

It strikes me that just one forty minute lesson of doing kind things makes very little impression. The man was asking Jesus what he should do with his life. What Jesus was asking of the man was a complete change of lifestyle. Selling all that he had was not just going to affect his life for the next forty minutes but was a long term change of priorities.

I found a quote on a sermon page on the internet:-

“I think he is inviting the rich young man to join him on his journeys, to become one of the disciples who enjoy the immense and unspeakable privilege of spending time with Jesus and learning from him on a day-by-day basis. What a wonderful invitation!”

Thirty years ago I received that same invitation – to join Jesus on his journeys and enjoy the immense privilege of spending time with him. I think the “sell all you have and give the money to the poor” might have been the first of many challenges that Jesus set him.

There is a sense that every day we run to Jesus, spurred on by a sense of urgency, falling on our knees before him, asking him “What shall I do with my life today?” Sometimes we don’t do that because we are not sure what he is going to ask and not sure that we think we want do it.

Jesus said to the man, “One thing you lack.” What was it he lacked? Was it “treasure in heaven”? Was it courage to follow his heart and turn his back on materialism?

If Jesus turned to me and said to me, “One thing you lack,” would I know what he was talking about? If I am in Chrsit - can I be lacking anything?

Talk Talk

Yesterday in our study together, a friend and I encountered a verse in Malachi 3:16 – “Then those who feared the LORD talked with each other, and the LORD listened and heard.” We were generally talking about how little people talk about things – and if they do talk it is always after the event, when things have been resolved rather than during the event. We are happy to share with others our masterpieces – the finished product – but rarely allow people to see the work in progress.

Joe is not really a great talker. He will talk volumes about things that interest him, but he rarely talks about personal issues. He assures me that it is a West of Scotland mindset! The idea of writing a blog or keeping a journal horrifies him!

There are times when he is more inclined to share heart – usually in the really late hours of the night. I grunt my responses in a hope that he might catch on that I am half asleep – but more often than not, the Holy Spirit will poke me awake, warning me that Joe is about to reveal something that matters to him!

He was talking about guilt. He often remembers and event in church a number of years ago. Joe had invited a friend from work to come along to the meeting. One of the leaders was given a word of knowledge to share about someone in the room. It turned out to be about Joe’s work companion. It was something straight from God, that the leader had absolutely no way of knowing in the natural and touched this person’s life. Talking about it afterwards round the lunch table with friends, we all confessed to moments of anxiety that something about our lives was about to be revealed. Each of us has brought to mind recent failures and falls in our faith that we really didn’t want advertised! All of us, that is, apart from Joe. He knew where the spotlight was about to be shone. Someone had laughingly commented that he must have a really clear conscience, but Joe was more convinced that his conscience must be seared! Some people in the room were real “spiritual giants” and yet they had all looked to their own lives and he hadn’t. I am never quite sure just how worried he is about the state of his conscience.

I think that it is a part of Joe’s catholic upbringing to feel guilty. Needlessly so for the most part! He talked last night about his mum. He shared a wonderful picture of one of his visits to her in the nursing home. He had arrived at a meal time and rather than come back in half an hour, Joe was given the last of feeding his mother. Everything she eats now is liquidised and resembles baby food. She is not always cooperative and it was a battle to get her to eat anything. Suddenly Joe saw things the other way around. Once upon a time it had been his mother pushing the food into his mouth and him pushing the spoon away. He was doing for her exactly what she had done for him all those years ago! She battled through his tantrums because she loved him and wanted the best for him. She met his uncooperative ways with patience. Now he was in that position – not with a child of his own, but with her – loving her and demonstrating such patience. Such tenderness, such love. That to my mind is when we discover who we really are and what we are made of.

"Winging it"

I have often had dreams set in school where I am not prepared for a class. Either it is a group of pupils that I am not familiar with, or teaching a topic that I know nothing about, or I cannot find the classroom. Sometimes I am just late arriving in school and miss the first lesson.

Last night I had another one of those dreams where nothing seemed to be going right – but this time I was supposed to preaching in church! I had a sermon prepared and tucked away in a polly-pocket. I seemed to have a million other polly-pockets, some with song lyrics in them and they were all mixed up and I every so often I found the one with the sermon in it, simply to lose it again.

We were meeting in a hotel and there were lots of people there that have since left the church. The previous church leaders were there – Charlie and Richard Green. Cliff and Michelle, great friends of ours who worship with another church were also present.

We had a short time of very dynamic worship, and then it was time for the sermon. I took out my notes and discovered that all the Bible references that I had printed out were all in the King James version with the most complicated sentence structure that even I could not make head nor tail of.

There were lots of people from the hotel that joined us. I was conscious that they were just ready for harvesting – but my sermon notes kept disappearing , the microphone wouldn’t work and every time I went to speak, there was no volume in my voice! It was frustrating. At one point Charlie or Richard stepped up to tell me that we would just keep on worshipping seeing as I was unable to do my bit! I insisted that as nice as the worship was, it was not going to convict people and bring them to repentance, and they needed to hear my words! But could I say anything – no! I remember singing a very prophetic song and the Holy Spirit was just saying to me “Follow my lead, you don’t need the notes, you don’t need the microphone – just follow me!”

