And So God Turns Away

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

The Last Line

I know my story

and how this chapter ends

I watched as the pen seemed to

weigh heavy in Your hand and

the words struggled to be written

Other words fell like laughter

from your lips as they shaped an empty void

I, the Living Word

with overflowing joy

sculpted mountains and carved out seas

This day, this last line is upon me

The ink smears as tears fall

Final words will tear my skin and unhinge my bones and

place sorrow on my shoulders

A felon’s death I can bear

But Your silence?

How can I endure that?

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

Liquiglide

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maybe it’s best to leave Liquiglide to

the sauce bottles.

Talking About Jesus

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

The topic for today is the Word of God.

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

We cannot do without the Word of God. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let's talk about Jesus!

Community

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I intend to be a grape and not a marble.

Real Hope

What is hope if not

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

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

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

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

Moniack Mhor - the Sequel

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tomorrow I might write a best seller!

Garden Poetry

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

Thistle

Gate crasher

Invader

Not invited to the party

You drift in, keeping a low profile

Lurking beside the drinks counter

You sidle close, yearning to join the conversation

But no one says

“What a lovely green dress!”

You’re not one of the pretty people

Prickly

You rub people up the wrong way

Bouncers approach armed with canvas gloves and a trowel

You are evicted

End of Year Report

The first thing you need to know is that it’s not the end of this year – but the end of next year.  One of the round-the-table discussion topics for the Keep Your Fun On (KYFO) personal evangelism course that I signed up to was to think about what you want to get out of the course and what you hope the course will not be about.  We used bits of cardboard and balloons last night but, being a writer, I thought it would be interesting to write an end of year report – God’s Report - in expectation!

Melanie came into the class knowing only a few of her fellow pupils.  Many of them had known each other for a while and worked together on different projects.  It has been good to see Melanie make new friends.  It took a while for her to feel comfortable around new people.  Now she is happy to initiate conversations and share her thoughts.  It has been good to see the friendship between Melanie, Heather and Ellie deepen over the year.  Heather has had a positive effect encouraging Melanie to take risks.

In her work place Melanie often talks about her faith.  She is happy to answer some of the deep questions people ask about life.  She comes from a Roman Catholic background and has always believed in God.  She has a mature faith and demonstrates a thorough knowledge of scripture.  She enjoys challenging people, but whereas she was determined to win the argument at any cost, now she seeks to win the person rather than the argument.

It has been encouraging to see Melanie step out in faith.  Joining the class in the first place was a big step of faith. She has a longing to be obedient to God but struggles at times to overcome her fear.  She is becoming more confident in exploring creative ways to communicate her faith. The Easter project was an overwhelming success and has done much to build her confidence.  She has shown a strong trust in God.  Watching her worship has been a joy. 

When Melanie joined the class she was very quiet.  She can be quite serious and intense.  Over the year she has relaxed a lot.  She more inclined to laugh with others and at herself, and exhibits a wicked sense of humour. 

Melanie has changed her prayer habits over the course of the year.  She is praying much more regularly than she used to.  Being a very independent woman, it is good to see her asking for help.  She loves to involve God in the challenges she faces, giving Him ample opportunity to be magnificent in her life.

The year had been an excellent time of growth for Melanie.  She has been a real asset to the group. She has embraced the adventure of lifestyle evangelism with enthusiasm.  She can look back over the year and know that she has been a good and faithful servant.  It is wonderful to see Jesus so clearly reflected in her life. 

She should see the year not as a programme she has successfully completed but a vibrant lifestyle fully embraced.

Just Being God's Friend

It’s Day 4 of my 40 days with Bonhoeffer and I am finding him to be a challenging man.  He comes from a very different generation of Christians from me.  He’s not a man for trivial nonsense.  He would be unlikely join me on my lifestyle evangelism course “Keep Your Fun On” that kicks off next week. 

Yesterday’s study was all about morning prayer.  

He was very determined that it had to be morning and not just some time later on in the day. Regardless of whether you are a morning person or a night person, he would say it makes no difference.  Finding the time that suits you best is pandering to the flesh and surrendering to what is convenient rather than what is right.

