story

It must be months ago that Amazon got in touch with me about a book.

The way they do. Since they seem to know all your needs and anticipate the sort of things you're looking for.

They suggested I might like to buy a book called 'Let Story Guide You'. Their hunch was right. I did.

At least, I thought I did. Buy it, I mean.

But any sign of the book? No chance. And that was really months and months ago.

After a bit of time had elapsed I e-mailed back asking about the book. (I could see from the way you can track these things that they still hadn't sent it off).

The book, they replied, was not available. They couldn't get it anywhere.

Which seemed a bit odd to me since they were the ones who'd suggested I might like to buy it.

So I thought I'd try myself, pursuing other routes. On-line and by phone. I only found one web-site which was offering the book for sale. And it was at the somewhat inflated price of £178.

I mean, I'm sure the book's pretty good and that, but since the normal retail price was under £9 and Amazon had been offering the book at about £6, buying the book at £178 seemed a bit steep. (It also seems a bit odd in hindsight, since I understand the reason for it's not being available for Amazon to forward on is because it's still not even published - the publication date keeps getting put back and back)

And so I've partly resigned myself to the fact that, for the moment at least, it'll remain for me one of the great 'un-reads'.

I was reminded about the book today (and tempted to follow it up again) by seeing in a whole range of very different contexts just how prominent a part the place of story plays.

There were folk from Kirkliston in to see me here this morning. They've been working on their 'story', I suppose. Preparing a booklet, what's called a 'Parish Profile', to inform prospective ministers of what the people and the place are like.

But it's story, really. Their story. Or God's story, more like, and the way they're able to see their own part in that wider, greater story of the Lord.

That was the bulk of the morning, by the time we were done. Teasing it out. Tightening it up. Giving it extra 'bite'. Giving it more the page-turning grip of a story than the bland sort of detail there is on a railway time-table.

Douglas was in again for his lunch. And the time with him was story, too, in some ways. Telling our stories the one with the other. The stories these past weeks have held. God's story in our lives again.

My nephew dropped by around tea-time as well. An off-chance call which turned out to be really oppprtune. He's a fine young man in the RAF with a love for the Lord and a heart that's so open to all that the Lord means to do.

It was great to sit and have a meal with him and sitting at the so-called 'breakfast-bar' (which has always seemed a slightly sort of discriminatory way of speaking of the thing to me) to chat about our stories once again.

The paths our lives have taken these last months. The way the Lord's been working and the things that he's been doing.

Story again.

And later at night I chanced to meet another young man, just walking along the road. I mean, I know the guy, it wasn't like he was a total stranger or anything. Anything but.

Once more it was to 'story' that we turned. His story. The story of his struggles and confusion this past while. His trying to work things about. About the Lord. Some of the things that Jesus sad and taught. He's struggling with that.

That's been very much the story of his life for many a month. He needed, or wanted, to tell me.

Where's God in his story? And where, for that matter, is he in God's story?

Later still I was round seeing a couple to work through a matter with them. They had a lovely album of their recent summer holiday.

Beautifully done. And done in the form of a story.

The good things in life are all in story form.

That's why I wanted to get a read of that book! 'Let Story Guide You' - the author, I know, is a master of the story form. I've read his other books. He teaches truth in story form in a fresh and compelling way.

It's something that I have to learn myself.

As well as patience, of course, as I wait for the book in hope!

a bastion against erosion

Some words in a book I was reading the other day made me stop and pause for thought.

"The churches here" (the writer was speaking about island life on Lewis and Harris) "are a bastion against erosion. They are defensive structures, a form of retreat from the modern and an insulation against the wickedness of the new."

Defensive? A form of retreat?

Is that how we're meant to be viewing the church?

I found myself reluctant to embrace that sort of view of what it is today to be a follower of Jesus Christ. But the writer was still in full flow and so I read right on to the end of the paragraph.

"However much they may have argued and divided over the years, the churches hold on to their congregations because they give a kind of nourishment and support which the material world has often failed to provide."

He's saying, I guess, that the Christian church is basically conservative.

I don't mean politically. Nor even theologically.

