A-Z Challenge - J: Jesus

Well, who knows what letter of the alphabet everyone else is on? I am on J, which is a good place to be, because that's where Jesus is. 

Once again, an old post but this time heavily reconfigured. Some things do not change, do they?

'In the morning, when I rise, give me Jesus.'

This is a quote from a traditional spiritual song that I don't know which was famously (apparently) arranged by a lady called Alma Blackmon. The words are very simple, and beautiful and the refrain: 

'You can have all this world

Just give me Jesus'.

That's about it. 

There have been a handful of times in my life, Lord God, when I've run out of... well, everything. Energy, ideas, patience, peace of mind. This week is pretty much one of those times. It's been a week in which anxiety and worry linked arms and barged their way back into my head where they set up camp and made themselves comfortable. Fear crept in quietly and ominously and now huddles with them round the camp fire and depression has taken a step out from the shadows and is asking to join in the conversation.

Give me Jesus. 

Lord, give me Jesus when I rise, and before that, when I lie in bed and stab at the snooze button and try to stay asleep because it's easier being asleep than awake. Give me Jesus when I come downstairs and try with as much tact and diplomacy and thick-skinned-ness to communicate with my teenage daughters who have their own sizeable problems at the moment. 

Give me Jesus as I exercise to try to loosen my aching joints and fight on against the accumulating excess pounds. Give me Jesus as I make phone calls and check for sad messages that are surely coming soon. Give me Jesus as I break news, as I make arrangements, as I try to think of things to say. Give me Jesus when I'm on the brink of saying things I should not say. 

As I spend time with people I love, give me Jesus so that they can see Him, not me. 

Give me Jesus as I try to find a meal that everyone will eat at a time when everyone is free to eat it. Give me Jesus as I head off to bed before my daughters and try to sleep not knowing when they'll go to bed and if they'll be able to get up in the morning. 

Lord, Give me Jesus. You can have all this world, just give me Jesus. 

Lord, you can certainly have all this world. I don't want it very much at the moment. It's a world full of broken marriages and pain and illness and hospitals and doctors and shaking heads and bad news and low self esteem and tears and waiting and lying awake at night not-knowing and filling the gaps with imagination that just loves to paint everything bleak and grim. 

It's a world full of shadows that are so dark that sometimes it's hard to see you.

It's a world where you are visible in the huge extravagant beauty of the magnolias blooming in my garden (well, the ones that survived last week's sub-zero temperatures) and in the promise of the flowers on the tomato plants and in the baby radishes peeping potential above the soil. It's a world of purply-grey stormy skies and lashing rain then watery sunshine and subtle rainbows and the smell of wet dusty ground. 

It's a world where those that have eyes to see and ears to hear can find you all everywhere - and all that's just lovely and great but right now it's not enough, Father God. I don't want to discern you in subtleties, I want to run actually, not figuratively, into your real, solid, faithful arms and feel the weight and strength of your embrace. To let my legs go as wobbly as they feel and let you pick me up effortlessly and hold me close like a little girl. 

Daddy, I'm tired.

I don't want to be strong. I want to give up. I want to stay asleep. 

I don't want to keep trying to communicate when I don't have words. I don't want to persevere with the goals I've set myself - who am I kidding? I abandoned them long ago, but they haunt me still. I want to sit down and not move. I don't want to make decisions and I don't want to explain bad things to small children and I just don't want to do any of it any more. 

I don't want to run the race, I'm tired and I want to rest. 

You can have all this world. Just give me Jesus. 

Two dates and a dash

I have this one life, and I like it.

I like being alive. I know how fortunate I am to live where I do, how I do, with the people I do, and have the freedom to do what I do. I know that many, many people don't have any of the things that I take for granted. I could have been born in a part of Africa where I had to walk miles for water, and when I found it, it was dirty. I could have been brought up in a place where life expectancy is so short that I'd have died before reaching the grand old age of forty-four. I might have been in Iraq, fleeing for my life because of my faith, or terrorised in Nigeria, or crushed, uneducated and oppressed just because I'm a woman in Iran or Pakistan, or Saudi Arabia.

