ancient paths

I'm never short of things to do. Every week is busy and full. But exactly what fills them is ever so varied, and changes from week to week.

This week, as I planned things out, I realised there were 8 separate occasions within the space of 5 short days when I'd be speaking and opening the Scriptures. Which itself serves to cut back the time that there is to prepare.

Each of these occasions is unique. A particular setting, particular people, particular needs. Trotting out some standard text I've used before just will not do. I can't and won't and don't do that at all.

It would make life a whole load easier, that's for sure. But it would totally miss the point.

The point, of course, being that the living Lord, who loves us all in a very personal way, has a very specific word for the people who gather at each of these very specific places.

Today it was a funeral. (That was after the couple of school assemblies through the morning)

At services such as this, of course, there's a very particular focus. A person has died. A very unique individual whom those who gather, from all walks of life, are keen to remember with thanks.

It's not a time or place for platitudes. It doesn't do to speak in simply general terms. The whole thing's wholly personal.

And into that, the Lord's intent on speaking with the folk who're there. Who they are, and what they are, and where they're at in terms of their relationship with Christ - well, the Lord alone knows. I don't have to know. My task is to hear what it is that the Lord is intent on saying to these folk, and then to deliver that word.

Every one is different. And today was no exception.

The man who'd died was a well-known man in the local community here. He used to come out in the evenings to our weekly Sunday worship. And, since the death of his wife a few years back, I'd got to know him quite well.

He hailed from Coupar, Angus, and a while ago he'd loaned me a couple of books about the old Cistercian Abbey there. He took pride in his roots, and took pride in his birth-place's past. In a lot of ways he had seemed to prefer the values of an older world to those of our present contemporary world.

The Lord laid his word on my heart for today.

"This is what the Lord says: 'Stand at the crossroads and look: ask for the ancient paths, ask where the good way is, and walk in it, and you will find rest for your souls.'"

This man had sort of gravitated back to those ancient paths. He'd sought in his life to walk in that way - and in a real and wonderful way he'd found a certain rest as well.

He ended his life, this last year or so, at The Tor, a lovely Christian Nursing Home. And there, in the care of a dedicated staff, he was certainly truly at rest.

There were folk there today who needed, I think, to hear that word from the Lord. I don't know who they were or why this was important. That's between them and him.

But I'm sure that was a word they needed to hear. And I pray that the Lord by his Spirit will lodge that word in their hearts and make it take root and then grow from that virulent seed into something which bursts into life.

There's a lot of prayer involved. Prayer as I seek to discern the Lord's word. Prayer as I seek to explain the Lord's word. Prayer as I seek to deliver his word. Prayer when it's done that the Lord would continue his work through that word in the hearts and the lives of the hearers.

And that's a sort of praying which we all can share.

Things happen when people pray.

the cult of youth

The long-running saga of 'The Brothers Milibandov' seems now to be reaching a close (for the moment). To their relief, I'm sure - and probably to the great relief of a host of others as well.

The younger brother got the job. An interesting, and, in its own little way, quite a significant fact.

Youth reigns.

The man is certainly young. The tag line that life begins at 40 has now been slightly altered - leadership begins at 40. We have the younger brother leading now: not the elder.

Never mind that he's not really had any other job outside of political life. Youth, it seems, is all.

There's something not quite right about it all.

In the Scriptures some stress is accorded to elders. The term is deliberately used.

As any genuine wine connoisseur will know (and I don't set myself up remotely as such, I should add) some things come with age. Some things require the passing of years. Some things are better the older they are, and can't be so good when they're younger.

Youth, of course, has a great deal going for it.

There's a huge, big reservoir of energy, for one thing, when you're young.

And (generally) massive enthusiasm, too. The young are full of ideals, full of a surging and passionate dream of just how the whole world can be changed.

We don't want to curb or to stifle these things. Not at all. We want to tap into that reservoir, we want to sustain and to draw on that visionary, vibrant enthusiasm.

But.

The one thing youth can never have is experience. By definition.

Why are older drivers so much less of an insurance risk? Not because they're any better drivers than the young. Often they're not. It's just that they're experienced. They've learned things down the years which no amount of lessons from the best of driving teachers can impart.

They have experience. And that always counts for a bit.

When the Scriptures give stress to the elders (as they plainly do), they're surely simply recognising that two of the components in the wisdom leaders need require the passing years.

This practical, and down-to-earth, and truly godly wisdom is a grace involving three distinct components.

The first is, as suggested, just experience. Some long decades of living in the world and mingling with a vast array of people and working through a whole array of problems and scenarios which can arise.

Being there, doing that, and getting the T-shirt is a time-consuming business in the real (and not the virtual) world. Experience comes over time.

By itself, of course, experience isn't that great. It begins to come into its own when it's tied to a grasp of the Scriptures.

And that takes time as well. Not just adopting some read-the-whole-Bible-in-a-year scheme. But being steeped in its truth and familiar with all that it says.

If you want your porridge the way it's meant to be, you've got to soak the oats. For hours.

