jazz

My life is pretty varied, that's for sure.

Despite normality returning. 'Normal' for me is anything but routine: it's far from being a neatly planned out thing and always most predictable.

No days are ever the same. And how I maybe think that things will run is rarely how they actually do. Rarely, did I say? More like probably never!

So today's been pretty normal. It started OK, with my making the soup. Though even that is rarely either 'normal' or predictable.

I don't use any recipes. I don't believe that soups are really meant to be that sort of thing: I think that if cooking's conceived as equivalent to music, then soups are the platform for jazz.

There are some basic rules, of course. But mostly you're free to improvise. As the mood takes you (and, to some extent, of course, as the items for sale in the shops allow).

I like to think the way I live the whole of life is pretty much like jazz. Some basic rules, and a basic tune, but improvising all the time, pouring into every day that personalised interpretation of the score that God has given us in Christ.

The 'jazz' today took over fairly rapidly. I found myself doing lifting jobs, removing from the Hall the set of staging they'd been using there last night: taking it down, packing it into the cars and taking it round to the school to whom the stuff belongs.

Hardly your average 'cleric', all neat-and-tidy, shirt-and-collar sitting at an academic desk and pondering oh so piously the text of holy Scripture in the Greek. This was more the sleeves-rolled-up, dusty, dirty, sweat-inducing graft of helping out.

The sort of thing that Jesus did.

And it took me among the people again. Over to the school. And it crossed my mind when over there while speaking with the 'janny' and the secretarial staff that a nice little gift for each of them would give them all a little boost and, more than that, a very nice surprise. I'll do that tomorrow, I think.

Today had to do with another gift. Again, not what I'd planned.

Well, I'd planned the gift and taken steps to see about acquiring it. It was just I hadn't planned on heading off to the shops today to pick it up.

We wanted to give a kind of 'musical' memorial to the place we have for the coffees and lunches each day - and to the people who work there, too, of course! In memory of my Mum, for whom the place was very much a genuine oasis in these latter years of life.

So we'd figured that a music centre would be good. And I'd got the experts here to go and do the recce and determine what equipment would be best.

They'd acted pretty speedily! And so I got a call to say that what they'd chosen had been put aside and I should go and pay for it and pick it up and then they'd start this evening to install it here on site.

So in I went to the shop and picked it up and waited at the counter as they sorted out the bill. There were two of them there behind the little counter in the shop. I could see that one was rather puzzled and the other had a worried sort of smile across his face.

They were about to give me the thing for nothing! On the basis that their flashy, new computer was informing them the payment had been made. I'd gone in to buy a gift - and here they were about to give the gift to me for absolutely free!

(We're talking here some quite big bucks!)

I understood the nature of that worried smile across the poor man's face. Should he trust his hi-tech, new computer? Or should he trust his instinct? Or should he trust his customer who stood there (with a smile on my face now as well!) insisting that the payment would be made.

He thanked me for my honesty. I smiled at my naivety. We laughed at how a simple straight transaction can become so very complicated in our modern, hi-tech world.

The shop was about to donate me this gift. And I was insisting on paying!

We didn't quite have a stand-off over it. But it might have come to that. Because I didn't want to give a gift that cost me nothing.

It gave me an insight into the heart of God again. His gift to us is always free. And he insists on paying. That way of life, I guess, is bound to be like jazz.