fever pitch

I was in at the barber's again today.

Another of my periodic visits to this favourite haunt of mine! And they were all on the top of their form. Non-stop chat from all of them.

And all the chat? Scotland, Scotland, Scotland. That was all! With the crucial game tomorrow coming up, when Scotland play the Italians through in Glasgow - and Scotland with the chance of going on and right on through to the European finals next summer - everyone's excited. Including me!

And one of the girls had a ticket she'd got for the match! I mean, how does a girl from a barber's shop do that!? No wonder they were all excited to bits.

They had the local radio on. And just as I went in they'd heard this guy go phoning in and buying up a ticket for the match for fifteen hundred pounds!

It's Children in Need again today. That was why the ticket was being sold. And everywhere I've been today it's these two national matters which have been on everyone's minds.

The folk in the shops, the children at school. Even the lady behind the Post Office counter.

All of them dressed for the day. Some of them into their Pudsey bear routines. Some of them into their kilts. The place is sort of fever pitch today!

I'm glad to be out and about on a day like that. It's like on a day such as this, all the inner feelings that are maybe always there, are given full expression.

Passion and hope, kindness and fun, child-like excitement and chat. All right out on the surface today.

It's good to have emotions showing face, I thought. We're most of us too good at simply hiding how we feel and keeping it behind the white-lace curtains on the windows of our hearts.

So no one really sees just where we're at or how we are or what we're really thinking.

Perhaps not even God. We close the door on him as well too easily.

Late on in the day I called on a home where grief has come gate-crashing into their hearts. Bereavement. I'll conduct a memorial service for the man next week.

The guy who died has been here in the village almost 30 years. A youngish man. Just one year older than I am. Hardly old at all.

And leaving behind a wife and a daughter who've shared so much of the life that he lived all these years.

He certainly filled his life all right. I couldn't even start to count the different charities he's helped.

And a massive, life-long football fan (supporting Hearts): and a speedway fan as well.

In some ways I suppose he was himself the absolute epitomy of all I'd seen already through the day. That passion, kindness, all that child-like energy and all that ingrained hopefulness and fun.

And yet so quickly and so suddenly the whole thing just evaporates away. Death. The whole thing just so fleeting. And - if that is all there is - so empty, therefore, too.

We can't afford to hide behind those staid and white-laced curtains which we draw across our feelings and emotions in our hearts. We can't afford to push these things away.

We need to see why passion is important and why kindness is so good: we need to see why life should be such fun for us and filled with so much hope: we need to see why all that child-like wonder and excitement which we feel is ultimately good.

We need to see where these things have their truest sort of focus, what gives them all the only lasting meaning they can have.

And that, I guess, is what my life's about. Which takes me back to the barber's shop where my day, in a sense, began.

With people. Where they are. In the highs and the lows of their lives. Sharing the joys, sharing the sorrows. Sharing my life and sharing my heart with them.

And sharing my Lord as well. Who gives life all its meaning.

I did take a look in the mirror as well, when once I was done with the barber's shop. I did half wonder if the guy who cut my hair was so immersed in dreaming of a Scotland win that he'd gone and cut a huge St Andrew's flag across my scalp!

It would have been appropriate! And it might have meant emblazoned on my very head and hair was the symbol that above all else reveals to us the heart of life's true meaning. The cross.

(But he hadn't!)