a better place

For the first time in over a week I get the chance to draw breath.

It's Easter Monday. The world looks different in the light of the resurrection of Jesus.

Today is not such a constant rush.

There's time to catch up on a hundred and one different things which tend to get neglected through the non-stop hustle and bustle which the week we run the Holiday Club always brings.

There's a lot of catching up to do.

Some of it basic admin. Letters and e-mails and all sorts of things like that.

Some of it more relational. People to visit and see. In their homes and some in hospital as well.

But there's been time for some reading as well. The rest of the world is on holiday. There aren't as many phone calls and there isn't the usual buzz about the place.

And part of the catching up I have to do involves my reading some books that folk have passed in my direction. Three in recent weeks.

All on the same single theme. The environment.

I read one right through from start to finish in the course of the first part of this morning (it was only 100 hundred pages and it wasn't a difficult read). I got well on into another book as well.

And was so impressed I flicked to the final page to see if the note I figured was going to be struck was the note on which the book would actually end.

(I don 't usually do that sort of thing - flick to the end before I've reached the end - but it was the sort of book where that sort of thing's OK. I mean it doesn't spoil the story or anything like that. It's a sort of reference book, sub-titled Acting now to end world poverty).

The writer quotes a man of whom I'd heard. Henry Spira. This is what he said -

"I guess basically one wants to feel that one's life has amounted to more than just consuming products and generating garbage. I think that one likes to look back and say that one's done the best one can to make this a better place for others."

I was really quite struck by that.

Doing my best to make this world a better place for others.

Last Friday night we held a service of worship here. To mark 'Good Friday'.

We pondered the story of the woman breaking open her costly jar of perfume and pouring it over the head of Jesus.

His verdict? She has done a beautiful thing to me.

I guess you could die happy if you knew that's what you'd done.

I guess that's why even Jesus there on the cross, despite its tortuous agony, could still die sort of happy. He'd done a beautiful thing. He'd made this world a better place for others.

That's what all of us here are really all about!