family life

The children of P5 were over with us today. It was great.

They've really enjoyed these classes we've had: and I think they actually felt a bit sad that today's would be the last. Meanwhile, anyway.

Today was a chance to show them round the inside of the building and let them see why things are as they are and what they're called. It's always great to have that opportunity to ... well, explain to them the message I've been teaching them these last few weeks.

The person: and the event. Simple. And all summed up in those three easy words - Jesus is Lord!

It doesn't matter what's the starting point - it's great to take folk back to this. The person and the event. What Paul did in Athens. And what I was able to do again today.

Starting with the buildings and the way it's all laid out, it all points back to what it's all about - this one amazing person, Jesus Christ and his rising from the dead. I think they got the picture!

We gave them juice and biscuits in the Hall afterwards. They love that sort of thing. We sat them down and let them watch the DVD of the Holiday Club we held here back in April. Since it featured some of them as well, they loved it, thought it was hilarious in parts and simply roared delight! What a lovely thing to see!

But there's no gain without pain, so they say. And the pain today was borne by my Mum who got rushed off into hospital with acute and intolerable pain.

My sister's up from Wales this week, so she got the trip in the ambulance as well. I joined her in the hospital and spent pretty much the rest of the day there.

The staff were great. Run off their feet half the time. But great with it. Helpful, thoughtful, always re-assuring and good to have around. Relationships are everything!

My Mum got shifted to the Royal late on. The specialists are there and they're best placed to treat her with the symptoms and condition that she has.

It's hard to sit and watch such pain, I have to say. To sit and watch and not be all that able to do much in terms of easing all the pain.

Except, of course, to pray. And, reflecting on the day, it seemed to me so much of how her needs were being addressed was very much in answer to such prayer. The hand of God upon her in her need. Sustaining and enabling her through what's a very scary time.

She kept insisting that we must have other things to do and hardly would be wanting to be there with her. But where would a son and daughter rather be than by their mother's side when she's in need? Isn't that what family's all about?

Which brings me back to where the day began. The message that I'm trying to get across is in the end relational - and not a merely intellectual thing. I want these children all to come to know, relationally, the Lord.

To know what it is to be part of his family. To know what it is to belong. And I think they got a feel of that again today.

red cabbage

Can you ever make soup using red cabbage?

Well, at one level, of course you can! I just did. Today (and not for the first time either!)

I called it 'Tartan Tommies' and combined the red cabbage with red plum tomatoes and red tomatoes roasted in the oven. The problem, I've come to see, is that 'red' cabbage is not actually red. It's purple.

More red than the green cabbage, certainly. And (at a stretch, and even then only maybe) 'red' at least in the sense of being a deep, deep red. But not literally 'red'.

And it doesn't matter how many red plum tomatoes or red roasted tomatoes or red anything else you add, the 'red' cabbage (which is actually purple) seems to win the colour stakes!

And though folk seemed to like the description of the soup and the smell of the soup (and if they'd got that far) even the taste of the soup, show them the colour and ... well, a polite no thanks!

Now you can see that I'm getting a thing about this whole business of purple soup!

But you can surely see as well that it is in fact a kind of culinary and unfair discrimination against this brand of cabbage: a sort of gastronomic racism, if you like. A colour prejudice.

Which effectively means that although you actually can make soup using red cabbage - in practice you can't! At least, if you do, no one's prepared to eat it (so what's the point of making it?)!

We were talking about this sort of thing over lunch today. Not the red cabbage as such, nor soup for that matter. But the way our ingrained ways of thinking prevent us even countenancing anything else.

It was the monthly 'fraternal' today. A meeting of fellow pastors from around the locality. These times are usually warm and good. But recently they've become more and more lively and stimulating.

Amazing what sitting round a table eating food can do to folk! They're all so relaxed, it's great. So the chat is good as well. And we ended up addressing once again some fairly major themes.

Why it is God's people don't seem able to communicate their faith. How former ways of 'doing church' just will not work today. And how those ingrained ways of thinking can present just such a barrier to the progress of God's work.

It's the 'red cabbage' problem all over again! If 'church' is not a 'colour' that I'm happy with - well, it's just not church! And I won't touch it!

The folk today were happy enough with the carrot soup. Orange for soup is OK, it would seem (the future is orange, of course!).

But then carrots themselves, when you stop and think about it - carrots themselves aren't orange at all: they're actually purple!