I try to grasp these truths and respond with gratitude and humility and to make the most of the opportunities that I have.

I am an introspective kind of person; definitely an over-thinker on occasion. I find myself spending time mulling over things like this - looking around the world and wondering what sort of person I might be if I had been born in Gaza, or in China, or Afghanistan. Or if I'd been in Jerusalem around 33AD, or in Stalin's Russia, or a Jew in Nazi Germany. What would life have looked like? What would it have made me?

Perhaps that's a completely different thing.

I have been born now, into this world, in Derbyshire in the UK and I have the life that I have. I didn't have anything to do with it - I had no choice in where and when I came along.

What even to call it, the fact that I have been born with so many advantages in nutrition, healthcare, education, freedom?  To say that I'm fortunate is inadequate as 'luck' or 'fortune' have connotations of chance and randomness about them, and I believe that God put me here, now, and I know that He doesn't make mistakes. There's nothing accidental about my birth or the circumstances surrounding them. I am also unsure about 'blessing', as I know that God loves those children trekking miles for water, and He loves the people in the vast prisons of North Korea, and He loves them no less than He loves me. I find it hard to believe that the God I know would withhold treasure from one of His children while giving so richly to others. The sun shines on the righteous and unrighteous alike, as they say... and sometimes when I see the simple joy of the impoverished African church in comparison with the apathy and discontent of many Western Christians, I wonder who is more blessed?

Opportunities and so-called accidents of birth aside, I am alive. I have been given the gift of a life - but I don't know how long it will be.

I'm checking the time and the date on my watch, now, and I will never have this moment again. Pff. There, it's gone. And another, and another.

Someone said that life was just two dates and a dash. I want to make the most of that dash.


I get to choose how I spend this life that I have. I make a myriad of choices every day; some that shape my life in a tiny way:

 - Scrambled eggs, or an omelette?  This shirt or that one?

Some that have a more profound impact:

 - Should I commit myself to writing this book, even if it means saying no to other things?  I am out of breath after walking up the stairs; should I do something about that?

Some that affect people around me:

 - Should I offer my help?  Should I stand up for that person?

Some that might have consequences that I may never know about:

 - Can I be bothered to pray for him/her?  Shall I send that letter? 

Split second decisions that can have huge effects:

 - Shall I respond angrily, or calmly?  Shall I pass on that piece of gossip?

I spend my days, and once spent, I don't get them back. A morning spent on Facebook, idly refreshing the page to see what gems appear on my feed next, or a morning spent reading God's word and asking Him what He'd like to say to me. An online quiz entitled, 'Which Tyne & Wear Metro Station Are You?' versus a two way conversation with the Creator of the universe.  Why on earth would anyone opt for the former?

(I am Central Station, apparently. Always preoccupied and in a hurry but more relaxed at weekends. See? That was worth doing, wasn't it?)

I was given a beautiful silver pendant a few years ago with a quotation from Jane Austen's 'A Prayer for Sunday':

"Teach us ... that we may feel the importance of every day, and every hour as it passes..."

The importance of every day. I've heard it said that what you do in an average day is what you do in an average week, or an average year. Today matters. This moment matters. I won't have another chance to do today better than I am doing it right now.

It's worth putting the Jane Austen quote in its context because she made this exact point:

"Father of Heaven! whose goodness has brought us in safety to the close of this day, dispose our hearts in fervent prayer. Another day is now gone, and added to those, for which we were before accountable. Teach us almighty father, to consider this solemn truth, as we should do, that we may feel the importance of every day, and every hour as it passes, and earnestly strive to make a better use of what thy goodness may yet bestow on us, than we have done of the time past."

Amen to that. Better use indeed. I doubt whether God was overly impressed that I took two minutes to establish which Tyne & Wear Metro Station I am most like.

