the chance to chat

Being a Monday I've mixed it about a bit again today. Stimulated by yesterday's services and with my head and heart full of so much that the Lord seems to be saying in these days, I could hardly wait to start hammering out the next episode in his summons to us all at this time!

So I've been doing a bit of that, thinking through just how that message might best be got across: especially with the morning service being one where all ages will be sharing together throughout.

I've been reading loads as well - around the themes the Lord's been laying on my heart. The reading certainly fires me up: and what with that and turning back again and again to the Srciptures and trying to tear away the 'filters' that I sometimes think have prejudiced my view of what the good book says, I'm excited and challenged and raring to go!

Calling by on a few folk, too, there was a sense of keen anticipation - on my part, I mean! A sense of the Lord being significantly at work, and through the 'chance encounters' on the street as much as in the 'formal' visits to folks' homes, a sense of these being meetings whereby friendships are being formed - and a sense as well that it's always through such friendships that relationship will grow and that it's inrelationship that Jesus will be known.

I bumped into an older couple whose daughter I married (as in conducted the ceremony!) a good few years ago and whose son I'll be marrying (in the same sense!) quite soon: they had their grandson with them and he's about to start in at the local school: and at the school, of course, I get the chance to see these children quite a bit and get to know them over time.

Indeed, as I walked down the street with someone else I'd met a wee bit later on, and every so often we'd pass a child who'd greet me and to whom I'd say a 'Hi!', the person remarked - "You seem to know an awful lot of people!" Well, I guess that's true, though often it's a fairly superficial thing.

But that's how it's meant to be and needs to be. Meeting and talking and slowly, over time, through such persistent meeting, chatting, listening in a multitude of different sorts of setting, simply getting to know and be known. That's how Jesus did his stuff. Why change a winning habit?

There was a cricket match in the evening. The first of the series against Bellevue Chapel that we've actually managed to play this year. A 'close encounter' of a different sort this! Their last man in almost played the ball on to his stumps which, had he done so, would have left the match a tie!

We'd batted first and scored a meagre 77 runs. Because the 'Last Man' out had made a score of 7, the bottom of the score-board read 7 77 - that being the perfect number and all, I thought it quite a promising sort of sign! But it was not to be. Not quite. Ah well, we can't win them all!

After that it was through to Glasgow to take my son back home. Great to have the time to chat (far better than the phone) - and we covered all sorts, including remembering a night we'd had on holiday a couple of years ago, when sitting outside far into the night with the wine and the beer on the table, the four of us had talked beneath the stars about the hopes and fears and dreams we had

It had been one of the most worshipful times I've ever known, with the Lord somehow so very much the centre of it all: and I'd thought at the time that this is what being 'church' is surely meant to be. But how to make it such? Ah, there's the question that I'm grappling with these days.