At that point I woke up! I never got to preach the sermon. I was convinced that the sermon was based on something either in Micah or Malachi, so at four o’clock in the morning I was trying to hard to read both books, forcing my eyes to try to focus on the words trying to find out what I had been about to say.

I was prompted to pray. I am not sure quite how lucid my prayers were at four o’clock in the morning but I was praying for the voice of the church. We have something to say that will revolutionise the way that people live their lives and yet too often we are too quiet – there is not volume. Too often we get sidetracked by the music and the performance side of things that people become just an audience and not participators. People never reach a point of decision because they are not challenged to do so. So that was kind of the direction of my prayers.

Then I started by praying about my own inability. It wasn’t just someone else in the dream that was having problems speaking – but me! I like clear cut paths and things to be mapped out and planned. I like to know exactly where I am going and how to get there and what to look for along the way! I prayed that I would be able to drop all of that and just unhesitatingly follow the prompting of the Spirit. That is not to say that I just launch myself out blindly. There is a preparation that comes beforehand – the time spent in the word, in communion with the Spirit and in meditation where I am being equipped. The equipping isn’t so that I can just follow a particular path on a particular map, but that in any situation I come across – off the path so to speak– I will have an answer for.

I am watching the Ryder Cup in snatches between cleaning and stuff. The players know how to play the game. How they play the game is about using the knowledge they have effectively – the wind direction, the slope of the greens, the choice of club and golf stroke. If they only ever played on one golf course, and the holes were never shifted – they would always choose the same club, hit the ball in the same way and would be guaranteed to pot the hole in the same number of strokes. They will have learnt to play with a set pattern. They would get as result!

However, if they never played the same course twice, or the holes were shifted regularly – they would always have to be adapting what they knew to meet the conditions of the course. Their choice of club and choice of stroke would be chosen carefully depending on the wind conditions, the lie of the grass – so many variables to factor in. But who is playing the real golf? The man who has played the one course so many times, he could do it blindfolded? Or the man who is a stranger, who just knows his clubs and his strokes well enough to meet any obstacle?

I guess what I am trying to say that I believe that I have been equipped by the Spirit. I should be confident to “wing it” trusting that I have all the resources that I need for any task. I don’t need a map of where I am going because I have the presence of the one who has scouted out ahead. I just need to be more spontaneous in my approach to the things of the Spirit.

Children of Men

Last night Joe and I went to the cinema to see the film “Children of Men”. It was labelled as sci-fi simply because it was set slightly into the future, but there wasn’t much in the way of science to it. It was quite a depressing view of the future. Apparently women have lost the ability to reproduce, though no explanations are given as to how. Society falls apart and Britain seems to be the only part of the world where there is some kind of structure. Illegal immigrants flooding into the country looking for some kind of hope are herded up, caged and transported to refugee camps.

Into all of this a baby is born. You would think that the birth would be celebrated but because it is not born to a white British couple, but a black refugee, everything has to be done in secret.

There is a high body count, lots of blood and lots of swear words. Not much in the way of humour, not much in the way of kindness and compassion – except from some of the people in the refugee camp. It was a hard film to watch in that every bad character trait that the human race of capable of demonstrating was present! There was no Dunkirk spirit. No sense the “we are in this together and we will triumph!” It seemed like the lack of children brought out the worst in people. Knowing that the human race was dying out – they were not going to go with dignity and nobility, or a stiff upper lip!

So much seems to be just below the surface in life and the film says that it does not take much to strip away the veneer. I suppose the death of the human race and the fact that no babies are born is more that “not much” – but what is on the inside inevitably finds its way to the surface.

I was reading earlier on in the week that what condemns a man isn’t what goes into a man, but what comes out of his heart. The Pharisees were pretty much of the thinking that as long as the outside looked fine, what went on in the inside was of no concern. As long as they kept the traditions – tithed their herbs, washed their hands and turned up on street corners praying – it didn’t matter that inside they were seething with envy, or resentment or unforgiveness.

Maybe that is the problem with a world without children. Jesus says “Unless you become like little children…” – if there are no children, where are your role models? Too quickly we grow up and forget what it is like to be a child. If we don’t have children around us to remind us how we should behave – then we are in trouble.

The things I didn’t eat!

I lost just one measly pound this week! For all my stumbling over fallen logs and wading through bog pits for two hours the other day – just one measly pound! It is just not a fair reflection of all the sacrifices I have made this week!

Can I just tell you about some of things I didn’t eat? With the curry on Thursday, not only did I just eat half the portion they served me, but I didn’t have any nan bread. That to my mind is the best part of any curry! I didn’t have any toffee pavlova for dessert either.

Joe has a large packet of fun-sized Mars selections. It was one of his birthday presents. He did not take it with him when he went to Glasgow. Did I dib in at any point during the week? Well, actually, yes I did – only the fun-sized Malteser packets, but they were carefully accounted for in my points tracker!

Saturday morning is usually a full Scottish breakfast – with all the elements – bacon, sausage, egg, beans, mushrooms and a well fired roll. Two toasted crumpets with peanut butter just don’t measure up. The usual afternoon cake with a cup of tea while watching the big race – even that was sacrificed in the name of dieting!

