exodus

One of the big advantages of seeing a person day on day, is that conversation starts to flow quite easily.

Douglas the janny's a case in point.

I was into the school again today. Briefly, over coffee time. And mainly to fix up a meeting with one of the teachers, Chris, about starting an SU group in the school.

But I bumped into Douglas and, the very next thing, he was chatting away about Moses and Egypt and how the Red Sea had been parted. I mean, he just started on about it all!

He'd been watching a programme, he said, which showed that the whole thing was true. Something about there being a huge explosion from a massive big volcano on one of the Greek islands - which resulted in the parting of those waters far away.

So it actually happened, he said. He seemed really quite excited!

Of course, he said, they didn't have a clue back then about these Greek volcanoes or the like and so they simply saw it as an act of God.

And so do I!, I intervened.

It was hard to get a word in even edgeways, he was so much on a roll! And all of this in what's, in truth, a very public place. Right in the reception space, with pupils there and all the secretarial staff at hand.

And there we were, discussing all these miracles and how it can be just the very timing of a thing which makes events a mighty act of God.

That fleeting conversation was itself, I thought, indicative of just that sort of thing. The acts of God today - and every day. His being at work in people's lives and in our daily, routine interacting with them all.

God at work, a sort of exodus again.

That's how it feels for me, at least, these days. An exodus of sorts. The Lord at work to lead me out and on towards a 'better' land - in terms of what it is to follow Jesus Christ and be the sort of minister he calls me to become.

Being in at the school and chatting with Douglas like that (a fleeting five minutes at most), was just another instance of that 'exodus' that's mine.

(Not, I hope, in the sense that I'm on the way out!)

A meeting at night was reflective of the same. It centred on a venture which, in many ways, is all about this 'exodus': this going out of Egypt, the 'land' which is the building-centred, Sunday-centred, worship-service-centred view of 'church' we've been familiar with for donkeys' years - and travelling to a fertile, new 'terrain', a different way of being and doing church.

It's about creating a 'place', a warm, creative, 'credible' environment, at the heart of community life, in the midst of a thoroughfare right in the centre of town, where ... Well, that was the question, I guess.

What is this place meant to be? What are we trying to do? What is the word of the Lord for this place at this time?

An exodus of sorts, though the contours of the land to which we're called by God are not entirely clear as yet. But it helped to be able to talk, to sense in our midst the presence of God himself, and to know that he'll show us the way.

Greek island volcanoes, or acts of God. It doesn't really matter how you think of it! As long as he opens the road and shows us together the way!

It was nearly 10 by the time we were done - and another sort of exodus still beckoned me.

Preparing the words that I'd say at the service tomorrow, the service of thanks for the life of the young man who'd died, who'd taken his life.

Hard. I needed time and space. Alone and in the dark.

I sometimes prefer to take time through the night to prepare for a service like that. So it was late (or early, depending how you see the thing!) before I was done for the day.

But I got what I'd say all prepared and typed up. And I've sensed through these hours that the words that I'll speak will become for this family a word from the Lord to their hearts.

An exodus again. A dark, traumatic night of dreadful death. And yet, perhaps, a new beginning, too.

And deep within it all, in ways that we will doubtless never grasp, an act of God.