spin

There's spin and there's spin.

My head was spinning this morning, that's one sort of spin, for sure.

A hectic morning with a (metaphorical) hundred and one different tasks to address.

E-mails and letters and phone calls - some pastoral, some personal, some essentially clerical (and not, I should add, in the 'dog-collar' sense of the word): preparation, writing, planning.

I'm hopeful we'll be able to produce another 'mini-magazine' for distribution round the community in the week or two before Easter. There's a fair bit of planning involved in that.

And the time is short. Easter, I know, is late this year, but to get the thing produced I'll need to have the contents complete by the end of the month. Which, starting from scratch as I am, is not a lot of time!

Lunch-time brought a welcome break with the half-hour service of worship. The story of David and Abigail. Which brought some interesting discussion over lunch together afterwards.

Was Abigail a 'goodie' or a 'baddie'? Swayed perhaps by the first description we're given of her (she was "intelligent and beautiful"), and impressed by the speed and wisdom with which she addresses a potentially disastrous situation (for her family and for David as well), I've always thought her a 'goodie'.

But plainly not everyone agreed! The view was expressed that actually she was a predatory opportunist sort of woman, keen to get out of her marriage, with a fancy for the young man, David, and quick to throw herself onto him as soon as she possibly could.

Is that fair? Particularly since she's no longer around to defend herself.

It does raise the question as to what construction we place on the conduct of other people, though. The worst? Or the best?

That's the question today in our modern world of 'spin'.

Is it simply naive to believe the best of others? Or is that not what 'love' will seek to do?

Talking about the construction we put on the conduct and circumstances of others, when I visited one of our older members this afternoon in one of the local hospitals - a lady up in her nineties - I found her with a glass of brandy in her hand!

Mid-afternoon and all - some would think in terms of a definite 'problem'. Others perhaps would see the thing as medicinal.

I haven't a clue where the drink came from (she did have two friends in with her as well, though I don't think they had brought the brandy in): but it didn't seem really to be doing her much harm - she seemed remarkably well! Lucid and right on the button.

It would be easy, though, to interpret the thing in a negative way. And I guess that's why the Scriptures stress how important it is that among us as the followers of the holy Son of God "there must not be even a hint of sexual immorality, or of any kind of impurity, or of greed, because these are improper for God's holy people." [Ephesians 5.3]

Not even a hint. Because a hint is more than enough for the cynical spin of our modern world to kick in and point the finger in a vicious and damaging way.

Love, by contrast, believes the best.

Love seeks the best and sees the best and gives the best and brings out the best in others.

We love, because He first loved us like that.