My first response was “Not possible!” The time between getting up and leaving for work is already a busy time – preparing packed lunches, eating breakfast, watching the news and settling to a snatch of a quiet time.  Getting up early would be an option if I was sleeping better.  One of my nieces has a new born baby and comments on how well or how badly he sleeps at night.  I sleep the required amount of hours and I dip into the dream part of the sleep, but it’s fragmented at best, waking up throughout the night. If I slept solidly through the night I could get up earlier.

I think part of the problem lies in confusion between what I call a quiet time and what he calls morning prayer.  My quiet time makes use of Bible study notes and a pen and a journal and time to muse before I write something.  His prayer is just prayer.  My prayers tend to be rooted in the Word that I have read. I am not so good at praying off-the-cuff.

Morning prayer is necessary, says my friend Bonhoeffer, to set the day right.  Prayer at the end of the day has something of the “after-the-horse-has-bolted-shutting-the-stable-door.  It’s a mopping up, picking up the pieces, damage control kind of prayer.  Much better to order the day before it begins and take the initiative.  We make our declarations about the day ahead to set our minds and hearts to glorify God. Intention is woven into the fabric of the day.  We are better equipped to deal with the challenges that come our way with a prepared mind-set.

I am challenged to look at my whole quiet time structure and the straitjacket time that I have made it.  I am looking to be more flexible.  I am stuck in a success criteria list based on how much I read or what I record in a journal.  So, yes, flexibility sounds good. 

I can’t help but wonder what Bonhoeffer might have made of last night’s half night of prayer hosted by Blue Flame last night.  I suspect he might have asked why it was a half night rather than a whole night.

I discovered last night that although the girl in me left the Brethren Church many years ago, there is still a lot of the Brethren Church that hasn’t left the girl. Many of my friends have explored a whole spectrum of ways of connecting with God.  I don’t know enough about what is happening in the spiritual realms when people dance with flags and ribbons.  I am a woman of words. The spoken word and the written word stir me.  I know the damage I can do with well-chosen words – or the healing I can bring about.  I am quite traditional and conservative.  There are a lot of things I haven’t tried and maybe it’s my next step to be a little more adventurous in my approach to prayer.

I forgot to put my hearing aids in before I left home which didn’t help.  I titled my head and caught a word or two, but because I hadn’t clearly heard what they prayed for I wasn’t comfortable about jumping in with a loud “Amen”.  I felt I couldn’t take up the baton and run my part of the race. 

I think God had a very different agenda.  He knows what I am like.  He knows that a half night of prayer will appeal to me – to get me to a place.  Ask me to pray, or to preach, or to lead worship and I am up for the challenge.  I love to “do”. To ask me to just sit, and to listen, and “not do” is the bigger challenge.  So I sat, and I listened and I did not “do” and I cried.  I felt God very tenderly help me to take off the armour that I seem to always be wearing.  We talked about the battles we had fought side by side throughout the week.  We laughed at the ridiculous moments and the humour of the week.  We had a silent minute or two to acknowledge the times when the enemy seemed to prevail. It was as if we weren’t in the room at all, but were two battle scarred soldiers propped up against a bar in a pub toasting each other with almost empty beer glasses.

I am God’s servant but at that moment I really had a sense of just being God’s friend.

The Set of My Shoulders

I admit it.  I am an addict.  My addiction doesn’t cost me hundreds of pounds.  At first glance one would say that it is a harmless addiction – but take a closer look and you might come to a different conclusion.

I am addicted to Bible study notes.  I just can’t seem to help myself downloading or buying them.  The intention is always to save them for after I finish the ones I am doing, but then I dabble.  I take a quick lick and then I am hooked.  They are no longer “saved” but join the current stuff.  The morning quiet time is no longer breakfast but a four course dinner with all the trimmings as I dip from one thing to another.  I have spiritual flatulence – interesting noises, a peculiar fragrance but no actual movements.

That is all changing, of course – according to my latest download. – 40 days with Dietrich Bonhoeffer.  I picked up a book about praying for 15 days with him and liked him so much that I wanted more. 

One of the verses to meditate on was John 15:12. 

“My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you.”