Sunday was a beautiful day for a picnic at Whin Park. It was warm enough for an ice-cream, but did I indulge? No I didn’t! I went blackberry picking instead!

Normally, I would not give it a second thought. I love food. I love the variety of tastes and textures on my tongue. I actually don’t mind giving these things up if - IF - I can see some rewards in it. One measly pound is not a big enough reward in my mind.

This is exactly why I gave up Weight Watchers the last time – the measly one pound losses after careful counting and saying “No” to treats. Two weeks and I am discouraged. I know that all the one pounds add up over the weeks. I know that it took years of over indulgence to get me to where I am today and the excess pounds are not going to shift it in a few short weeks. I know all that in my head – but my heart fells short changed. This little voice in my head says “I bet you could probably have eaten the nan bread and you would still have lost the measly one pound.” I should never listen to voices in my head – but they are kind of compelling!

Discipline is hard! As someone once quoted Joe, “A sacrifice is not a sacrifice unless it costs.”

When You touch me

I’m coming to the cross again (When You touch me)

I’m coming to the cross again
The place where all the sin and shame
Of what I do
Was squarely placed on You
The pressure’s more than I can take
I’ve tried to walk in my own strength
I lay it down
Before your thorny crown

I’ve tried so hard to be someone
That You’d be proud to call Your son
To earn the love
I know I don’t deserve
When I think I’m standing tall
The greater height the bigger fall
Now all I see
Is my futility

But when you touch me
I feel the burdens slipping down again
And when you touch me
Can’t stop the tears from falling down like rain

I feel the shame of shallowness
The kind of measured holiness
That seems to fit
The life I want to live
How much of this is wood and straw
I want to work for something more
Than piety
Respectability

When the words cut like a knife
And harsh rejection haunts my life
I tell myself
This was the pain You felt
You walked this road a thousand times
The victim of the cruellest crimes
And left for dead
By every friend You had

When the accusations came
You refused to play their game
No words of hate
To set the record straight
And when they taunted at the cross
If You are God then save yourself
You set Your face
To free this fallen race

(c) Stuart Townsend 1999

I treated myself to a new CD. As I was peeling wallpaper off the bathroom wall I was listening to it. I just felt when I got to this track that God did some peeling off of His own!

It is the kind of poem that I wish I had the sensitivity to God's Spirit to write - the honesty of admistting that I am not where I should be, and that a lot of what i do that I pass off as holiness is just "wood and straw".

And then God touches me. I wept as I thought of God's grace towards me. Even when I think I am standing tall, God knows so well that in reality I have fallen over and still He comes to restore.

"Babe in the Wood "- it's no pantomime!

It is amazing the sense of peace that a stick of wood with a yellow arrow on it can create!

Because of the curry last night I was way over my Weight Watcher’s points, so I decided to try and claw a few back by going for a walk. The plan was for a half hour walk around a pleasant little wood I passed on the road a couple of days ago. About five miles away from there was an herb garden that does teas and coffees – a nice end to a busy week.

That was the plan! The Forestry commission are very good about making the best use of the woods. Usually beside the car park there is a big map of the place with all the various trails marked on it, telling you how long the yellow path is, or the blue one, or the red one and whether it is easily accessible or not. Tomfat Wood doesn’t have one.

I figured I would just walk along a path and after a while, take a left, and then another left, and another left and that by my reckoning would be like a big square and should get me back to the start. Earlier this afternoon I borrowed a book out of the staff library about the differences between men and women. Men have a great sense of direction, dating back from the cavemen times, while women don’t! I should have paid attention. I did the right amount of left turns but did not end back at the start! After about half an hour of walking I was lost. I suppose I could have retraced my steps, but I had come down some steep hills and I did not fancy climbing up them! I met a lady with three dogs and asked her for directions back to the car park.

She was very good telling me to follow the path I was one, past a small quarry, through a very big puddle and up a steep hill. That bit was fine. I wasn’t sure whether she said to turn left or right at the cross roads. I turned left. It looked a perfectly fine path, but after twenty minutes or so turned in a bog of squelching mud. Did I turn around and retrace my steps? Well, it had been mostly downhill and I was almost through the boggy ground. And I could see daylight through the trees. I figured that at worse, if I walked around the edge of the wood, I would find the car park eventually!

Did I ever? I just got more and more lost. There were no paths, no people, no dogs, no car park and the light was fading! I began to be just a little bit anxious. At this point I had been walking for an hour and a half! There was nothing to tell me whether I was walking in the right direction.

I saw a deer poking around in the trees, which I wouldn’t have seen if I had not been lost. I saw a variety of mushrooms and toadstools, and I saw some very small brown frogs hopping along the path earlier – so that was nice!

I felt very much like the lost sheep though, and although I didn’t pray properly I think God must have read my distressed thoughts! Suddenly there was a path and a stick with a yellow arrow on it! A path marker! I was no longer lost, but on a real path. A sense of relief washed over me and I followed the path back to the car park

My half hour stroll along a clear path had turned into a two and a half hour clamber over fallen tree trunks and wading through bog marshes!

I had to restrain myself from kissing the bonnet of my car once I had finally returned to the car park.

I think I fully earned the packet of Maltesers I ate when I got home - fun size, of course – just two points!

Dutch biscuits and rosehip syrup.