Our minds and our hearts must be soaked in the truths of the Scriptures if we're seeking that biblical knowledge. That takes years. There are simply no short-cuts. It takes time and application. Much to the consternation of an 'instant age', it will not ever happen in a flash.

But when a person's experience is married to that biblical knowledge, and when that combination is being fashioned by the Spirit of Almighty God, then wisdom is increasingly its fruit.

That's why the Scriptures give place as they do to the elders.

Age still counts for something!

Is that a mark of my getting old? I hope it's not. I've always maintained that a leader will be at his peak when he's 50-60 years old. Before that stage he'll certainly have enthusiastic energy. After it he'll certainly have experienced expertise.

It's surely there, within that span of life (I'm speaking here in general terms), that the two are at their optimal point of balance. Energy and experience.

The one the driver of action. The other a pillar of wisdom.

The cult of youth is a worrying trend, for in the end there isn't any substitute for age.

You can buy some 'plonk' pretty cheap, of course. But a really good wine has been slowly maturing for years. And it costs!

I sometimes fear this preference for the younger not the elder is the hallmark of a culture which has opted for the drunken high your average 'plonk' can give.

Life (if you can call it that) decidedly on the cheap.

seriously strong

I came across this short commercial for Nolan's Cheddar cheese today.

It's a kind of 'mini-adventure', which encapsulates the story of so many in a 90-second nutshell.

Click on the picture to watch it.

Like the mouse which stars in the advert, people are hungry.

Hungry for experience, hungry for meaning, hungry for love.

Hungry in the end of the day for God.

That sort of hunger has been placed in the hearts of us all. It's that sort of hunger which drives us out to pad across the floor-boards of this world, looking for that which will satisfy that constant, aching hunger deep within.

Like the cheese in the advert, there are all sorts of things which look and smell appealing. We start perhaps with a sniff and a lick, but before too long we're hooked.

Wealth, sex, drugs, travel, fashion .....

The 'cheese' comes in all sorts of forms.

And with little by way of a warning, we find ourselves caught in a trap.

Addicted to something which destroys our lives - and sometimes the lives of those around us too. Trapped in a lifestyle which throttles our hopes and ideals and from which we can't find a way out.

I'm meeting with folk just like that every day. I'm seeking to bring the good news to people like that every day. Those who are caught in a trap - and can't get out.

The good news of Jesus is directed to that graphic facet of the human condition.

And like the point of the advert, I'm wanting to highlight for people the liberating power of Jesus and how it makes us strong.

Nolan's Cheddar may indeed be 'seriously strong': but it's nothing compared to the strength and the power of Jesus!

Taste and see! You heard it first in the Bible.

quayside ministry

A crowd of Hebrideans waving goodbye to their countrymen who are emigrating to Canada on board the 'Matagama'

Never forget the oldies!

The words were addressed to myself by a woman I'd not met before. She was in a local Nursing Home, where I was conducting (as perhaps twice a year I do) a half-hour service this afternoon.

We hadn't met, as I say. So her comments were not directed at all in a personal way at myself. They were more by way of reflection.

How easy it is, she was feeling, for a person like her to become overnight an out-of-sight-and-therefore-out-of-mind displaced statistic in the church's life.

She'd been involved for many a year in a thriving Christian fellowship in town. The emphasis now, though, she felt, was all on youth.

She wasn't bitter. She wasn't at all unsympathetic to the care we must have for the rising generations in society today. Anything but. She saw the urgent need there is for reaching out in Jesus' name to those who now have often not an inkling of just what it's all about.

But don't forget us older folk! We have needs as well.

Considerable needs.

Our earthly lives are largely all behind us now. The tireless fount of energy we once enjoyed has largely all dried up. Our movements are restricted, our horizons all fore-shortened.

A whole new way of living life is forced upon us now. And death has ceased to be a distant sort of subject for discussion, and now is something stalking us each day.

The youth of today may have choices to make. But this lady I was speaking with, and those who are her contemporaries today - there is for them a very final journey they're embarking on. And down there at the quayside of their earthly life, embarking on their ship of emigration to another, unknown world, they need fresh re-assurance and encouragement.

She was right, of course.

The challenge I face is not in remembering the 'oldies': I'm always aware of their needs. The challenge is finding the time for them all, since there are these days so many now thronging that quayside.

Today was a good illustration of just how extended and stretched I can quickly become.

I'd just come back from the primary school where I'd been at the assembly and had spoken with the Head about my starting up the SU group again: I was due now to meet with the SU person who covers this side of the town. It was another of those one-thing-after-another sort of mornings.

Then a call came in from the hospital. An elderly lady, whose husband had died not long back, who's not been all that well herself, and whom I'd arranged I would see later on today - she'd been taken in to the hospital. A doctor dealing in palliative care was on the phone. The lady had hours, not days, to live.

The shift from a focus on all we're concerned to be doing with the youth and the children here, to the needs of a woman well up in years now lying and breathing her last - it's a fairly major gear change in the motor car of ministry.