I seem to remember preaching a series of words on the theme of love.  I began with “Love your neighbour as yourself” and dissected the parable of the Good Samaritan.  As a church family we should be insulted if we were loved as neighbours – our relationship in the church is not a neighbour to neighbour one.  We are brothers and sisters – not neighbours and are entitled to love that goes beyond neighbour love.  

The series moved on to John 15:12 – loving one another as Christ loves us.  Maybe “as I have loved you” should characterise all our actions without distinction between neighbour and brother or sister.

It amazes me that there is always new truth to be found in God’s word – sometimes it’s an old truth with a fresh reminder.  Sometimes it is just new.

I was thinking about how Jesus doesn’t ask me to decide who to love.  He takes that decision out of my hand by saying “Love each other.”  Left to my own devices I would attach numerous strings to the command.  Just in case I was ever in danger of loving the wrong person I would have an unspoken list of who qualifies and who doesn’t.  Jesus has ripped up the list and cut all the strings by saying “Love each other.”

I was also thinking about how Jesus doesn’t spell out in any kind of detail how I am to demonstrate love.  He just says “as I have loved you.”  That makes it all rather open ended.  Love is an action word and any action that puts the needs of another person before my own qualifies.

Jesus command covers the “who” and the “how” of love.  The “who” leads me to people beyond my own small circle of friends and family, to strangers, to people who live outside my comfort zone. The “how” challenges me to act in sacrificial ways – how I spend my money or my time.  

At this point I am feeling hot under the collar.  I love my comfort zone.  The easy yoke that Jesus promised seems to drop on my shoulders with a heavy weight. I don’t think any yoke is an easy one if the posture is all wrong.  Drooping, disheartened shoulders will never bear an easy yoke comfortably.  It doesn’t fit right on the shoulders but chaffs sorely.  There’s nothing wrong with the yoke but everything wrong with the set of the shoulders.  So, I am setting the shoulders straight!

I have signed up for a lifestyle evangelism course called “Keep Your Fun On”.  I wouldn’t say that it was an instant feeling of “Yes, let’s do it.”  The description of the course is just about everything that I would prefer not to do.  I’m not inclined to buddy up with folk.  I don’t want to dare or be dared to do anything – I take risk assessments seriously. The course really isn’t me…which kind of begs the question “Why would I sign up for it?” It might not be me but how am I to know until I try it?

Years ago I signed on for a creative writing course at the local college curious to see if it was for me.  It was the pushing of a door to see what was on the other side. It was so me it was ridiculous.  I fell into writing and was so at home in the written word.

I sometimes think I am a finished product that I have seen all the facets in me that exist and I like the person that I am.  I like this clay jar the Potter has made on His wheel.  But it isn’t the finished product – there is always a new facet to fashion, a different angle for His light to catch.

It’s time to start making some new connections – to other people, to new ways of expressing love and connection with God that goes beyond the next set of Bible notes I download or buy.

Let's Talk about George

This time last year I was reading my way through a collection of poems designed to lead a person through Lent.  It had been recommended by the FB page of the CLC local bookshops.  That was a year ago. 

This year I picked up a study book from the Pauline Bookshop in Glasgow last weekend.  The bookshop and Whittards, the tea/coffee shop are the two staple stop offs whenever we are visiting. 

The opening study was all about being blindsided – the way that life takes you by surprise and knocks you off the secure path you were on. 

It has been a blindsiding week for me. There has been nothing dramatic but a series of small little irritations.  A visit to the doctor earlier on in the week produced a diagnosis of tendonitis in my right wrist. I have a sore paw. It was more sore after the doctor had played with it.  It should be renamed – tender-nitus.  I have a supply of tablets which I neglect to take so the sore paw is taking its time to recover.

Then a letter arrived in the post a day or two ago from the Electoral Register Officer informing me that I needed to prove I was me if I wished to vote in the coming elections.  Apparently they have moved to a new system of registering people.  Most people’s names slid easily from old to new – from caterpillar to butterfly without the dark cocoon stage. My name didn’t slide across.  My name failed to make the new register and I took myself and my passport along to the office.  The front entrance hall was being refurbished so I was diverted through a series of corridors through the back door. If it hadn't been for a very clear picture in my head of women chaining themselves to railings I might have not bothered. My vote matters to me.  I'm back on the register.