It is amazing the kinds of things that trigger memories. I remember years ago going out for a meal with Joe to a local pub. At the end of the meal we had tea and coffee. Balanced on the edge of the saucer was an individually wrapped biscuit. It was a caramel, ginger, finger sized biscuit. Once unwrapped, the smell of it evoked really strong memories of childhood. My father was part Dutch and used to visit Holland a few times a year. He always brought back gifts – headscarves with windmills or tulips printed on them, very small wooden clogs that you hung on a hook on the wall and packets of “speculars” – Dutch biscuits in the shape of windmills that smelt of ginger and caramel. I am not a fan of anything with ginger in it apart from stirfrys, but I adored these biscuits! The memory was so strong – I just sat there with the biscuit held to my nose, and a glazed look over my face.

A couple of days ago I had another memory moment. I had gone out for a long walk. Joe and I had planned to go out for his birthday meal – an Indian restaurant that the just recently opened up in the city. I needed points to play with – since joining Weight Watchers one just cannot eat something without working out how many calories or grams of fat one is dealing with. I intended to go for a walk, pick some blackberries, stop off at the shop to buy some apples and stew them up. Well, there were no blackberries in sight. There were lots of the most wonderfully coloured mushrooms or toadstools!

It was the rosehips that did it! Back in the 1960’s there was a government thing about collecting rosehips. We were encouraged to collect them, send them somewhere, and they got made into rosehip syrup. I think it was something that was good for you, like cod-liver oil but much nicer tasting! I can remember our primary school class going off for many an afternoon with our containers to collect rosehips.

It was a nice memory – being out of school, walking over the fields, knee deep in grass and avoiding the cowpats and the nettles to get to the rosehips. I don’t suppose the government today would want children out in the fields collecting rosehips. They probably wouldn’t know what to do with the rosehips anyway. They have probably decided that rosehip syrup really isn’t that good for children either compared to some other chemical collection masquerading as vitamin supplements.

Memories matter! The Bible has a lot to say about remembering things – listening to the reminders. I was reading this morning in Hebrews about the experiences of the Israelites being written down as a reminder for everyone else to learn from their mistakes. After sending in the spies to look out the land, they got very cold feet and wanted to head back to Egypt. God was not impressed and the only thing that stopped him disposing of the rebellious horde was Moses’ intercession. The people survived that day, but only to die another day on the journey through the wilderness. There fate, written down in detail, reminds me that to not trust God, to complain, to reject his claim on my life or to forget his mighty acts in my life is to court disaster.

To the next three and a half pounds

I think that very often the first step in making a change in our lives begins with admitting that there is a change that needs to be made!

For too long I have swithered about doing something about my weight. My nieces wedding last year although it provided motivation to loose weight, did not actually get translated into real action – so the weight never got lost. I just went up a dress size so that I would feel comfortable in whatever I wore for the day!

I have become quite lazy in some areas of my life and need to establish a bit of self control. So I joined Weight Watchers last week! A friend of mine joined a few years ago and has lost a tremendous amount of weight. People who have not seen her for quite as while no longer recognise her!

I hate Weight Watchers! I hate paying money to climb onto scales. ( I lost three and a half pounds this week.) I hate the discipline involved. Weighing out portion sizes to see what I ought to be eating has been a real eye opener. To some extent I do eat healthy food – I just eat too much of it! I think what I hate most is having to admit that on my own I can’t do anything that is as effective. On my own I have failed! I don’t have the required will power to say “No” to Indian takeaways! (Incidentally that does not make me a bad person!)

I am going to WW simply because I need to make myself accountable to someone. Left to my own devices, I have good intentions, but I don’t hold a whip over myself to make sure that I do it. The lady at Weight Watcher’s does!

It is not a sign of weakness to enlist the aid of other people to help us to do the things we cannot do for ourselves. It is recognising that we have weaknesses that need to be dealt with and that other people can provide the support we need.

I am sure that this translates into the spiritual realm somewhere.

Confession - Joining WW is like making a confession, openly admitting to thirty or so women in the room with you that, as far as eating is concerned, you are out of control. I don’t think we do enough confession in the church setting. We do not always openly admit that there are areas of life that we are struggling with.

Accountability – By joining WW I am making myself responsible to someone each week and have to report back on my successes and failures. Someone else knows what is going on in my “eating” life. To some extent she only knows what I choose to tell her – but if I don’t tell her, the advice that she gives is not the best advice to help me. I don’t believe for a moment that she is going to share my secrets with the rest of the women, or point the finger and laugh at me. I trust her. In the church setting we need to be accountable – to be more open and more vulnerable.

Support – It is not just what the lady at the front says that makes the difference but the conversations that I have with the other women. They are “normal” like me – with all their wobbly bits still in place. They are not success stories that make me feel I will never get there. Support in the church setting is not the prerogative of the pastor alone. It is all of us working together.

So cool!

This is so exciting! Thinking about the poem and getting an illustrator and a publisher – I took it a step further!

I don’t know any children’s illustrators so I “googled” it and arrived an internet directory of illustrators. They list loads of names and as you follow the links they showcase their work. I just picked a name at random, a name I liked the sound of (that is how I pick out my horses!), and someone living in the UK. I thought that if things came to anything, I would be able to contact the person easily.