For the second time this morning I got soaked to the skin as I beat a hasty path along to the hospital. The daughter was there - about to face grief and bereavement a second time when the loss of her father a month or so back is still such a raw and very much un-healed wound. The brother of the dying woman was also there, along with his wife.

To sit beside a person on their deathbed, and to seek to bring the grace of Jesus Christ upon her life, is a privilege beyond all words.

Never forget the oldies!

I'm down at the quayside a lot, I suppose. Supporting, assuring, encouraging those who are gathering there with the final emigration on their minds.

However much the prospect of a better world inspires our hearts, there's a pain involved for one and all. The parting isn't easy.

In the dim and distant past when I used to strum a guitar and pretend to be some sort of up and coming folk singer, I recall playing a song called 'The Leaving of Liverpool', which has the lines -

It's not the leaving of Liverpool which grieves me

But my darling when I think of thee

The prospect is great. But the parting is hard.

That 'quayside' ministry to an older generation is a privileged, vital work.

follow me

What shall I do, Lord?

It's a good question with a significant historical precedent.

Saul of Tarsus, having been rather unceremoniously stopped in his tracks on the road to Damascus, asked two simple questions.

First, who are you, Lord?

And then what shall I do, Lord?

It's a question I'm asking every day. I'm at his service. Available. I report for duty each morning, and on through the course of a day. And that, on some form or another, is the question I'm always asking.

What do you want me to do? Where do you want me to go? Who do you want me to speak to? What do you want me to say? What are you wanting me to do in this situation?

That's the heart of our 'following Jesus'.

I was with some folk this evening and we had in interesting, and I think helpful, discussion along these lines. Does the summons to 'follow Jesus' involve for us (as it seemed to do for Simon and Andrew and James and John, to whom it was first addressed) ditching our job and leaving our homes and turning our back on a whole former pattern of life?

And if we don't do that, have we not really followed the Lord?

The answer, I hope, is obvious. Of course that's not the case.

The summons to follow is the challenge to ditch our agenda (rather than our job necessarily) and take up his. It's the call to respond to the Lord by saying to him simply 'Here I am, I'm entirely at your service now.'

That's the starting point. Starting to seek and to follow his agenda and share with him in his work.

And from there we start asking, OK, Lord - what do you want me to do?

Most of the time he's not going to call us away from the work that we're doing already. Though he might. And if he does, he goes about it wisely and he makes it pretty clear.

Most of the time he's happy to see us involved in the work that we're doing. Except he now says, Do what you're doing with me and for me. Which makes life suddenly more than a little interesting, and what once was merely routine becomes overnight an adventure.

That's what my days are like. What shall I do, Lord?

His agenda, not mine.

Today that took me along to the secondary school, to meet for a coffee and sort of 'touch base' with the Rector. Establishing dates for assemblies and services on through the course of the year. And making myself available there at the school should needs arise.

I try to be a source of real encouragement when I'm along at the schools. My guess is that those who hold down a job as the Head or as Rector - well, I figure they'll appreciate encouragement. It must be hard and demanding the work they do and I'm sure I don't know the half of it!

There was the midweek lunch-time service, of course, today, as well. And for those who were present it's always a special, significant time.

The afternoon was all tied up with meeting a couple of folk. Not least in connection with a day conference coming up this Saturday in a nearby congregation, where I'm to be the 'facilitator'.

I wanted to get a feel for the day to know how best to be handling the thing. And I'm conscious that this is a tough and important time for these folk with some difficult decisions to make. They're keen, I think, to draw on our experience and to have a bit of guidance as they tread across what I guess for them is strange and new terrain.

And in some ways for them as well at this time, it's Saul-of-Tarsus territory. What shall we do, Lord?

A whole new way of living opening up, as he takes them by the hand and says to them - Follow me.

Except the hand which he extends to them is my hand! And the privilege that I have this coming Saturday is, as one who's passed that way before, to be myself the one who gently says, Come, follow me.

hungry

I'm not sure if there's a collective name for a whole crowd of Brownies - other, I suppose, than 'Brownies'!

(I'm talking girls here, rather than cakes, I should make clear)

Anyway, whatever such a crowd of Brownies is called, I found myself surrounded by them when I looked in to see them this evening. They were champing at the bit, desperate to know when the Scripture Union group was going to be starting again along at the school. Was it going to happen? Would I be leading the group again? When was it going to start? Where would it be?

When I replied that I'd been on the phone today with the school about this, they almost interrupted to let me know that the reason the school had been in touch was because they'd gone themselves to the Head and had been pestering him about it too.

They're keen!

And I'm keen, as well, to get the thing going again and build on the sort of momentum we had last year.

There's no time like the present for our getting to know the Lord. And no better time than this, in the first flush of youth, for these children to learn about Jesus and to be giving their lives to him. A definite decision to live for the Lord all their days will shape the whole of their living.

I'm keen to help them reach such a point where a genuine, meaningful committing themselves to the Lord is being made. And therefore keen to get the group re-started.

My problem has been that the teacher I worked with last year in leading the group is not to be doing it this year. And I can't really do it alone - disclosure regulations are such that although I'm disclosed, I've not been disclosed as a member of staff at the school, so I can't be alone with the children.

