piecing the picture together

Today was not a day for hanging around.

Well, thinking about it, it probably was a day for doing just that. What with it being a Bank Holiday and the sun shining wall-to-wall throughout the day.

But I couldn't afford to hang around, myself. There was too much too do.

There are all sorts of things that need to be done when a minister leaves a church. Someone has to 'stand in the gap' and fill the empty role.

And this time round, for this particular church, out at Kirkliston, a couple of miles away - that gap-filling someone is me.

There's less than a month 'til the minister leaves, so there isn't a lot of time for all that needs to be done.

Most of the morning was spent on that, in one way and another.

But it proved a fruitful use of time since the end result was a major step forward beng taken. Fixing up a 'locum' who will take on much of the pastoral, preaching load.

We'd prayed about that specifically. And the Lord's been good in answering the prayer. Though like most of the answers he gives, it takes a bit of work on our part too.

It's easy to get preoccupied with all that's needing done. And easy as well to start to lose sight of the fact that it is Christ's church, not ours. His work, not ours, that I'm involved in.

And so it's easy, too, to start to think it's all a case of doing the things that need done.

Just for the sake of seeing them done as it were. Rather than seeing what the Lord is doing in and through it all. And trusting him to provide for the needs he sees.

So I see it all as part of his sovereign providence that it's me that's now involved out there. It's a time of new beginnings there. Something's going on.

And it's part of my role to help them see just what that something is.

Appointing a 'locum' is part of that. Not just a matter of having a person there (though that helps!). But having the person that God wants in there.

It's his church. So he provides. Right person, right place, right time.

In all the demands there always are, it's easy to overlook that!

So today I've made time to reflect on it all a bit. To see the sort of picture that is building up. Different bits of a jigsaw that are slowly coming together.

Like hearing from one of my friends of a parallel work of God out there in Kirkliston. And learning of their delight in it being me who's charged to oversee the thing just now.

* * *

There's a funeral service I've to take tomorrow. So I started to tackle that this afternoon.

In and around a meeting that there was about this coming day on Saturday 7th June. 'Living simply' (or 'simply living', depending how you rea it, I suppose!) is what it's called. And it's getting closer by the minute!

It should be good. I'm excited to find that others, too, are thinking along these lines. I had an e-mail today from a guy involved with a city-wide version of this.

Their website looked good.

http://www.edinburghclimate.net/.

They put the whole thing well, in terms of what it is we're on about.

* * *

At night I was off to call on Ina's daughter. Ina who died last week.

I remember when her husband died, how impressed and how moved I'd been by the love the two of them shared and the life the two had lived. That was some eleven years and more ago.

It's been hard for her over these years. They'd spent just short of fifty years together in their married life, a couple just made for each other. He was a lovely man, so courteous, gentle and loyal in every regard. And she's been just the same.

She's missed him hugely every day, I think. And yet has battled bravely on, her gratitude as real as all her grief.

Such visits leave me thinking just how privileged I am to have the chance to share with folk like that. To see behind the curtains of their lives and meet them in the living room of grief.

It's good to be able to talk with the grieving relatives. To get from them, in the way they talk, a picture of the person whom they mourn. And start to see, through all they say, the sort of picture God himself is meaning me in time to paint.

But I've still got tomorrow's portrait to do! It's still not quite complete.

So I'm back at the office once again. And I'm writing up notes on Ina's life (the first initial 'sketch' as it were) and I'm typing my script for the service I've got in the morning.

A very different picture! And not the sort of enterprise where 'mix-and-match' will do.

I've got to get each portrait that I paint like this - I've got to get it absolutely right!