connections

We're having a whole new sound system installed at the moment.

In the hall and also in the building that we use for our acts of common worship (I'm loath to call it 'church' - mainly because it's not! So I figure I'd better get out of the habit of calling it that. Leading from the front and all that!).

Anyway, these guys have been around today. I'm getting to know them really pretty well. We've had them here enough across the years.

So one way and another, between the cups of coffee and the need for double checking as to what we really wanted and just how the thing would work, my day's been somewhat stop and start. A bit of preparation then a bit of touching base with these three men.

Two of them I've met before. This time they had another man, another Jim (the guy in charge is also Jim). This Jim (the 'new' one) - he's involved back through in Ayrshire in a local baptist church.

We got chatting away about this and that and it seems that he knows a couple of folk from the fellowship here.

It felt good to be drawing those lines and making connections like that.

And the more I reflected on their being about today, the more it seemed that far from being a tiresome interruption to the solid preparation which I'd planned to do, their presence was itself somehow a sort of sign from God. A kind of symbol or a signpost, a real-life, all-parts-working visual aid.

As if the Lord was teaching me a lesson by directing me to what these men are doing in their daily work.

Connections. That's what they do in their working life.

They make the connections. Their craft is a privilege to watch. I mean, if you saw all the cables and all of the jacks and all of the sockets there are .. well, unless you knew your stuff, you'd have a fit. Or blow a fuse. Or something, anyway!

These guys are good at their work. Making connections.

Connecting the sounds at their source and feeding them on to wherever they're meant to be heard. A pretty graphic picture of the work I'm called to do.

Like the Lord was simply saying to me once again - work at making connections. And make the connections work.

There was someone in, on Tuesday I think, who was saying exactly the same. Connections, she said: that's the word which rumbles round her head these days.

And she's right. Connecting a people with Christ. Connecting those people with people around them as well.

It's back where I started, the theme which has been there all week. The absolute priority of God-infused relationships.

I have to really concentrate my energies on building those relational environments where genuine connections can be made.