walking

"Where's your car?"

An interesting, suggestive question.

I was out visiting a lovely, older lady this afternoon. She's not so able herself to be out and about these days and is only a few weeks back in her own familiar home after quite a spell in hospital.

So I'd called by to see how the lady was and enjoyed the time with her.

It was when I was leaving, as she stood at the door, that she asked me about the car.

She was, I think, concerned. Worried, perhaps, that my car had maybe been stolen, since it plainly wasn't visible up or down the street.

"I'm on my feet," I said. "Walking."

A deliberate ploy on my part. To get a bit of exercise. To have some time to think. To meet folk on the way.

And not to use the car.

It's strange how the assumption always is these days that journeys need a car.

It's only a brisk, maybe 10 or 15 minute walk along the road to her house. But the assumption is I'd always take the car.

Economy of time. That sort of thing, I guess, is how we justify that means of travel round the place.

But it's more, I suspect, like thoughtlessness and laziness. And on all sorts of fronts, a fairly false economy as well.

The Lord looks only for me to walk with him. Not to be so driven.

into the hills

Light requires a prism for its constituent colours to be seen.

Something like that, anyway. I was pretty hopeless at school at physics, the only remotely appealing and memorable thing about my physics teacher being his rather attractive daughter.

I'm not even sure it was he who taught me this about light. Or whether it was simply an idle observation that I made when my BIC biro caught a shaft of direct sunlight and broke it up into all the different colours of the rainbow.

Today has been a 'prism' sort of day. I needed good, uninterrupted time to figure out the themes for Sunday morning services throughout this coming year.

I knew the over-arching theme. That's been very much a burden which the Lord has really laid upon my heart. Sort of like an intense and shining light.

Today I needed the individual 'colours'.

So I set aside the day for teasing out those 'colours' through the 'prism' of some prayerful time spent working this all through before the Lord.

It took me the whole of the morning and most of the afternoon. Tucked away on my own. Without the distraction of people or phone calls or noise.

It was humbling, exciting, and .. well, I think time that was really well spent.

Now I can't wait to get started and to see where it's all going to lead! Out of the city and into the hills, I think. Metaphorically speaking.

Like Abram and Moses.

is life beautiful

Any lingering idealism which those weeks of summer holiday might subtly generate doesn't last long!

It's down to earth and back to the world of reality with a bang. A funeral yesterday. And today I found myself meeting folk who haven't had their problems to seek.

One of the encounters was fortuitous. A chance and brief encounter in the car park with a lady who's for long enough had one thing piling on another in her life.

She was coming out of the surgery as she's been struggling with a long-term internal problem. And her husband's been struggling with depression for long enough. And, as if she didn;t have her troubles, she was mugged up town and suffered from concussion.

And all that's before you ever get on to her children and all they struggle with there as well.

That's the real world, I suppose. Problems of health, of finance and of crime. Worries about children, fears for the future, and pain that won't go away.

Later I called by on a woman who's battled with cancer for quite some time. She's far from well. Still really relatively young you'd say, but the cancer has blighted her life these past few years.

And now, as I put it to her, she's simply hoping for the best and preparing for the worst. It was good to be able to talk the whole thing through with her. There'll come a time, I guess, when that sort of talk will really not be possible at all.

Life's often hard. And often doesn't work out quite the way we'd hoped it would. But it's what we choose to make of it that's in the end the really crucial thing.

I watched a DVD a couple of weeks ago. An Italian film with English sub-titles. 'Life is beautiful' was the (English) name of the film (La vita e bella is the original Italian title). Something of a classic. But it makes that point pretty well. Worth a viewing if you haven't already seen it.

It's how you choose to handle all the hardships that life brings which is the crucial thing.

i-f zones and mixed up beliefs

Four weeks away in an 'internet-free zone' is almost certainly good for the soul.

Lousy for communication, I grant you. Hopeless in terms of keeping in touch with people.

Yet despite all that, good for the soul. Maybe even because of that.

Like the six and a bit weeks that Jesus spent out in the wilderness. Which was pretty much the equivalent for him of an IFZ. Incommunicado.

I feel the better for it, whatever. The mind having time for a good 'spring-clean'. The heart getting space for refreshment.

Refreshed, re-fired, re-focussed. Sort of raring to go once again, with a burden impressed on my heart from the Lord as to all that he's wanting to say. And do. And have us do with him.

Today, though, it's been pretty much a case of hitting the ground running. First day back and a funeral service here in the church to conduct.

It was all pretty much arranged in advance (at least in terms of the choice of music and praise).

So I found the way it ended quite a graphic sort of picture of the mixed-up, strange confusion that I think there is in most folk's minds today.

The closing hymn was 'Be thou my vision..'. With line after line going on about heaven.

Raise thou me heaven-ward .. High king of heaven, my treasure thou art .. High king of heaven, after victory won, may I reach heaven's joys, O bright heaven's Sun..'

And so on. Heaven, heaven, heaven.

And then straight after that we had the opening lines of the John Lennon song, 'Imagine'.

'Imagine there's no heaven...'!

It seemed so strange and paradoxical. And yet it seemed to me as well so thoroughly expressive of the ignorance and inner contradictions that there are within society today.

A mixed-up, messed-up world which sometimes wants to believe; yet half the time chooses not to believe as well.