forward planning

Mondays often involve a fair old bit of forward planning.

As in preparing for all that the coming week is going to hold. Including, of course, the coming Sunday services.

It's sometimes hard to get myself down to that. Yesterday's still so fresh. My mind and my heart are so full of the word that I've only so recently brought that it's hard to shift gear and to start all over again.

There is a certain continuity, of course. God's dealings with us all, and what he has to say, they're hardly a staccato sort of thing. He builds on what he's said and done before.

So it's much more like I'm reading a book and turning the page to start a whole new chapter in the story as it bit by bit unfolds before my eyes.

Or ears. Because it's basically a case of trying to listen to the Lord. As he reads to me the next succeeding chapter in the story of his dealings with us here.

It takes both time and energy. But it's good, exciting stuff. Being in the story ourselves. Instead of somehow simply sort of reading it as just an academic exercise.

So a large part of the day was spent engrossed in getting down to all of that. Tuning in. Waiting, reading, praying, thinking. Tossing things around with God, to tease out what he's saying to us here.

I was out at different points as well, seeing different folk. Like the widow of the man who died last week. And their daughter.

Forward planning again, I guess. At least in some ways. Planning with them the way they'd like the memorial service to be.

The man was a massive Hearts supporter. Heavily involved. A programme seller at Tynecastle and an away-game season ticket holder too. Committed, in other words!

And a long-term fan of speedway, too. As avid in supporting the Edinburgh Monarchs as he's been in supporting the Hearts. I saw his death was mentioned on the website of both teams. That's how involved, committed and keen the man had consistently been.

And so they want a service with a Hearts song as they enter and what is I think essentially the 'anthem' of the club being played at some point through the varied ceremony we'll have. 'We are the Hearts'. And a well-known local radio DJ who's a friend to speak about the guy. Another friend to read a home-grown poem that a further friend composed.

I think a few years back I'd have run a mile from conducting a 'service' along such lines.

But since the last few weeks it's been the wedding Jesus shared in that's been brought by God before me, it's like he said - 'Now you go do that too'.

Except it's a funeral not a wedding I'm to go to and attend. Their world. Their grief. Their pain. Their terms. Their service.

That's challenging. To bring the grace of Jesus to their world. To make his presence known. To let his voice be heard.

In language they can understand. In terms to which they all can well relate.

It's almost like the Lord gives me a 'practical'. It isn't simply 'theory' I expound. I've got to learn the practice too. Wedding, funeral. Same difference. Get out there, God says: you've seen what Jesus did, now you go do it too.

At night there was some further forward planning.

With the couple I've met with for quite some months as we've worked through Coming Alive! Well, that's been a loose sort of basis for all that we've shared and discussed.

We ended up thinking of worship tonight. Not because I'd planned things quite that way. We just got onto that and stuck with that and tossed things back and forward on those lines. It was good stuff as always. A help to me as it was to them.

But we're nearing the end, I suppose. So I raised the question with them. What next?

It came up very naturally. We'd talked, as I say, about worship most of the night. And I'd shown them what Paul had to say (1 Cor.14). Which is quite a shock to the system, I think!

He says when everyone gathers together, we're all to come with a hymn, or a word, or a fresh sort of revelation: we can all, he says, we can all prophesy, and if a revelation comes to you while someone else is speaking, well the guy who's in full flow should stop and let you have your say.

I mean .. well, I mean, that's not the way we do things here!!

So we got chatting away about all of this and I think they saw that things were rather different in the days when Paul was writing this.

Like they didn't have large buildings and when they gathered together it would be in someone's home. And so I asked them how they'd feel about expanding what we presently did (the three of us) and use their home as a 'gathering place' for a larger crowd of folk.

As the next step forward from where they're at, I think it seemed to them an obvious and attractive move.

And me? Well, the whole thing really excited me. I thought that's surely just exactly how Christ's church is meant to grow.

I didn't go with that in mind when calling on the two of them tonight. It's simply how the evening opened up. Forward planning of a rather different sort!