They're only orange because they've been dyed. That's not the way they were made to be.

And I think that's true of the church today: the colour of our life today is not the way it's meant to be - and not the way it was.

I'm trying to get back to the way it's meant to be. What does it mean to follow Jesus Christ? What does it mean to be his church?

The only dying that counts is the death that Jesus died. That death is coloured purple: it was the king who died. And purple's the colour of royalty.

Red cabbage stuff again. For the 'colour' of his death is meant to stain our lives and leave our living always 'purple' too. We've a lot to learn about getting right back to how it's meant to be.

It was, therefore, good to be seeing this afternoon a couple about their marriage. The girl grew up in the church and the man seemed a lovely guy.

And a privilege always for me to be asked to take them on from where they're presently at. That's what Jesus did. Finding out where people were at and taking them on from there.

That's really all I'm called to do. To open up the future for these folk (and yes, I know the future's orange!) and give them something way beyond thheir wildest dreams!

tremors

By the time I got down to the Halls this morning there were already some people gathered there for prayer.

They hadn't exactly booked the room so I hadn't a clue they'd be there! Otherwise I might have joined them. These were some parents whose children are all at the primary school. They've been meaning to meet for long enough (I think), but had just never got it together.

Until today. It was maybe the thought that something exciting is happening along at the school which prompted them now to pray. I mean, they've been praying, I'm sure (of course they have), but now they were keen to join together to pray.

That in itself is a sign of the Spirit at work. When people come together to pray. It's always a clue, a sign, a sure and certain pointer to there being a work of God going on. Like those tiny, little tremors in advance of some big earthquake that's impending.

There's something like that going on. Lots of little 'tremors' which are harbingers of something really big. That's what it feels like these days. The sense of there being a work that God's about to do, little puffs of smoke (to change the image slightly!) suggestive of a coming, huge eruption of the lava of God's love and power.

I was later in this morning, as I say. I had to do some shopping first. Buy up the ingredients for the trifle which I'd said I'd make for a lunchtime meeting the 'Complex Team' were having here today.

We try and meet together periodically. A sort of mutual support system.

I mean, the support is always there, make no mistake: but it's good to take some time to simply 'be', when there's not the constant busy-ness of serving all the lunches and the cups of tea and coffee through the week within the 'complex' here.

A chance to pause, reflect and chat things through and pray for God's fresh working in our midst. More of the little 'tremors' which anticipate the 'big one' yet to come.

And the trifle goes down a treat!

I was on from that to the school again, for this meeting about the start of an SU group. Chris is very much the driver of this thing: he's the teacher at the school, and it's great that it comes from him.

So we were meeting in his room, after the children had gone. Hazel was there as well - she's been with SU now here in Edinburgh for a good many months: and .., well, she's just a great enthusiast. Great to have involved. And always so eager to help.

It's like the bits of a massive jigsaw all beginning to come together. Like the way folk often work at a jigsaw. Taking time to get all the bits laid out on the table. Then finding the corners, slotting them into place: and after that the edges, so that slowly a frame's built up.

It's rather like that. The frame's been put in place and the bits of the jigsaw are all ready, it seems, now to be fitted together.

That meeting of those parents here this morning was significant. A sign indeed. Another little tremor! Something big is just about to happen here!

At night I was out in the home of a couple who've been with us here for a while now, talking through the baptism of their second child which is happening soon (the baptism, I mean, not the second child!).

It was great to be able to talk for a while. Most of the time it's only fairly fleeting bursts of chat I get with them. On a Sunday, over coffee. That sort of thing. So it was great to have time in their home and to be able to talk at some length.

I suppose what struck me most in speaking with them both was the massive opportunity we have to raise up all these growing generations of our children in a way that sees them knowing Christ themselves.

There was a moment today which captured, I thought, the essence of it all.

It was as I was leaving Chris' room along at the primary school. The school was all done for the day, of course: the children all gone away. And just as I stepped out the door, one of the girls from P5 came rushing by on her scooter. I called out a 'Hi!' (using her name) as she flew along the path: and she turned and responded with a smile and a wave.

She's a lively girl, bright in every way: and she's been along to the services here before.

But life is lived at pace these days. And all we get with so many of these children here (eager and open and bright as they are) - all we get is a brief and fleeting moment in their lives to bring them Jesus Christ.

He who hesitates is lost!

working the soil

The end of another week. And a mixture again, today, of relaxation and preparation.