I emailed the lady to explain about the poem, the illustrations and the publisher. I confessed that I was winging it and had really no clear idea how to go about it. I thought that if she just turned me down, I had lost nothing really. I was just pushing the door to see if it opened.

It opened! She emailed me back saying that the poem evoked very strong images and carried a deeper message too. She gave some suggestions about the options I might want to consider.

I could send it to a publisher and if they accepted it, I could tell them that I have an illustrator in mind. It might end up in an anthology, in which case the publisher might already have illustrators.

I could commission the illustrations and send the whole package – the poem and the pictures to the publisher. It might make a limited edition book for specifically Christian market.

I could go down the self publishing path, buying the illustrations and negotiating with the printers. I get the book I want, but they don’t manage the sales side of things. Contracts are drawn up between the writer and the artist about royalties and copyright at stuff.

I think that she is certainly interested in being involved!

So, I am well excited! I have great ideas but rarely take steps to make things a reality! It all looks so possible and not just pie-in-the-sky dreaming.

I am going to have a good talk with Joe about it and get his advice and talk with my friend, Mark, who may know how to contact a publisher.

This is so cool!

Absolutely delighted

As you know, I have been a member of Faithwriters.com for a few years. Most weeks I try to participate in the weekly challenge. I probably do get more caught up in winning and loosing than I ought to do – it is the competitive thing in me! Yesterday I was really delighted find my poem had won top spot.

A few of the comments made by the FW family said that I ought to try to get the poem published. As I wrote it, I could envision illustrations, but I am no artist. Maybe that ought to be my next challenge – to find a children’s illustrator and to find a publisher!

What, little tree, will you be?

Little tree, little tree
What will you be
When you grow tall
No longer small?
What, little tree, will you be?

I’ll be a crib
For the Saviour child
The holy babe
So meek and mild
I’ll rock Him gently
Through the night
Beneath the moon
While stars shine bright
That’s what this little tree
Will be!

Little tree, little tree
What will you be
When you grow tall
No longer small?
What, little tree, will you be?

With billowing sails
I’ll be a great ship
On a flurry of waves
I will rise and dip
And the Saviour
Will sleep
As I bear him along
Sturdy and strong
Upon the ocean deep
When winds start to toss
And clouds march across
The blue sky
Will I shake him
And wake him?
Others will, not I
He will raise up his arm
And the storm will calm
At his powerful word
In awe men will quiver
And demons will shiver
At what they have seen and heard
That’s what this little tree
Will be!

Little tree, little tree
What will you be
When you grow tall
No longer small?
What, little tree, will you be?

There’ll come a day
So dark and grey
I’ll lift him up high
As they watch him die
Mankind so cruel
To fashion a tool
Like this cross
As they hammer a nail
Through flesh soft and frail
They feel no loss
No regret and no shame
Not caring, or knowing
His crimson blood flowing
He’s bearing their shame
They witness his cry
“Abandoned am I!
And darkness steals over the sky
God’s face turns away
On that evil day
Then He hears his Son say
“It is finished”
Then falls his Son’s head
The Saviour is dead
And sin, the foul curse, melts away
That’s what this little tree
Will be!

Little tree, little tree
Do not weep or mourn
On the day the Son rises
All creation‘s reborn
Now hold we our breath
And eagerly wait
For His glorious victory
So awesome and great.

(c) Melanie Kerr 2006

Not at home

Jonathan Edwards made a resolution that he would live in such a way hat when he looked back on his life when he was old, he would have no regrets. There would not be a sense of wishing he had done something that he had the chance to do, but never did. I, sadly, do have regrets.

I regret not attending some of the weddings of my brothers and sisters. I was newly a Christian at the time of some of them and deeply disapproved of the chosen lifestyles and choices of husbands/wives. I was brash enough to think that I was right and they were wrong. I didn’t go to the weddings because…if you have seen the BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, the scene quite near the end where Catherine de Boer and her daughter keep away from the wedding of Darcy and Elizabeth – well, that disapproving look says it all. That was me! I cut my nose off to spite my face and it didn’t change anything!

I would like to think that I am different now. I am less harsh and down-the-line, hopefully more generous. When a friend of ours invited us along to the Mormon Church to witness her baptism, Joe and I chose to go. The Mormon Church and I have a bitter history. While I was asking Jesus to be Lord of my life, my sister was becoming a member of the Mormon Church. At the time I visited her determined to “set her right” and push her onto right path. Things did not work out that well and we didn’t speak for a while afterwards! Looking back over the years, I still cannot see that her faith has enhanced her life – but that is another story!

I guess I must have had an invisible sign hovering over me – the body language speaking very clearly – “Don’t even attempt to witness to me!” No one approached, except in the most friendly and inoffensive manner. I know our friend was delighted to see us.

I have rarely felt so uncomfortable in a place or worship. Part of it was probably the baggage of attitude that I brought with me, but seriously, I never felt the presence of God. I don’t really know enough about Mormonism to pick holes in their theology. I just know that they have some very different views from mainstream Christians. The people were nice, but, for me, the Spirit of God wasn’t there. The reality of a life producing faith just wasn’t there. Not for me, anyway.