Finally.  Imagine yourself as a player in the real events that inspired the film “The Great Escape”, that wonderful war film that I have seen so often I could repeat the script entirely and without fault.  Tom, Dick and Harry were the tunnels.  Let’s talk about Harry.  Harry is the stuff of folklore.  On the night of March 24, 1944 the Allied prisoners gathered in hut 104 before crawling along the 100ft tunnel to a brief taste of freedom. Only three escaped; 73 were rounded up by the Germans and 50 were executed.

My own personal Harry showed up just before Christmas or perhaps just after.  “They” were looking to make savings and for the first time ever “they” were relaxing the rules regarding early retirement and winding down.  There were options presented.  I don’t have that long to retirement but the option of taking my foot off the gas without it affecting my pension looked appealing.  My boss agreed and gave his blessing and I set off to crawl into the tunnel.  The drop in session to talk to the experts and collect the form to fill in was like a enemy officer pointing his rifle as me as my head emerged. 

“So how many years have you been in the job?”

“Since 1981,” I replied impressing her.  Do the maths – if I do it I start to hyperventilate.

Most impressive I hear you say.  Had it been a life sentence in a jail I would have been out long ago, even without the good behaviour.  The trouble is only the last 23 years applied to Scotland and I needed 25 years to qualify.

“No worries,” said the woman, “if you transferred your English pension when you took up your Scottish post those years will count.”

“If” is a very important word.  I didn’t transfer the pension.  I had opted out of SERPS and I had a pension scheme with someone else.  I had five years teaching in a church school with no pension at all.  I had a catch-up pension to cover those years – but the long and short of it was Harry was collapsing all around me and the enemy had his finger on the trigger of his rifle.  

So, yes, I have had a blindsiding week.  I was knocked over, perhaps, but not derailed.  I am made of sterner stuff. 

Apparently there was a fourth tunnel.  After executing 50 of the captured escapees the camp officer thought he had deterred the rest of them.  They built George.  Not everyone knew about George.  He was discovered when the site was excavated years later.

Perhaps I should call my Bible George.  He’s not really an escape tunnel because the Christian faith is not about escaping.  It is about engaging with life and living it to full in spite of the things that blindside us.

I read the story of Daniel and responded in verse.

Daniel

his enemies

can find no fault with him so

they dig their hole and

bait their trap

in the presence of His enemies

daniel spreads his table

praise is the main course

he gives thanks to God

extolling the splendour of

the Ancient of Days

he will not change his ways

or cut the cloth of his prayer

to suit his enemies

the pattern

is just as it has always been

undisturbed by the

posturing of small men

The Opportunist Feeders

Carassius auratus

(that’s gold fish to you and me)

have bellies no bigger than their eyes

Opportunist feeders

they lack the capacity to know

when enough is enough

Given the opportunity

they eat and eat and eat

and they poo and poo and poo

until the water in the fish tank

becomes cloudy

Eventually

the eating, the poo and the cloudy water

sign their death warrant

Homo sapiens

(that’s people to you and me)

have eyes much bigger than their bellies

Opportunist feeders – the greedy ones

they lack the capacity to know

when enough is enough

Given the opportunity

they eat and eat and eat

and they buy and they sell (at a profit)

and they sow their seeds in a poor man’s field

and they build bigger barns

and they kick and they maim

as they step one upon another to reach the top of a ladder

They slay the vineyard owner’s son

They poo…

venting clouds of smoke from their factories

until the air of the planet

becomes toxic

and the water becomes poison

(and Carassius auratus is glad it’s not living in the wild)

Eventually

the eating, the poo - 

the toxins and poisons

sign their death warrant

Praise and Prison Walls

Last night’s Women Aglow meeting didn’t turn out as planned.  The technology let us down – a DVD to be played from a laptop computer projected into a screen refused to cooperate.  The dummy run before everyone arrived went smoothly but then the laptop and the projector stopped talking to one another.   Who knows what was said in silent cyber speak?  Did the projector hint it would have preferred working with one of the sleek and slim newer models?  Did the laptop say something demeaning about the projector’s size?