Well, that's if you can call a heavy shift of digging in the front garden a dose of relaxation! But I guess what I was doing with the soil was in some ways what I was also doing with my soul.

Turning things over and breaking things down and getting things ready to generate life.

I also watched some rugby - and got myself engrossed in seeing the to-and-fro encounter between Wales and Fiji! But I had to miss the Scotland match (probably not that good for the nerves anyway!) as I was back to the business of working the soil of God's Word. Hard at the preparation once again.

shadows of grief

The service at the crematorium in early afternoon kind of straddled the whole of the day.

It somehow casts its shadow both forward and back. At least it feels like that. It feels like being under a cloud all the day.

I'd done the preparation through the night: which I often prefer to do. It always takes a good few hours to learn from God his word for the occasion and to work up the address. And it's best to have those hours all in a one-er: and I find as well it often works quite well to do it late (last thing) at night. No one's around and there aren't any calls and my mind is quite often in a fairly creative mode.

But because it's late at night, I always like to check it through when morning comes. So the first part of the day today was spent on simply putting final touches to it all. Feeling my way once again right into the heart of the grief. I like to speak from very much 'inside' the grief and pain, instead of being some unaffected, cool-as-ice observer looking on.

And that's the reason why, I guess, there's always such a shadow cast right back across the morning hours before the service is being held.

I try to get on with other things - and to some extent manage to do so. But the shadow of that grief is always there: and makes it hard.

The same as well in the aftermath. I worked some more on the coming Sunday's services. But the 'shadow' was there and that makes it slow and hard.

The service itself saw over a hundred people gathered there. A shame really that it was the smaller 'Cloister' chapel that they'd chosen, since it only seats some 60 or so at most.

Maybe they'd thought there wouldn't be that many there. Though for an active young man of just 41, with a whole range of hobbies and so many folk who'd been touched by his life, it was hardly very likely that the numbers would be small.

Perhaps it was just that his widow preferred it small: sort of wanted to hide away and just be by herself. I don't know. Desperately hard for her. And for them all.

It's hard to tell in a service like that just what is getting through. So many folk with little or no ostensible faith. The 'shadow' of death is somehow all too real when that's the situation.

There seems to be an all-pervasive heaviness, a certain sort of emptiness, which simply echoes round and round the bleak despair and hopelessness attached to all the grief.

And so, as I say, it's hard to know how much gets through. But I've long since learned to leave that to the Lord. He gave the words to say: I'm sure of that. It's up to him just how those words are used.

But I pray there was some comfort and some help.

exodus

One of the big advantages of seeing a person day on day, is that conversation starts to flow quite easily.

Douglas the janny's a case in point.

I was into the school again today. Briefly, over coffee time. And mainly to fix up a meeting with one of the teachers, Chris, about starting an SU group in the school.

But I bumped into Douglas and, the very next thing, he was chatting away about Moses and Egypt and how the Red Sea had been parted. I mean, he just started on about it all!

He'd been watching a programme, he said, which showed that the whole thing was true. Something about there being a huge explosion from a massive big volcano on one of the Greek islands - which resulted in the parting of those waters far away.

So it actually happened, he said. He seemed really quite excited!

Of course, he said, they didn't have a clue back then about these Greek volcanoes or the like and so they simply saw it as an act of God.

And so do I!, I intervened.

It was hard to get a word in even edgeways, he was so much on a roll! And all of this in what's, in truth, a very public place. Right in the reception space, with pupils there and all the secretarial staff at hand.

And there we were, discussing all these miracles and how it can be just the very timing of a thing which makes events a mighty act of God.

That fleeting conversation was itself, I thought, indicative of just that sort of thing. The acts of God today - and every day. His being at work in people's lives and in our daily, routine interacting with them all.

God at work, a sort of exodus again.

That's how it feels for me, at least, these days. An exodus of sorts. The Lord at work to lead me out and on towards a 'better' land - in terms of what it is to follow Jesus Christ and be the sort of minister he calls me to become.

Being in at the school and chatting with Douglas like that (a fleeting five minutes at most), was just another instance of that 'exodus' that's mine.

(Not, I hope, in the sense that I'm on the way out!)

A meeting at night was reflective of the same. It centred on a venture which, in many ways, is all about this 'exodus': this going out of Egypt, the 'land' which is the building-centred, Sunday-centred, worship-service-centred view of 'church' we've been familiar with for donkeys' years - and travelling to a fertile, new 'terrain', a different way of being and doing church.