The service lasted about an hour. It was very serious and …I am trying not to say the word “dull” but that comes to mind. A small choir of men sang a wonderful hymn “The Lord is my Shepherd”. Maybe it is the worship leader in me but it wasn’t exuberant enough. Such wonderful words needed heart and soul and spirit. I wanted to say “Is He really your shepherd? If He is then why aren’t you exploding with joy?”

Part of the service included watching a DVD called “The Witnesses” – fifteen witnesses to the truth they had found in Mormonism. They thankfully stopped at number five. Ninety percent of what they were saying, I could go along with – but the ten percent of other stuff was not scriptural. Joe said afterwards that for him that kind of “church” is the most dangerous kind. There is so much truth that the error sneaks in. It is like getting someone to eat an unpleasant tasting tablet by sticking it in a banana! The banana is easy to digest, but you don’t notice the tablet. Tiny though the error might be, it infects the rest of the truth, twisting it to something it is not supposed to be. We are all susceptible to twisting the truth, but the Bible acts as a plumb-line, and the prompting of the Spirit keep us from error.

I felt really sad was that our friend had been unable to find her answers in our church. She had been a member of our church for a while many years ago. I felt sad that we had not managed to meet her needs – we failed to be the body that she needed. Actually, the problem might not lie with us. Just because you are being the right kind of body, does not mean that people wish to fit themselves into it.

Incidentally – to go back to places of worship where I have felt at home – amazingly enough – one such place was actually a Muslim mosque! Just a few miles away from the airport at Larnaca, in Cyprus, there is a small mosque. It is on the edge of a salt lake. It is surrounded by trees. Inside it is just one big empty space with carpets. I felt the presence of God there so strongly. It may have been just the silence and the peace of the place, but I felt close to God there.

Is he dead?

I think this is a genuis idea. It is in the Observer Food Monthly magazine. It is one of the winning entires of the Seeds of Change photography competition. Being a food producer, the photo had to have some connection with food.

It reminds me of the Brick Testament where a some has re-told stories of the bible through lego people. Maybe John Roberts, the winning photographer, should have a stab at doing Bbile stories with jelly babies.

Incidentally I really like jelly babies.

Where do people get these ideas?

I'll take the high road...

Joe and I have a very curious eccentricity, which so far we have not discovered anyone else shares! When we are away on holiday we take days off from one another! Think about it – throughout the normal working year we spend quite a bit of time apart. We don’t see each other during the day. Sometimes we don’t see each other in the evenings if I am away at music practice, or he is attending a union meeting. Suddenly we are in each other’s company for 24 hours! I defy any loving couple not to find that hard at least for a few days! We don’t have distractions like children – it is just Joe and I. So we devised a system to spend a day apart. It doesn’t always work! In Egypt it was not cultural for a woman to travel alone. In Saltsburg Joe found something really interesting to do on his day off and I gate-crashed! There are things that Joe loves to do like trailing across World War 1 battle sites that do nothing for me. There are things like shopping and visiting churches that do nothing for Joe. I am not saying that we do not attempt to share one another’s interests because we do, but days off are good ideas!

Not everything it life hoists the flag to the top of the pole for me. There are things that just don’t appeal. Trailing around museums does not appeal. I can do art galleries at a push.

I came across a really insightful chapter in one of the books in my bookcase the other week. The book, “God is Closer Than You Think” is by John Ortberg. The chapter is about spiritual pathways and begins with a quotation from C S Lewis, “Why else were individual created, but that God, loving all infinitely, should love them each differently.”

John Ortberg recognises this and writes about pathways to God. He is talking about the different ways that people relate to God. We all desire to connect with God but we don’t all do it in the same way.

Some people make the connection through the mind – reading and analysing the Bible. They hear God best when they are learning. They delight in Greek or Hebrew words. They are thinkers or philosophers and love to engage in discussion.

Other people connect with God through relationships – the small group junkies. They are not people who are into solitude but like to be with people.

Still others find the connection through serving or helping others. They are motivated by the passage in Matthew – “when I was hungry – did you feed me…”

Ortbreg identifies a number of pathways – through worship, through being active in the political arena, through retreats and contemplation or through being outside and communing with nature. It is not for us to ignore any of the pathways to connecting with God, but some are easier than others for us.

I find myself to be naturally making connections with the mind. Reading and studying God’s word really does hoist the flag for me. I am not so much into Greek and Hebrew words – but God speaks to me through His word. It is not dull or lifeless to me, but bristling with revelation. Word bombs explode inside my head and there is always something new to see – another path to explore. That is not to say that I am dull to worship, or to seeing God in the nature around me – it is just I love the written word!

To some extent, reading the chapter was like someone opening a prison door – it is OK to study the Bible and get excited about it! It also explains why sometimes I find it hard to relate to some people who do not share my passion for words. What rocks my boat does not rock the boats of other people. I have a little bit of the political activist in me and I don’t always see in reflected in people around me. People are different. We say that we acknowledge and respect the uniqueness of people but then we push them into a mould to make them just like everyone else. We think that is “this” works for me, then it has to work for her. I can remember earnestly thrusting a friend into a bible study on the character of God to deepen her relationship with Him. Getting her to switch off the TV was an accomplishment – but maybe she was one the relational types that just needed someone to be a friend, to watch TV with her and chat.