My workplace is just around the corner – two corners really, or just over the fence at the back of the hotel for the athletically accomplished.  I offered to fetch a different laptop and rescue the evening.  The entrance foyer was full of small people in judo kits.  On mass they were rather intimidating. It was somewhat disturbing to enter the building and walk out with a laptop unchallenged by any adult.  Of course, I couldn’t have got the laptop without my room key.  Regardless, the projector wouldn’t talk to that one either.

Plan B was an opportunity for people to share testimonies.

I can remember when Saturday mornings used to be sleep-in-affairs, but since I arrived at the other end of the menopause I am wide awake and ready to go. The Saturday just gone I was wide awake at silly o’clock.  Later in the morning there was the faith writing group to look forward to – but that was much later. 

The week had been one where my finest hours were absent.  Maybe I had set the bar too high and banged my legs trying to leap over it, or more likely I’d set it quite low and still managed to bang my legs leaping over.  I was not a happy bunny.

“So, it doesn’t work then?” said God.

“What doesn’t work? I asked.

“The whole praise thing when the prison walls fall.  It really doesn’t work.”

I think God has picked up the habit my husband and I have of starting a conversation in the middle, challenging the perplexed spouse try to work out what it’s all about.

I knew this one.  It all relates to a dream I had years ago.  My dreams are often vivid and colourful.  Many of them are pure nonsense, but sometimes they are profound.

In this particular dream I had been grabbed by demons and dragged into a deep prison. I lifted up my hands and began to sing worship songs. The walls of the prison dissolved before my eyes. The demons grabbed me a second time and dragged me into a deeper prison.  Again I praised God and the walls melted away.  When it happened a third time, I looked into one of the demon’s eyes and spoke so clearly.

“There is no dungeon deep enough, no place you can take me to, where worship cannot bring release.”

I saw fear in the demon’s eyes.

It’s not a dream I have forgotten.  Many years later I wrote a poem based on the story of Paul and Silas in the prison at Philippi. 

“So, it doesn’t work then?” said God.

“Actually it does work,” I replied. “The problem isn’t with the truth – it’s with my application of it.”

God nodded.  He and I agreed that it had been a long time since either of us had heard me sing. Too often I look at my circumstances and convince myself I have a good reason not to sing, but in choosing not to worship I make my faith of no value.  How am I any different from someone who doesn’t have my faith? When I set my heart to praise God, particularly when things aren’t going so good, there is always release. The situations I face may not have changed but it no longer imprisons me. 

Freedom is not just for the Pauls and Silas’ in the Christian church but for all of us.

Things I Should Not Say

I should not say
My flame was extinguished
By raging wind and storm blast
Can I only burn
When clouds are soft and skies are blue?

I should not say

My faith cannot blossom
Under scorching sun and baked earth
Can I only flourish
When rain is gentle and sunshine is kind?

I should not say

My spirit grows cold
In autumn’s aging and winter’s bite
Can I only thrive
When springtime frolics and summer gleams?

Then I call this to mind, Lord

Yours is the flame ignited within
Yours is the seed stirred to life
Yours is the breath I inhale
I align my life
According to Your seasons

 

 

 

The Raven

The first Monday in the month is given over to poetry appreciation at Eden Court.  A small room's worth of people share their favourite poems and poets.  The topic for the next meeting is "Love" seeing as it will be February then.  I think the hope is not for too many sentimental slushy poems because of Valentine's Day.  I have had a quick google around and found nothing I would like to share with anyone.  I had a go at producing my own non-slushy love poem.

The Raven

The raven dressed in dapper black attire

Takes to the wing in dizzying display

He flicks and flips always climbing higher

And dances in an aerial ballet

Vaunting his plumage dark beneath the sun

Above the naked bones of winter trees

His choreography a poem spun

That nourishes the heart of she who sees

He has no music in his voice to sing

No notes, no melody to win her heart

He scribes his love note with each shifting wing

Boldly declaring they will never part

Long ago years they met and they mated

A bond of commitment they created

Built nests and laid eggs, nurtured their offspring

Thus celebrating - he takes to the wing

I have been reading the RSPB magazine "Nature's Home". I didn't get around to signing on for the Big Garden Birdwatch on account of not having a BIG garden.  Having been kidnapped and consigned to bed by a really bad cold I had not been able to fill the bird feeders.  Seeing there were no peanuts, seeds or suet balls to stuff their faces with the birds went elsewhere - a BIG garden, perhaps, where they were properly counted.

