the dentist's chair

"That's a good way to start the week," the man said to me this morning.

Since the man in question is my dentist, and at the time he was gazing into my dutifully opened mouth, I wasn't entirely sure what he meant! My grunt in reply could have meant anything, I suppose.

I don't actually think he meant that seeing your dentist on a Monday morning is the best of all ways to begin the new working week. Though he may have, I guess.

I think he meant that if you've got to see your dentist at that time, then needing nothing done has got to be good news.

But dentist or otherwise, I did in fact have a brilliant start to the week!

I was along at the school for the SU group again. Last week the numbers were small. But the children had prayed and they'd asked that the Lord would make the little group grow.

They were looking, I think, to double the numbers. Which would've been more than we'd ever had meeting before. And involved a sizeable leap of faith on the part of Chris and myself!

As it turned out today the numbers were three times as many as last week's small group! It was great. Talk about answered prayer!

I had children pitching up at the door at one point and asking if this was the place where the Christian thing took place and could they come in and join in what was going on!

The time just absolutely flies! But I think the children love it all and they're quick and eager to learn.

Who knows how many there are going to be next week!

It's always hard to get back down to do fresh preparation when a Monday comes.

My mind and heart have both been so pre-occupied with all that I've been working on the previous week - culminating always in the three big services yesterday - that it's hard to switch from that and go right back, as it were, to square one. And start the thing again.

It's hard, I say. And it takes me quite a time. Especially when I'm tired, which on Mondays I often am!

Sometimes I think I'd be better just forgetting all about such preparation. Taking a break and starting in on Tuesday with a 'fallow' day between.

But then the week itself becomes quite short!

And so I mainly try and make a Monday different and ease myself quite slowly into preparation mode - and do a load of other different things as well.

Not that it always works like that, of course!

I was in at the hospital seeing a lady there. And later called on one of the youngsters who comes along on a Sunday night to the time we have for the folk in S4-6.

She'd been pretty upset last night again, after a series of sorrows and burdens she's had to bear this past wee while.

The others were really good with her there last night. Supportive and caring and .. well, just being for her the friends she needs us all to be.

I wanted to check she was doing OK.

So it was good to have the chance to chat a bit and see her Mum as well and pray with them both about it all. And let them know in a kind of tangible way that the Lord is always with them and is always there to help.

This girl, she's had a sort of dentist's chair experience these past few years. At least in the sense it's something we would all of us prefer to do without. Painful and sore and touching some pretty raw nerves.

But sometimes the fears and the anxiety we feel are not matched by the way things in the end turn out. The dreaded dentist's chair becomes the platform for the start of something new.

A good way to start the new week, as the dentist himself declared.

The sorrows and the griefs we sometimes have to bear, the dark and dreadful valleys we pass through - they sometimes are the avenues through which a whole new work of God begins to flow. I'm praying that's so for this girl at this time.

We'd looked with the children who'd come to the SU group today - we'd looked at the story Jesus told about the wise and foolish builders. How important to listen and hear and simply obey what the Lord directs us to do.

And we'd stressed at the end that the Lord is the same himself. He listens to us and hears what we say and acts in response to our words.

And does far more than we could ever ask or even think.

My day and my week began today in the dentist's chair.

And it may well be that as often as not the new things God's intent on doing in our lives begins in the dark and dreaded valleys full of sorrow, pain and fear.