What Ortberg does challenge me on is to take a walk along the pathways I least explore and allow God to connect with me. It would stretch me in a way that perhaps a Bible study would not.

Slug Trails

In the house my mother lived in before she moved into her sheltered housing flat was the end house on a terraced row. It had the only backyard that was not covered in concrete or paving slabs. There wasn’t any grass, just lots of rose bushes.

I suppose it is inevitable that with a proper garden you get beetles and spiders, but it was the slugs that did me in. If the slugs had stuck to the garden we could probably have co-existed without much fuss. Somehow or other the slugs found their way into the house. Every morning there were slug trails in erratic patterns around the carpet under the dining table. They were sticky, slimy and silvery and always there in the morning.

One evening, late in the year, the phone rang. I was in the kitchen at the time and walked through the living room to pick up the receiver. Just because the slug trails are there in the morning, does not mean that the slugs make them in the morning! This lesson I learned as I stepped onto a slug. Sad to say, I wasn’t wearing shoes at the time and the squashed slug oozed between my toes. I was hopping round the room, screaming down the phone to my sister, “Ooh! Ooh! Oh no! Arrgh! It is gross! Yuk! Yuk!” It was very unpleasant!

This morning brought back those unpleasant memories! There was a slug trail in the hall way! The slug had kindly kept its ramblings to near the back door. A silvery trail of slime and goo marked its path. We have had things done to the garden over the last few weeks. I traced the slug trail back to a bin that my husband had been using to collect bits of a fir tree in as he was hacking at the branches. We are taking down a number of the trees. The slug had hitched a ride and then began exploring!

Spotting the slug trail is an easy thing. It stands out. In the book of Genesis, the path that Abraham took through the land of Israel was also easy to spot. Everywhere that Abraham stopped, he built an altar. Sometimes he went back to places where he had been before and worshipped there.

In the New Testament, when John the Baptist was imprisoned, he wanted to know whether Jesus really was the man who would come after him. He sent his disciples to find out. The path that Jesus walked was clear. The lame walked, the dumb spoke, demons were cast out and people were raised from the dead. Jesus left behind him a clear trail of changed, or challenged, people.

It just makes me wonder what kind of a trail I am leaving for others to follow! Do I want people to walk in my path? Are the words that I speak much like the unpleasant slug that gets squashed between the toes? Or do I leave a trails that demonstrates my worship of God, and my care for the people He loves?

Surreal moments

There is a scene in the film Notting Hill where the characters have “surreal moments”. Yesterday was a bit surreal – it was totally out of the normal run of things. The day for the most part was normal – as normal as first day back at school can be normal. It was after school that things got surreal!

I was very tired and decided to lie down on the sofa and listen to a worship CD. I was drifting off rather nicely when the doorbell rang. A few thoughts went through my mind – had I left the lights on in the car and a neighbour was coming to tell me, was it a double glazing salesman, or someone trying to convince me to change my gas and electricity supplier.? I recognised the man immediately – it was the husband of a friend from Rugby – the friend that I had regularly wrote letters to one year when she was going through a tough time. It turned out that they had decided to take a driving holiday – a whistle stop tour of Scotland, popping in to surprise us along the way. (I could never be that casual and off the cuff!)

Words really fail to say just how delighted I was that they were visiting. It was like Christmas!

My friend and I go back a long way. She has always been an inspiration to me, but the last few years have been hard. Her relationship with God has not been a bed of roses. A great deal of what we had in common was our faith, and when she was going through difficult times, it wasn’t always easy. My enthusiasm - I guess at times I probably made her uncomfortable! When you just want to keep God at a safe distance you probably don’t want to be around someone burning with a passion!

Maybe it is because I am a writer I think that the solution to feeling down is to read something uplifting. The written word does it for me! “Read this and you will feel much better” is my philosophy. I thought that if she read some of the poems and short stories that I had written, it would re-ignite her passion, so I left her with two files of my work – volumes one and two! As it was she was stirred by some of the things she read! But she held onto volumes one and two for so long that I did think about replacing them – printing them off again and sticking them in a new file. Her visit yesterday reunited me with volumes one and two!

It was so wonderful to see her and her husband. I have been drunk only twice in my life. One of those times was round at their house one New Year sampling their collection of liqueurs. If you are going to get drunk, there is no safer place that among people you like and trust! I didn’t know these things had whisky in them – and I was sorely missing Joe!

It was surreal – sitting in a pub on the banks of Loch Ness with three of my most favourite people in the world. I felt specially blessed. It kind of out weighed all the not so good stuff of first day back at school!

Mind reading

In the late nineteen eighties, I left my job to join an evangelistic outreach team working with a church in Inverness for a year. It was the right thing to do and the right place to be doing it. At the end of the year, it was back to the "real" world. I chose to remain in Inverness, and make the church there my family.

Trying to get a job afterwards proved most difficult. Teaching jobs were like gold mines. One plum job that had "Melanie" written all over it was advertsied. I applied, was interviewed, and not appointed. That was my first step on the downward spiral of unemployment.

What followed was eight months of rejection. Because of my qualifications, no one wanted me. I was overqualified to wait on tables, to clean floors, to file letters or any of the other jobs I had applied for. No one wanted me.