Which has meant my finding someone else to be there on a Thursday over lunch. Which has meant the need for some further disclosure as well, this person being 'disclosed' by Scripture Union. It all takes time!

I'm meeting with Gill (our 'Es-team' worker from SU) this week, and after that we should be ready to go. I'm hoping so, at any rate.

Opportunity knocks all right. My problem has been that bureaucracy's put so many locks on the door, it takes a while to unlock it!

The door of these young girls' hearts have no such bureaucratic locks. They're opened wide to the Lord and eager to learn.

Feeding time is about to begin again!

growth

Every time I see my grand-daughter I'm aware of how she's grown.

I was down in York on Saturday afternoon for a family celebration. And the wee girl (with her parents, of course!) was there as well.

It's a good six weeks, I'd guess, since I saw her last, and she's fairly come on since then. Almost, but not quite, walking - more 'taking steps on her own' (as her mother discerningly puts it).

She's growing. And to watch that growth brings a joy to a grand-father's heart which is hard to out into words.

How much harder for any of us to grasp what our growth in grace must mean to the Lord. He delights in such growth on our part with a joy that's as huge as himself. I doubt we fully understand what joy our growth affords him.

And I doubt we even start to comprehend what pain there is within his holy heart when no such growth is evident.

There's a story Jesus told along those lines which I've been working at today. It's simple, short, and more than a little sobering.

A man has a fig-tree, planted in a vineyard. He comes to look for fruit on it, but finds none. He's been doing that now for a good few years. He's patient. But he's getting frustrated. There's no real growth.

"Cut it down!" he orders. It's becoming a waste of space. Or a waste of good soil, at any rate.

The man who's charged to secure that growth pleads for another year. He'll dig round it, give it the benefit of some healthy manure - he'll pull out all the stops, that is, do everything he possibly can to promote that genuine growth.

And then, a year on down the line, if there's still no fruit, well, then the tree can be given the chop.

God looks for growth, longs for growth, provides for growth, delights in growth. And he's grieved and dismayed and dishonoured by a lack of growth.

When there isn't that growth in our lives, when we're not growing "in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ" (2 Pet.3.18), we've become a waste of space.

That's not my verdict, but his. Growth matters a whole lot more than we sometimes think to the Lord.

imagination

Being along at the school on a Thursday is always a thing I enjoy. And today was no exception.

It wasn't the Head himself today. But the value for the month was the same.

Imagination.

I've been glad to have had the chance these past few Thursday mornings to be giving thought to this. Reflecting on the gift that God has given us in this remarkable facility we have.

What do we do when we start to imagine? Well, in some ways what we're doing is simply putting an image in our minds. And this is an integral part of the way that we're made.

We're given, most of us, the gift of sight. We use our eyes and see things. People, places, absolutely all sorts; a multitude of different images are caught by us through every waking moment of the day.

Sight is a wonderful gift. Once you start to lose it you know all about how wonderful it is. I understand that. We have older folk here who are losing their sight; and it's hard. Hard beyond words for them all. The world has become a darker, less colourful place.

But alongside that gift of sight, we've also been given the wonderful gift of memory. The ability to store, and then later retrieve at will, all sorts of different images or pictures from our past.

We remember events and occasions and people and places and moments which all left their mark on our lives. Sometimes we choose to remember. Sometimes the memory is triggered without any conscious decision on our part at all.

If the gift of sight enables us to see and enjoy the richness of our present situation, the gift of memory enables us to feast upon our history and savour once again the joys we've known.

And the sorrows and hurts as well, of course. I appreciate that. There also is a 'downside' to this gift. People can be haunted by their memories and sometimes wish this gift that God has given us had never been bestowed.

It's striking, though, how often in Scripture we're exhorted to make use of this gift. Remember ... remember ... remember.

Imagination, I think, is its complement. In some ways this is a yet more remarkable facility with which we've been endowed. The gift of imagination.

By the use of this gift we're able to put images into our minds of things we haven't yet seen. We're able to picture the future. We're able to dream of the things that might be, instead of the things that just are or have been.

We're able to see in advance what could be. We're able to dream in advance of what will be.

It's more than a little interesting, therefore, that alongside the biblical call to remember, there's also this future dimension. The great word of promise which is wired into the church's DNA on the day of her birth (Acts 2) runs along these lines -

"In the last days, God says, I will pour out my Spirit on all people. Your sons and daughters will prophesy, your young men will see visions, your old men will dream dreams."

Seeing what is not there (or is not there just yet), as if it were. Seeing what might be, what could be, what will be.

The Spirit of God gives a potent kick-start to this integral part of our make up, and helps it come into its own. He gives us to see that the Lord who's come into our lives "is able to do far more abundantly than all that we ask or (wait for it) imagine."

We learn to dream. We learn to see visions. We learn to get an image in our minds and hearts of what is yet to be. We learn to see God's future, and that image casts its shadow back in time and starts to shape our living to that end.

