soup-making

Tuesdays begin with the soups.

I generally start here quite early, about 7.30am. And on Tuesdays I start with the making of both of the soups. There's a certain sort of therapy in that, because it keeps me from simply rushing headlong into all the different things there are to do. And gives me time to think.

It's the same with the task of setting up the tables and the chairs in the halls. There's a therapy in that at the start of the day. I'm getting the place in order. Looking good.

And that involves both time and work. But that's the business of creation.

We're wanting to serve our society and offer them something good. Like the soup. But it has to be got on the boil for quite a while. It doesn't happen instantly. (I know you can get these packs of instant soup, but they're not the same. Really!)

Today I was thinking that it's much the same with all that we're seeking to do. With the soup it's the raw materials of various different vegetables that I'm working with, preparing and then combining them over hours of gentle heat, until at last they emerge as a tasty soup.

That's not a bad picture of the bigger sort of work in which I'm day by day involved. Except it's not vegetables I'm working with, but people. The basic raw material from which the 'soup' of kingdom living's to be made.

There's work to be done with people individually. That personal 'preparation' which is part of our discipling folk.

But there's work to be done on a larger canvas too, as we slowly start combining all these very varied people and building them together as the church of Christ.

'Church', I fear, still looks far too like just the bundles of varied vegetables which I bring into the kitchen in my shopping bag. Everyone present and correct. Together in a sense.

But hardly soup. In fact barely recognisable as such at all.

A shopping bag full of veg isn't soup. And a building full of people on a Sunday isn't church.

The same sort of thing occurred to me later on. One of our older members was compiling a brief sort of 'bio'. A sheet about himself since his previous one was a little bit out of date.

Could we help him? So we got down to work with the text and set it all out in a range of different ways for him to see. And then we got down to the photos as well. Any number of different poses, the camera clicking away like a machine-gun doing over-time.

And once we'd got the picture we got to work with cropping it and 'softening' it, and shaping it, until it looked pretty good.

You may think that's a waste of my time. But it's not. It's a picture of what I'm about. Working away with this person and that to present them at last to the world in a way that reflects more and more both the beauty and grandeur of God.

Soup all over again - in an individual's life. Working with some pretty basic raw materials and seeing them transformed into something remarkably good. Which draws folk in and makes them want to 'taste' for themselves and see that the Lord is good.

But it takes a long, long time. And a lot of hard work as well.

My soups have to simmer for hours on end.

And the work of the kingdom of God - that, too, takes time.