five-leaf clover soup

One of the soups today I called 'Five-Leaf Clover' Soup. Seemed reasonable to me since it included the 'leaves' of five green vegetables.

Sometimes we get feed-back from our customers. And today was one of those days. One lady took the soup and remarked simply - It looks a mess, but actually it tastes quite nice!

It crossed my mind that the process of change is a bit like that. It can seem very messy, but if we're prepared to swallow it, it's actually not that bad.

Some people are put off by the look of the thing.

We have that with the soup. I once made a soup called 'Purple Haze' (I make up the titles in much the same way as I make up the recipes!): red onion, red cabbage, red (obviously!) tomatoes, some blueberries and a few other ingredients - and it all came out ... well, purple.

It tasted good and was highly nutritional. But so far as a number of folk were concerned ... well, I mean, you don't get purple soup do you? (Despite the fact that you just did!).

Soup isn't purple: end of story. So they weren't prepared even to give it a try.

This doesn't look like church at all - so we won't even give it a shot. The same phenomenon. Same outlook on life.

It's been a bit of a 'five-leaf clover soup' sort of day. I spent quite a while in the morning talking through the processes of change with the lady who's committed to the vision God has given her of doing church a very different way.

It's not easy! All sorts of different obstacles to get around. A right old mess! And altogether easier just to keep things as they are.

The mess can put people off. They don't want to live with the mess inherent in change. But live with the mess and it actually tastes quite good!

And good on her, she's pressing on, dependent on the Lord to sort the problems out, to work out all the timing of the change and meet the different needs there'll be. It's his soup that we've got ourselves into, after all!

Much of the day was spent completing prepration for the P5 course I'm starting on tomorrow. The time got re-arranged: and, again, as I reflected on it all, it seemed to me that here again the 'normal', settled pattern of the minister's life (traditionally) was becoming more and more of a mess!

But it tastes pretty good!

The elders were meeting at night as well. There's always preparation for a meeting such as that which I'm to lead. And here as well I've felt that we needed to change, move on a bit.

If we are indeed a team of leaders then it's seemed to me we need to act as such. We need to talk, to share, to pray for one another: to teach, instruct, to listen and to learn.

Not what the meeting is usually like at all. In fact, probably a bit of a 'five-leaf clover' mess. But I wanted to give it a try: I wanted to help us move forward and learn to become the sort of team of leaders that God means us all to be.

I've yet to learn if people liked the taste - despite it being a mess!