I think that's at least something of what the apostle meant when he wrote about the future which is promised us and said -

"Now we are children of God, and what we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when he appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is. Everyone who has this hope in him purifies himself, just as he is pure." [1 John 3.2-3]

The picture we're given is this - we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is.

And that picture of what's yet to be, of what we'll one day be like, both informs our present perspective and transforms our whole way of living. We start to become bit by bit what one day we'll finally be.

A God-given gift which comes into its own when the Spirit of God bathes our lives.

consequences

Our midweek lunch-time services started again yesterday.

It always does my heart good to see the folk who come out.

It's mainly they're folk who are, well, 'up in years' as they say, a lot of whom can't really make it to worship on Sundays - 10.30am is too early and 6.30pm is too late, and an hour or more is too long. So they're glad of this midweek oasis. A half hour service in the middle of the day, with a chance for a meal thereafter.

There are also some younger ones, too. And again, in the case of some, it's because for them a Sunday just doesn't work. That they make the effort to be in at this service of worship really gladdens my heart and lifts me no end.

We feasted today on a passage early in the book of Judges which really goes right to the heart of where things went wrong for the people of Israel once they'd finally settled in Canaan.

If you know the book of Judges at all, you'll appreciate that it makes for some fairly uncomfortable reading. A lot of it is ugly, distasteful stuff. An illustrated commentary on what things start to look like when a people (like Israel) have no king and "everyone did as he saw fit."

It's uncomfortably close to the bone of our our own contemporary land.

The early part of the book of Judges reveals where the root problem lay.

"After that whole generation [Joshua and his contemporaries] had been gathered to their fathers, another generation grew up, who knew neither the Lord nor what he had done for Israel." (Ju.2.10).

That's to say, a generation grew up which was marked by an ignoring of God and an ignorance of Scripture.

The older generation here today are a dying breed. They were taught the Scriptures at school, were generally fed some biblical truth in the home through their childhood years, and would have, almost without exception, had a Sunday School education as well each week.

The end result is at least some residual awareness of biblical truth, at least some basic knowledge of the central truths which the Lord has set before us in his Word, at least some sense of what it is the Lord has done for us in Christ.

But, as I say, that generation is a dying breed. One by one they're being 'gathered to their fathers'. They're dying off.

And new generations are now rising up, and it's alarming to see just how ignorant most of them are of biblical truth, and how patently absent is any real sense of a living encounter with Christ.

For all their often vaunted 'spirituality', they simply don't know God.

Indeed, that very spirituality is akin to the route the Israelites took when their lack of a knowledge of God, and their ignorance of all that he'd done, saw them sucked into all of the self-centred, self-indulgent, self-fulfilling, self-expressing 'spirituality' of the Baals and the Ashteroth all around.

In the absence of that knowledge of the living Lord, a people soon end up as Israel did just doing as each sees fit. They do their own thing. Anything goes. Whatever floats your boat....

In regard to your worship and morals as much as anywhere else.

Which is pretty much where we're at today. In the last few chapters of Judges (which, I should warn you, you'd be wise not to read before the 9 o'clock threshold - and even then with the caution that these chapters contain images which some 'viewers' may find distressing).

The root of the problem is many long chapters before. Back there in Judges 2.

And it's that which the last of the judges, the towering figure of Samuel, begins to address. Going up and down the land in his day, teaching the Word of God.

There's a pressing need for the same sort of thing in our land today.

Not the 'chic' and so-called 'revisionist' line, which re-interprets Scripture into something wholly opposite to what's declared, and turns out to be little more than the modernised (and still so very self-indulgent) Baal worship.

But the clear, bold, faithful teaching of the Scriptures as our forbears and their forbears sought to do. Standing against the tide of the current trends, and applying the truths of the Scriptures to every area of life.

Not 'chic'. Not popular. Not easy.

But the truth of God. And the only solid ground on which to build our lives and that of our society.

Judges shows what happens when the line which the 'revisionists' adopt takes hold. It doesn't make pretty reading.

Only when a Samuel comes along can all the sordid chaos in society be remedied and changed. If we knew our Scriptures, and knew what the Lord had done in the past, we'd see that very clearly.

And we'd know where our priorities must lie.

conversion

We live in an 'instant' age.

And that sort of thinking can sometimes slip into the way we expect God to work. As if his way of working was to snap his fingers and all of a sudden, out of the blue, and in one quick moment of action dramatic change has occurred.

We read the story of Saul's conversion like that. From sinner to saint in an instant. A flash of God's lightning, the man gets zapped, and all of a sudden this man who's been antagonistic has become a born-again Christian.

Not quite magic, but the Christian equivalent. A Christianised abracadabra (prayer), then a cloud of dust and a 'rabbit' appears from the conjurer's hat in the form of some person now coming to faith.

And having read of it happening like that in Saul's life, we expect it all of the time.

No wonder we're disappointed! Because there are two big flaws in our thinking like that.

The first big flaw is that Saul's becoming a Christian is not to be viewed as the norm.