The "bird behaviour" article is about spring aerial displays and setting up territories and singing love songs across the wood to attract a missus. 

In amongst them all are the ravens.  The blurb reads, "Ravens pair for life, so their displays are aimed at nourishing an already established relationship."  I am sure there are quite a few species that pair for life and we all go "Ahhhh". "For life" means they stay together when his feathers go grey and her waistline expands a little.

I loved the idea of the male raven doing his aerial acrobatics not to impress a younger bird (note that I used the word "bird" in its correct context!) but to honour the one he has paired with. 

We could learn something from the ravens.

Reclaiming the Surrendered Places

“They came to the other side of the sea, into the country of the Gerasenes. When He got out of the boat, immediately a man from the tombs with an unclean spirit met Him…” (Mark 5:1)

“They” were the disciples, “the sea” was the Sea of Galilee and the “He” that got out of the boat was Jesus.  “The man” who met him was demon possessed, living in the tombs and tearing away the chains from his hands and feet that had been used to restrain him.

Just before Christmas Joe and I had spent a few days with family.  It was the thirtieth anniversary of my brother-in-law’s fortieth birthday and there was a party.  We can’t always get to these things in term time, but I was recovering from medical treatment and had a sick line off work.  There was also a new great nephew to meet.

We stayed in a pub in the village. The window of our room looked out over the wall and onto the gardens of the village Manor House.  I remember that they used to open the gardens every year for the village May Day celebrations and dancing around the Maypole. The back wall of the pub carpark overlooked the cemetery.  Every day I intended to take a walk through the cemetery to pay a visit to my mum’s grave.  The family have plans for a proper gravestone, but right now, which row she and my dad, David, are buried in – my sister knows, but I would only be guessing.  I didn’t visit the grave and it’s something I regret.  I didn’t have any flowers to leave so I just chose not to go.

Had I been Jewish I wouldn’t have needed flowers – just a small stone to place somewhere to show respect.  Better if the stone had come from my garden or was some coloured pebble to mark the person’s life.  Jews tend to be infrequent visitors to graveyards.  Bonding with life is more important than dwelling with the deceased.  Some days are just better suited to visiting graves than other days.

In the country of the Gerasenes there were no better suited days – no days at all for visiting graves. “The man lived in the tombs, and no one could bind him anymore, not even with a chain. He had often been chained hand and foot, but he tore the chains apart and broke the irons on his feet.  No one was strong enough to subdue him. Night and day among the tombs and in the hills he would cry out and cut himself with stones.” (Mark 5:3-5)

It appeared that the nearby villagers had simply surrendered the cemetery to him.  They had tried to restrain him but he broke free.  He lived in the tombs and they let him.  Perhaps the thinking was if they left him alone, he would leave them alone, so they gave him the cemetery and stopped visiting to place their stones on the graves.

Sometimes the path of least resistance comes when we surrender something.  “For the sake of peace” we tell ourselves.  Or we convince ourselves that what we surrendered is something we don’t really miss, or it’s not really that important.  We can live, we tell ourselves, without placing our stones on their graves.   And we do…

When Jesus casts out the demons and leaves the man sitting, dressed and in his right mind, He doesn’t just restore a man. He gives back to the community a man in his right mind and He gives them back their cemetery.  The place they had surrendered to a demon possessed man has been restored to them.

It’s not just people that Jesus restores but it is the places that these people inhabit that also get restored.

Sometimes we get used to living with areas of our lives surrendered, not to God, but to other things.  We adjust to accommodate things when we shouldn’t have to and we slap a “No Entry” sign on to a door.

Maybe it’s time to ask Jesus to restore those things and those places to us so that we may live life to the full.

Writing Poetry With the Experts (Eden Court Writing Master Class)

John Glenday, the guest tutor, began with a quote.  “Poetry is never finished, only abandoned.”  He compared writing a poem to working with clay.  If you leave a poem overnight, like clay, it hardens a little.  Sometimes it is all about accepting the faults and moving on.  He talked briefly about poetry and writing before setting any tasks.