This downward spiral of unemployment was accompanied by a downward spiral into depression. Slowly but surely confidence in myself was being eroded. Every area of my life seemed to be affected. I felt everyone was looking at me and seeing failure written into everything I did. It was like being sucked into quicksand.

Perhaps someone looking on would not have noticed anything amiss. I did not appear on the surface to be worried or anxious. I didn’t withdraw myself from participating in church activities. I sang just as off-tune as ever, I prayed as fervently and shared insights at Bible studies. On the outside things seemed to be fine.

I would have to admit that there was a resentment building up that no one seemed to notice! I thought that if “these people” were really hearing from God, then they would know how miserable I was inside. If they were in touch with the divine, they would know. I don’t suppose that is a unique reaction to take, or that I am the only one who has ever travelled that path.

God’s reaction to that line of thinking was “Why don’t you just tell them how you feel?” Christians are not mind readers, and yet we expect them to be. There are occasions when God brings a word of knowledge to open up a situation, but when a person is quite capable of telling someone, He probably doesn’t see the need to do that. Eventually I did tell someone. My problems did not instantly lift, but because they were out in the open, the air was getting the wounds and healing was happening.

Since then I have always told people and told myself that if there is something bothering me, I should not go down the route of thinking “If they were really hearing from God…” I should not expect people to be mind-readers.

I think it must be a pride thing. It takes humility to admit that we are not the “more than conquerors” that Romans says we are. I also think there is a hurdle to climb over in the sense that you think that people are not going to understand. You see nothing in their lives that tells you that they have also been this way and they know how you feel. Too few people confess their weaknesses, so you get the impression that they don’t have any!

I am sorry to admit that I have been thinking that people ought to know how I feel without being humble enough to tell them that things are not wonderful. I don’t look around at my life and see holes everywhere, but there are areas where I am struggling and I don’t ask for help. I think sometimes that I inhabit a different planet and I don’t speak the same language as other people!

All this came to light at our ladies Bible study last night. I knew that I was on shaky ground when I found out we were studying Hannah. The whole issue of not being able to have children is guaranteed to throw a light on my vulnerabilities. I spent a lot of time in prayer trying to shore up the defences before I left – “Please, God, don’t let me bawl my eyes out.”

And I thought I was doing so well. I have no idea just what words turned the key and the floodgates opened – but I wept buckets! It was good that I was in an entirely supportive atmosphere, surrounded by friends that cared. I just wish that I had said something months ago – when the emotions were at a manageable level.

There are some people that would hold to the view that it is enough to talk through sensitive issues with God alone and they get sorted. I don’t believe that! I don’t believe either that you spread the message of your weaknesses to all and sundry – that could cause harm. It is important that someone knows the warts and all version of your life history.

Taking the rollercoaster ride

I have been thinking about my brother, Richard, recently. He is the youngest of my two brothers, though I suppose that somewhere in his forties now is hardly “young”. Joe and I have stayed with him when we have been down to visit the folks in Rugby, and his comment after spending an hour or two in Richard’s company, for the first time, was “He will either be a millionaire or totally bankrupt by the time he is forty.” I think he is swinging close to being bankrupt, but the millionaire part is waiting in the wings.

Richard has amazing self confidence. He left school when he was sixteen without any qualifications. He is very much a “hands on” kind of person. He will look at something like an extension to someone’s house, someone’s kitchen, or bathroom and go home and build it! He has no formal qualifications in architecture and yet his advice is sought out by big firms and he is asked to design shopping malls. He just talks confidence all the time. He may know absolutely nothing about something, read up on it for a couple of hours, and talk through it like he is an expert!

He invents things by adapting what someone else has made to suit his purposes. He applies for a patent on his invention and then the big companies who provided the shoulders to climb on take his to court and say that he has copied them – which to some extent he has.

He is a risk taker, and I think that is what I admire about him.

I don’t want to be self confident in quite the same way as Richard. I want to be God confident. Too often I play it really safe in the sense that I am very cautious. I am hesitant to plough all of my energy and time into something until I am 120% sure that it will succeed.

A couple of years ago I wrote regular letters to a friend of mine – I typed them, so there are copies of them on the hard disk. There is something like a dozen spanning an entire year – regular monthly updates of life in the Kerr household. They trace the beginnings of my involvement with Faitheriters.com and virtually every letter involves a debate about publishing a collection of poetry.

If I was my brother Richard, with all his confidence and risk taking – the book or books would be sitting on the bookshelf by now. He would have seen it in his mind’s eye, not even questioned whether they were “good enough”, and started contacting publishers!

Last night we were praying about the resurrection power of Jesus. Many of us have dead dreams that God wants to resurrect. As we were talking things through and praying, the reasoning bit of my mind kept up the mantra – “This is not about me – I am fulfilling all I have set out to do – there are no dead dreams for me to pursue.”

In a sense that is true. The dream of publishing a book of poetry is not dead. If this was a sci fi thing I would say it is suspended animation, or in stasis. Suspended animation is as good as dead in that there is not interaction with the world around.

It must be very hard being married to my brother – a real rollercoaster of a ride. He achieves things that other people just dream about doing. I want to be like that. I don’t want my confidence to be in me and in what I can do if I put my mind to it – but in God!

The mediocre has never been God’s plan for my life.