It can happen like that. It does happen like that. 'Dramatic' conversion experiences do occur. No question about it. I've seen it happen myself.

And there are no two ways about it - it's a thrilling and humbling thing to see God at work like that in a person's life. Bringing a person out of the 'dominion of darkness' and into the light of Christ in what seems like an instant of time. It's wonderful. It fills me with awe when I see it.

But, rather like the sunrise, it's not like that in everyone, by any means.

I've been in Africa and I've seen the way the sun can rise and set out there.

Near the equator, the shift from light to darkness at the end of the day is really very rapid. It's almost like in the time it takes you to blink, you've moved from bright and shining light to a thick all-encompassing darkness.

And the same in the morning, of course, as the sun comes up. Darkness into light in what seems like no more than a moment.

But most of us don't live by the equator. And most of the time the shift from darkness to light in the early hours of the morning is a much more subtle thing, spread over hours.

I once went out to watch the sun rise over the Sea of Galilee. It seemed like a good idea when I went to bed at 10.30pm the night before and set my alarm for 4am (I wasn't quite sure just when the sun would rise, but I figured that 4am was a safe-ish sort of starting time).

The experience was an interesting one, for sure. At 4am it was dark. Really dark. At 5am it was still dark. Just less so. By 5.30am the sky was light, a lovely shade of orangey-pink.

But still no sun! I began to think the sun itself had ceased to exist! But gradually over the next long while, with the sky getting lighter and lighter, the sun very shyly poked it's head above the horizon.

Stunning, certainly. But a long, long, dreadfully drawn-out process.

That's how the sunrise usually happens of course. The equator is the exception.

Saul's conversion experience, which saw him shift from darkness to light with such rapidity, is generally the exception too.

The first big flaw in our thinking in 'instant' terms is our failing to see that mostly the 'sunrise' of faith in a person's life is not an 'equatorial' thing.

The second big flaw is our thinking like this has to do with our failure to see what was really going on in the life and the heart of this man.

It wasn't really all compressed into that moment on the famed Damascus Road. To think it was betrays a certain superficiality. There was, in other words, more than a bit of history behind that single moment when he came to faith.

This was a man who had studied the Scriptures for years. The Word of God is potent and it seeps beneath the skin of those who read it - even those resistant to its summons and its truth.

The Word of God, like some secret agent infiltrating far behind the enemies' lines - the Word of God had been doing its work in his life for years, in ways he was wholly unaware of. Weakening all his defences. Corroding all his intellectual arrogance. 'Getting under his skin' as we say, and whispering through to his conscience that all was far from right.

And then, as well, there was the impact of the testimony Stephen gave. Stephen was a man who loved the Lord Jesus, taught God's Word and challenged God's people, with a wisdom and a winsomeness which was hard to resist.

Their only answer was to get rid of the guy. Which they did by stoning the man to death.

Saul, we're told was watching.

Watching, without a doubt, a quite remarkable, humbling manner of dying on Stephen's part. A bit too reminiscent of the death of the Jesus he loved. His grace, his strength, his peace, his courage, his love. And his forgiving spirit.

A bit too much of the deja vu for any informed spectator.

The sight, I imagine, was imprinted for ever on the mind and heart of Saul. And the memory of this godly man must have lived with Saul all those years.

His conversion had a history. The fuse head been lit long before and had quietly burned all those years. The 'bang' when conversion took place was spectacular, dramatic, sudden. Sure.

But 'bangs' like that don't happen without such a fuse.

A lot of the time when I'm speaking with folk I'm part of that God-given fuse. Sometimes lighting the fuse. Sometimes seeing that fuse is kept burning in the knowledge the explosion will happen at some point further down the line.

A bit of my time today's been like that. Folk I've been seeing, and I know that the Lord is at work in their lives, and it's great to be seeing all that - but I'm longing and praying for more.

The fuse is burning. The sky in their hearts and their lives is brightening every week. But the sun of living faith in Jesus Christ has yet to rise.

Sunrise is rarely an instant thing.

genuine interest

All sorts of different people cross our paths each day. Some planned. Some quite unexpectedly.

Today I bumped (almost, but thankfully not quite, literally) into a man whom I haven't seen for a good few years. He's retired now, but he used to teach at the school where our sons got their education.

I don't know how many pupils he must have known in his time; thousands and thousands. And every pupil with a parent or two. And it's maybe as much as six or more years since our sons left school. So we're talking a long time back with a man who's had to cope with thousands and thousands of pupils and their parents.

I was impressed that he knew straightaway who I was. HIs explanation was interesting.

"It tends to be parents who took an interest in their children," he said, "that I remember."

Which made it sound like it's only the occasional parent who's interested in their children. But he explained he was talking about things like parents turning up at rugby matches to watch their children play.

Not so many were always there, week by week and match by match and from start to finish each time.

He said that some parents sometimes asked - "when will the match be finished?" To which he'd reply - "when you see the boys all coming off the pitch, that's when the match is over!" Be there for your children, in other words.

Parents who take an interest in their children. A novel concept!