All writing is difficult.  Words only rarely flow onto the page.  Just because it is hard, it doesn’t mean you stop doing it.  It’s a way of telling the writers and the non-writers apart.  Writers keep writing.  Non-writers stop writing.

Poetry has a way of taking the BIG ISSUES in life and writing them in smaller, more accessible ways. The human brain baulks at big numbers.  A nuclear explosion somewhere in Europe is written in pressure cooker terms.

Poems might be intensely personal, the poet’s own experience, but they make a universal connection. 

Very often a poem describes a physical object or something tangible or concrete, but often speaks about something abstract or spiritual.  Shrek pointed out that onions have layers and so do people – but so do poems. They resonate on a multitude of layers.

Task 1 – Opening and closing lines are important in poems.  (My first encounter with Dick Francis novels involved first lines.  He used to do a brilliant job hooking me in as a reader.  The first line was always compelling.)  The first line does most of the work in a poem.  It has to engage the reader.  The last line of a poem is also important.  It concludes the story, ties up all the knots and leads us back to the beginning.

Given a poem, minus the first line, we were tasked with supplying it.  We had a title and the rest of the poem and looked for clues.

“Love Poem” by Louise Gluck

Your mother knits.
She turns out scarves in every shade of red.
They were for Christmas, and they kept you warm
while she married over and over, taking you
along. How could it work,
when all those years she stored her widowed heart
as though the dead come back.
No wonder you are the way you are,
afraid of blood, your women
like one brick wall after another.

I come from a household of knitters.  I am not sure if my mum ever knitted scarves in endless shades of red.  Many of the writers in the class picked up on a winter theme and cold weather and equated it with the mother’s apparent coldness.  The knitting seemed to represent the mother’s non-participation in real life.

“There was always wool on the needle” was my opening line. Some people don’t like to be on their own. They want someone around regardless of how deep or shallow the relationship. 
 
Someone else had come up with “Like Madam Defarge…” She pictured the women knitting while the guillotine did its messy business. I liked the image.  I shall leave you, dear reader, to make your own stab at a first line before googling it to find the right answer.

John talked about the misconception people have about any kind of writing.  Where you are the reader, you begin at the beginning and work your way through the middle to the end.  The writer is like the parachutist dropping into the middle of something and working their way to a beginning and an end.  You write, not according to intention, but according to the few words you start with.  You begin with the words and, as you write, you discover what the poem is about.  It’s possibly not the only way to write a poem – it’s not my way, but then is there ever a right way?

Andrew Motion, a past Poet Laureate was asked about how he deals with writer’s block.  He didn’t really admit to having writer’s block but said he simply wrote.  Much of it might be rubbish, but in the process of writing something would emerge.

Task 2  - Listen to a poem being read.  Write down 10-15 words that strike a chord.  Use some of these words in your own poem.

The poem was something to do with cartography and how to draw maps. 

I found this to be hard.  To be given the words that had to be included was a challenge.  I probably wouldn’t have written the poem I wrote.  I am choosing not to share it as, having listened to all the other poems sparked by a similar list, mine is definitely on a different planet.  They used images and deep stuff and mine was silly in comparison. It was one of the many times in the evening I felt really out of my depth and in the wrong class – a foundation pupil in a Higher English class.

You can have my words though and see what you make with them:- choose, blue, remember, elect, recommend, symbol, paths, questions, shoes, deciding, lost, submerged and utterly.  The poets among you have probably located the poem they came from in your mind.

John ended the class by reminding us that sometimes writing anything is not about the end product.  It is the process we use to get there – the doing of it.  He freed us to revise the poem, or not.  As we revisit and revise the poem changes as we lose things and we find other things.  Pick up any poetry book, indeed any book at all, and what you have is not a draft copy.  You never get to see the first draft.  By the time we read the poem in the book it is the finished product.  We only ever see our own first drafts.  It’s almost foolish to tell ourselves we will never be able to write good poetry like Carol Ann Duffy or Wilfred Owen.  Their first drafts probably look just like ours and nothing like the end result.
 
I enjoyed the class.  Although I might have felt out of my depth, no one made me feel that way.  John’s responses to every shared line and whole poem, no matter how rough the draft, was encouraging.  He took delight in everything and was impressed at how we all jumped into unfamiliar waters so enthusiastically.