It's about creating a 'place', a warm, creative, 'credible' environment, at the heart of community life, in the midst of a thoroughfare right in the centre of town, where ... Well, that was the question, I guess.

What is this place meant to be? What are we trying to do? What is the word of the Lord for this place at this time?

An exodus of sorts, though the contours of the land to which we're called by God are not entirely clear as yet. But it helped to be able to talk, to sense in our midst the presence of God himself, and to know that he'll show us the way.

Greek island volcanoes, or acts of God. It doesn't really matter how you think of it! As long as he opens the road and shows us together the way!

It was nearly 10 by the time we were done - and another sort of exodus still beckoned me.

Preparing the words that I'd say at the service tomorrow, the service of thanks for the life of the young man who'd died, who'd taken his life.

Hard. I needed time and space. Alone and in the dark.

I sometimes prefer to take time through the night to prepare for a service like that. So it was late (or early, depending how you see the thing!) before I was done for the day.

But I got what I'd say all prepared and typed up. And I've sensed through these hours that the words that I'll speak will become for this family a word from the Lord to their hearts.

An exodus again. A dark, traumatic night of dreadful death. And yet, perhaps, a new beginning, too.

And deep within it all, in ways that we will doubtless never grasp, an act of God.

knowing my way around

The lady at reception asked a rather probing question. Do you know your way around?

I was up over lunch at the Church of Scotland offices. Sort of moral support for one of our folk who's been called by the Lord to the 'ministry of Word and Sacrament'.

The lady at the desk was pleasant as could be. She certainly didn't mean to be probing at all. She was just doing her job.

And more or less assuming, since I'd told her who I was, that I would know the place.

I had to confess that, no, I didn't really know the place at all. Which I think rather shook her!

And (as an illustration, on a deeper plane, of where I'm at) it sort of shook me, too. Realising that I didn't really know my way around this church so well these days. Not feeling quite as much at home as maybe once I did.

The question that the lady there politely asked contrasted with another probing question that I faced today as well.

This time from the 'janny' at the primary school.

It's been a week 'choc-ful' of schools. I'm along at the Royal High (the secondary school) each morning this week, first thing: speaking at the year-group assemblies which they hold from time to time. It involves a fair amount of concentrated preparation since it's morning after morning: and it's different each time, of course.

But I'm glad of the chance to be there and given the chance to speak.

Today, though, it was one swift chase to get from there along the road to make it to the upper school assembly at the primary school in time. When that was done, I was leaving the school when the janitor passed on the street.

See you next week! he said (he's a friendly guy!).

Next week? I said. I'm back in less than an hour! (being Wednesday, it was the next in the series of lessons I have with the P5 classes).

I think he was taken aback just a bit. Understandably, I suppose.

Are you wanting my job, or something? he asked with a laugh.

And it crossed my mind later on that I knew my way around this place, this context for my doing and being 'church' - I knew my way around this place far better than I knew the actual church's offices up town.

Obviously, in some ways. But it served as a picture of the change in stress and emphasis that the Lord has been slowly effecting.

This is where it happens. Here in the village, here at the school. The constant intersecting of my life with those of people here throughout the whole community.

It's here that I feel most at home. When I'm out on the streets and in people's homes, engaging with folk relationally.

Like the P5 classes I had again today. This was the last time that I'd be in with them meanwhile (next week they're along with us here in our halls). The topic to be covered was 'the sacraments'.

What a great time we all had! I took them through both baptism and communion and we fairly had some fun! I think they got the picture, too, and gained a better understanding of just what it's all about.

Then at the end, I said it was like Jesus with his friends, how he wanted to leave them a way of remembering him.

I explained how it was not the last supper today, but the last class that I would have with them in school meanwhile. How I'd really enjoyed these times and hoped that they had, too.

And how I wanted to give them a way of remembering the things that they'd learned. So I'd got something for them. For each of the classes.

I gave each class a plant and asked them what they'd need to do. Water it! they cried as one.

Exactly. We'd thought about water a lot when working on what baptism meant.

So I simply said that every time they watered the plants I'd like them to remember me and what it was I'd taught them these last weeks.

The life God gives. The love he shows. The person and event.

It's not so much the janny's job I want. It's more the chance to be among the children as he is each day: it's that I so enjoy. It's that I really want.

And it's there, far more than in the corridors of any sort of institutional church, it's there I feel I know my way around.