But you see what the man was getting at. And his words today brought to mind the words which were written about a rather shy young man, a long, long time ago, by the name of Timothy.

"I have no one else like him, who takes a genuine interest in your welfare. For everyone else looks out for his own interests, not those of Jesus Christ."

It tends to be people like that you remember best.

And the lesson was further impressed on my heart when I called on a person who'd been at our worship yesterday.

Getting on up in years now, the person is easily missed (and perhaps dismissed) by others far more gifted and 'successful' - and probably feels it, too. The person had really been challenged by what the Lord had spoken through his Word, and sought to respond to the call which the Lord had been making.

My going round to the house tonight meant the world, I think, to the individual. Someone was taking 'a genuine interest'. It was a humbling experience to hear what the person then prayed; and to sense at that moment the outbursts of joy that there was in the glory of heaven.

I have always been challenged by those words first applied to the shy young man, Timothy: I have no one else like him, who takes a genuine interest in your welfare.

That, I suggest, is a quintessential hallmark of a pastor.

'significant conversations'

Someone I was seeing today used a phrase I've often used myself.

'Significant conversations'.

They happen. You can't always tell in advance just when they're going to happen. And it's often the case that they happen at times which may not be convenient to yourself. Times when you'd rather be fast asleep in your bed, or doing something else.

But whenever it is that they happen, they're moments of great opportunity. They're times when there's not just the chance to be saying some pretty important things, but times when there's also a real and unusual receptiveness on the part of the other person.

Parents, not least, have, from time to time, those 'significant conversations' with their children.

Choose the wrong moment, and they don't rise above being a 'lecture'. Important things are maybe being said, but if there isn't that basic receptiveness ... well, it's hardly a 'conversation' and it's probably not significant.

But there are those moments when a daughter or son (or a grandchild, of course) will want and need to speak.

Parents need wisdom to see when those moments have come.

They also need grace to embrace them - because often they'll come at times which are hardly convenient. Late at night, or when they've got a hundred different things they're trying to do.

They need patience as well in the way they develop the flow of the conversation. As in lighting a fire, the big lumps of coal are never put on from the start. You start with the kindling and bit by bit the fire is teased into flame: it's a while before the logs and the big lumps of coal can be placed on top and the fire is established and strong.

These 'significant conversations' are important and necessary things in the lives of our children - whatever their age or their stage. But they're delicate things as well.

And that's what the man I was speaking with earlier today was really on about, I think. He was talking about his mother, and the way in which she ensured there were those 'significant conversations' with the children she had borne.

It's through such 'significant conversations' that great dynasties of faith are built. And it's one of the marks of godly, gracious parents that they have these conversations with the children they are raising for the Lord.

Spotting the moment - that needs wisdom and discernment.

Seizing the moment - that needs selflessness and grace.

And igniting the moment - that needs patience, care and boldness.

We pray for one another that the Lord would always give us just that wisdom, grace and boldness - and that fires of faith would once again, and bit by bit, be lit across our land.

stability

For all sorts of reasons, there's more of a 'butterfly' mentality in how life's lived today.

Sometimes through necessity, often, though, through choice, we flit about from place to place and job to job.

Butterflies.

Restless: unwilling to settle for anything more than a moment or two of our time. And perhaps, who knows, incapable, too, of settling down.

We get bored with our jobs, or the thing becomes too hard. Problems arise, the pressures increase, we don't find it quite so fulfilling as once we did. And so we quit. We pack up our bags and move on. Always on the look-out for the perfect job, that one elusive avenue of work down which we'll find whatever it might be we're looking for.

Folk get bored with their 'partners' as well. We fall in love and life and love is absolutely wonderful. And then there is an argument. It isn't all a lovely bed of roses. Tensions arise. Resentments seep under the door of our spirit. Or a boredom creeps into our hearts, and the air of that love is no longer as fresh as it was and we start to feel a staleness in our spirits and we feel we're unfulfilled again and yearn for someone else.

Butterflies.

I only ask to be free. The butterflies are free.

The famous quote from Dickens has become the strap-line of our age and generation.

We want to be free. Free to flit into and out of relationships, past-times and jobs. Free to keep jumping from one bright-coloured 'flower' to another in the garden of society today.

We're attracted by 'colours' and have subtly become the advertisers' dream.

And yet, despite it all, we're probably far less free, and hugely less 'fulfilled' than the slow-moving, 'colourless', 'caterpillar' generations of another age.

I called on a lady today who set me thinking once more upon these lines. She's newly into her 97th year and as bright and alert as many a third of her age.

And she's lived in the same little flat for 73 years.

The stairs to her door are round the back and up the outside wall. Good, old fashioned stairs of stone, weathered by long years of village life. And the flat itself is hardly big. Compact and simply adequate, it's been her home for all these years. And even if she'd had the chance to move, I doubt that she'd have taken it.

She's from the 'caterpillar' generation. Solid, settled, and slow. Not in a hurry like most are today. Not jumping up and going off in a huff at the first sign of trouble or when things are not quite as we wish.