I mean in the sense that what the church does best, in the face of the rolling tides of 'progress' in a rapidly changing world, is simply to conserve the good things that are likely to get washed away. Eroded.

I was up there in the summer. On Harris and Lewis.

And I worshipped there as well.

In some ways it was just another planet. Certainly a very different culture. And maybe that's the point.

In the face of all that is slowly and subtly today eating away at so much that is good in our heritage, here was a place where with reverence, passion and faith the sandbags of defiance were being stacked up to protect the way, the truth, the life these folk have long since known.

A bastion against erosion.

The people were hugely devout. And deeply taught. Well versed in the truths of Scripture.

It was humbling to see and feel it once again. It always is.

And I think it's bound up with the slower pace of life they studiously pursue.

Down here in the city we live at such a speed. And like raindrops falling down upon a high speed train, the truths of Scripture maybe mostly bounce off all the double-glazed, wide windows of our hearts and never really penetrate at all.

Not like up there in the islands, where the steady and persistent rains soak bit by bit deep down into the land.

Anyway, I've been thinking along those lines again today.

The need to slow down. The need to try and help folk here live life at really more a slower pace than hitherto we've done.

And leave our hearts more open and receptive to the truth of God and let that truth seep deep down into all the very fabric of our lives.

So I've tried to be far less rushed. Taking time over what I do.

Which means I get less done, of course! And that's the constant pressure that I'm learning to avoid.

So much to be done! But I can't do it all, no matter the pace that I try to live my life.

I'll settle for the 'one thing' that is needful through each part of every day.

'Defensive structures'? A 'form of retreat'? An 'insulation'?

Well, I guess that's maybe so. Maybe we do need more of those 'defensive' sort of structures in our busy lives today. Maybe we do need those conscious 'retreats'. Maybe we do need far more of that 'insulation' against a modern life which often is corrosive and perhaps, without our noticing, erodes so much of what is truly good.

flashing lights

There was a fire engine standing in the car park here today.

It gave me a fright when I saw it from a distance as I came back to the buildings here.

Lights flashing. Men in their fire-fighting kit moving around the appliance. I wondered if the buildings here had all gone up in smoke.

But since there wasn't any smoke to be seen and the buildings looked intact, that moment of anxiety soon passed.

In fact, I'm still not sure just why the thing was there.

I mean, it looked the part. It wasn't as if it was carefully parked. It certainly looked as though the thing had arrived in a hurry and was parked there with a fire in mind, rather than sticking to some neat white parking lines (not that we really have any of them).

And the flashing lights, the men in their gear - the whole thing looked so authentic.

But they weren't really fighting a fire at all. They weren't really 'saving' anyone from anything at all.

It was all just show. Or so it seemed.

(It crossed my mind that one of the guys was maybe running a wee bit late for a doctor's appointment and that's why the light had been on - the doctors have their surgery across the road from us).

It left me a bit bemused. A bit like I guess the whole idea of 'church' leaves many folk bemused. Those figurative flashing lights, suggestive of the urgency there is: those guys dressed up in their rescuing gear.

But who are they actually saving? And what are they saving them from?

walking

"Where's your car?"

An interesting, suggestive question.

I was out visiting a lovely, older lady this afternoon. She's not so able herself to be out and about these days and is only a few weeks back in her own familiar home after quite a spell in hospital.

So I'd called by to see how the lady was and enjoyed the time with her.

It was when I was leaving, as she stood at the door, that she asked me about the car.

She was, I think, concerned. Worried, perhaps, that my car had maybe been stolen, since it plainly wasn't visible up or down the street.

"I'm on my feet," I said. "Walking."

A deliberate ploy on my part. To get a bit of exercise. To have some time to think. To meet folk on the way.

And not to use the car.

It's strange how the assumption always is these days that journeys need a car.

It's only a brisk, maybe 10 or 15 minute walk along the road to her house. But the assumption is I'd always take the car.

Economy of time. That sort of thing, I guess, is how we justify that means of travel round the place.

But it's more, I suspect, like thoughtlessness and laziness. And on all sorts of fronts, a fairly false economy as well.

The Lord looks only for me to walk with him. Not to be so driven.

into the hills

Light requires a prism for its constituent colours to be seen.

Something like that, anyway. I was pretty hopeless at school at physics, the only remotely appealing and memorable thing about my physics teacher being his rather attractive daughter.

I'm not even sure it was he who taught me this about light. Or whether it was simply an idle observation that I made when my BIC biro caught a shaft of direct sunlight and broke it up into all the different colours of the rainbow.

Today has been a 'prism' sort of day. I needed good, uninterrupted time to figure out the themes for Sunday morning services throughout this coming year.

I knew the over-arching theme. That's been very much a burden which the Lord has really laid upon my heart. Sort of like an intense and shining light.

Today I needed the individual 'colours'.

So I set aside the day for teasing out those 'colours' through the 'prism' of some prayerful time spent working this all through before the Lord.

It took me the whole of the morning and most of the afternoon. Tucked away on my own. Without the distraction of people or phone calls or noise.

It was humbling, exciting, and .. well, I think time that was really well spent.

Now I can't wait to get started and to see where it's all going to lead! Out of the city and into the hills, I think. Metaphorically speaking.

Like Abram and Moses.

is life beautiful

Any lingering idealism which those weeks of summer holiday might subtly generate doesn't last long!

It's down to earth and back to the world of reality with a bang. A funeral yesterday. And today I found myself meeting folk who haven't had their problems to seek.

One of the encounters was fortuitous. A chance and brief encounter in the car park with a lady who's for long enough had one thing piling on another in her life.

She was coming out of the surgery as she's been struggling with a long-term internal problem. And her husband's been struggling with depression for long enough. And, as if she didn;t have her troubles, she was mugged up town and suffered from concussion.

And all that's before you ever get on to her children and all they struggle with there as well.

That's the real world, I suppose. Problems of health, of finance and of crime. Worries about children, fears for the future, and pain that won't go away.

Later I called by on a woman who's battled with cancer for quite some time. She's far from well. Still really relatively young you'd say, but the cancer has blighted her life these past few years.

And now, as I put it to her, she's simply hoping for the best and preparing for the worst. It was good to be able to talk the whole thing through with her. There'll come a time, I guess, when that sort of talk will really not be possible at all.

Life's often hard. And often doesn't work out quite the way we'd hoped it would. But it's what we choose to make of it that's in the end the really crucial thing.

I watched a DVD a couple of weeks ago. An Italian film with English sub-titles. 'Life is beautiful' was the (English) name of the film (La vita e bella is the original Italian title). Something of a classic. But it makes that point pretty well. Worth a viewing if you haven't already seen it.

It's how you choose to handle all the hardships that life brings which is the crucial thing.

i-f zones and mixed up beliefs

Four weeks away in an 'internet-free zone' is almost certainly good for the soul.

Lousy for communication, I grant you. Hopeless in terms of keeping in touch with people.

Yet despite all that, good for the soul. Maybe even because of that.

Like the six and a bit weeks that Jesus spent out in the wilderness. Which was pretty much the equivalent for him of an IFZ. Incommunicado.

I feel the better for it, whatever. The mind having time for a good 'spring-clean'. The heart getting space for refreshment.

Refreshed, re-fired, re-focussed. Sort of raring to go once again, with a burden impressed on my heart from the Lord as to all that he's wanting to say. And do. And have us do with him.

Today, though, it's been pretty much a case of hitting the ground running. First day back and a funeral service here in the church to conduct.

It was all pretty much arranged in advance (at least in terms of the choice of music and praise).

So I found the way it ended quite a graphic sort of picture of the mixed-up, strange confusion that I think there is in most folk's minds today.

The closing hymn was 'Be thou my vision..'. With line after line going on about heaven.

Raise thou me heaven-ward .. High king of heaven, my treasure thou art .. High king of heaven, after victory won, may I reach heaven's joys, O bright heaven's Sun..'

And so on. Heaven, heaven, heaven.

And then straight after that we had the opening lines of the John Lennon song, 'Imagine'.

'Imagine there's no heaven...'!

It seemed so strange and paradoxical. And yet it seemed to me as well so thoroughly expressive of the ignorance and inner contradictions that there are within society today.

A mixed-up, messed-up world which sometimes wants to believe; yet half the time chooses not to believe as well.