73 years! The second World War had yet to begin when the lady had first moved in. It's an impressive statement of the value of commitment.

And it reminded me of something which I'd read a long while back from Eugene Peterson's book, Under the Unpredictable Plant. He's writing about the pastoral ministry, though what he says has perhaps a wider application.

"When I began my pastoral ministry in my present congregation, I determined to stay there for my entire ministry. I was thirty years old. There was nothing particularly attractive about the place; indeed, there was nothing but a cornfield at the time. But I had been reading St Benedict and was pondering a radical innovation he had introduced that struck me as exceedingly wise. In the community of monks to which he was abbot he added to the three standard evangelical counsels of poverty, chastity, and obedience a fourth: he added the vow of stability."

He ends this particular section of the book with this telling statement -

"The norm for pastoral work is stability. Twenty-, thirty-, and forty-year-long pastorates should be typical among us (as they once were) and not exceptional. Far too many pastors change parishes out of adolescent boredom, not as a consequence of mature wisdom."

That 'adolescent boredom' has become somehow a hall-mark of society today. Perhaps because we've lost that truest wisdom, whose roots are in the humble fear of God.

casual acquaintances

There are all sorts of people whose paths we cross in the course of our daily routines.

People you meet on the bus as you go to, or return from, your work. People who work in the shop you frequent. People who use the sports club at the time you use it too.

All sorts of different people whose paths we regularly cross.

Not friends as such, since we barely know them at all, beyond the superficial chat we have in those moments of time which we share with them. They're more like 'casual acquaintances'.

There's a guy like that whom I see most days. It's a fleeting few seconds at most each day in the main that I see the man. But sometimes there's scope for more.

He knows who I am and where I work and what it is I do. We've had that sort of chat long since.

I think it slightly intrigues the guy that I choose to do what I do: and that I plainly so enjoy it all. He sometimes wants to know more.

What about him? Well, I've got to know a bit about him. He's a pleasant, genuine guy. Warm and friendly and keen to please. But a little bit lost in life.

No longer young (though he's hadly what you'd think of as being 'middle-aged'), he's still to discover what life's all about and where his life is going. I think he feels he's drifting.

Is this what life is all about? This sort of endless routine?

He's started to ask when our Sunday worship services take place. And what they're like. And who's all there. "Because I'm not that religious," he says, "and I can't really sing at all."

"You'll need to show me the way!" he jokes. Except, deep down, he's not joking. I know that and I think he's glad I know that too. He's looking - like so many are today - he's looking for the way.

"Half past ten in the morning?" he asks, when I tell him the time that our morning service starts. "I'm not sure I'll be awake by then," he laughs. "I need my sleep!"

Which is doubtless true. His hours are demanding and must often leave him weary.

I saw him on Monday morning again and joked again that I'd missed him at the service on Sunday morning. He'd slept in, he confessed.

"But I passed by later on when the service was on," he said.

"What a lot of people!" I think his surprise was genuine all right. He'd looked in through the windows from the lane which runs along beside the church and hadn't expected the place to be so full.

"Do you get performance-related pay?" he asked. This time I couldn't quite tell if the guy was simply joking or not.

"No," I smiled, "it doesn't quite work like that!"

This morning I told him I'd started to pray for him hard. That he'd find the work for which he'd been made.

"Ach," he said, "people have been praying that for fifteen years!"

"Well, there's a challenge!" I said in reply. "What would you like to be doing?"

A question. Questions often open doors. The Lord uses questions a lot. Check the Scriptures and see for yourself.

It opened doors this morning. He started to chat at some length. About the sort of training that he'd done. The work he'd hoped to do. And how he hadn't made it.

And here he is now, drifting into middle life, muddling by as best he can but sensing that there surely must be more to life than this.

"I couldn't do what you must do," he added after a while. "Visiting elderly ladies? No, I don' think I could cope with that!" he said.

"And children? How do you cope with the children?" he was in full flight by now. "There's another minister comes in here," he went on, "and he was saying the other day, 'Oh no! I've got the children today. I hate children!'"

He looked at me. "Do you not hate children, too?"

I'm thinking this is a bit of a wind-up!

"No," I say, "I love the children being around. I'm still just a child myself!"

The guy is probing. Trying to get a handle on the life I've got. Not just what I do in life. But more what makes me tick.

"You're good at listening, anyway," he says. And I can see that's been important for the man. Maybe not that many people take time to listen to him.

And maybe that's what he most needs. A listening ear.

And yes, I guess I do a lot of listening. There's an awful lot of listening in the ministry of preaching.

Listening to what people are saying - behind and beyond the words that they use, behind and beyond what their eyes and their faces are saying. And listening to all that the Spirit of God is himself, with such wisdom, revealing.

Yes, I do a lot of careful listening. The guy is right.

And one of the things that I'm hearing from God is this daily reminder that here in these simple encounters, here in such 'casual acquaintances' all of us have, here is where Jesus is quietly and gently at work.

Meeting with people the way he's been doing for years. And touching their lives and opening their hearts and leading them into the kingdom.

And the wonder is we get to share with him in that.