It's not all about worthiness, though. I can't live a momentous life every minute. What am I doing right now?  I need to work and I need to play because that's how I was made. I cannot be 'on' all the time. It's about being aware, it seems to me. About being wise, not wasting, making good choices. Doing what I do for the glory of God, even if it's defrosting the freezer or watching my daughter swim. I can live my life in a thoughtful way, or I can fritter it away aimlessly.

I have been amazed and distressed in the last six months or so to hear that so many of my friends and acquaintances have been ill. I can think of ... eight people right around me now who are just beginning, in the middle of, or coming to an end of a course of chemotherapy for various cancers, along with a couple of people celebrating the end of such a chapter in their lives, and someone for whom the treatment did not work. I passed church this morning and noticed that it was set out for a funeral later today.

It doesn't last forever, this life of ours, and we don't know when that second date is.

She lived from this date - that date.

I want to make the most of that dash. It's my life.

At Christmas we had family staying with us for a few days and we ate, drank and laughed. On several occasions we laughed until we cried, and I have a few photos that can start me off again. Laughter is a wonderful, exhilarating, healing thing.  Late on Boxing Day the snow began to fall and the children dashed outside in excitement to roll about in it, throw it at each other and squeal with delight in the wonderland. I stayed inside for a while, thinking only of the difficulties and dangers of driving in the snow, the forecast that temperatures were dropping and the fallen snow would freeze and all the ominous implications. Then I realised that I was indoors feeling grumpy and they were outside shouting with joy.

I put my coat on and my boots and went to join them. Down the road the neighbours were out helping stranded motorists on the main road and we talked, pushed cars, scooped snow and we laughed.

Its all about choices. Little ones and big ones. Too often I only see the choice I didn't make in my rear view mirror.

People are dying in Nigeria, Iraq, Syria, Africa. Bad things are happening to people who deserve it no more than I do. People are writing heartbreaking blog posts on how it feels to live when terminally ill - and their loved ones are adding the post-scripts.

When I hear of a ten year old girl strapped with explosives and sent into a crowd, or someone dying of Ebola, cut off from their family, or a friend diagnosed with a tumour, it hurts my heart. No man is an island, remember - we are all part of the main* - and pain and suffering affect us all. But for me, safe in my kitchen, coffee and the internet on hand, all the comforts that I am used to, what should I do?

I have to live life. I have a responsibility to.

I have to try in my limited, complacent western way to grasp what I have been given and make the most of it. Lose the apathy; don't let it slip away.

To laugh and weep and feel and learn and celebrate and sing and love and grieve and see and ask and listen and rest and give and receive and grow.

There's a time for each of these things and so much more.

Notice what there is to be noticed, write it down, because that's what I do.

A million stars on a cold, cold night, whorls of frost on top of the car, a rainbow, the feel of my daughter's hand in mine.

Greenfinches on the bird feeder, an aloe vera plant that gave birth to no less than thirteen smaller plants, a pigeon the size of a football weighing down a branch of the elderly apple tree.

The sunrise - another day that nobody promised me, to add to my collection.

Notice and give thanks. Don't let them just slip away.

Psalm 90:12 tells us that an awareness of the brevity of life makes one wise:

'Teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom.'

After this life, there is something much better. That must be a comfort for those whose time on earth is full of pain and suffering, and for me it puts things in perspective on the days when my troubles seem big and complicated, but we are here to live until we die. To have a rich life full of the things that we are given to enjoy.  I know that I cannot do all the things I'd love to do but I must cut my coat according to my cloth. I have what I need to live the life I am supposed to live.

I want to live my life, not just watch it passively as it slips away. Carpe diem, I think. While I'm alive - live.

I want to make the most of that dash.





* John Donne, Meditation XVII 'No man is an island...'

Do what you do

Dear God.

Everyone has something to say about what's happened in Oklahoma. The way a tornado flattened an area miles wide with so little warning that some people didn't have time to find a safe place, not that there were any if  The way some were safe in a vault at the bank, customers huddling with staff. The way a lovely old lady wept in thanksgiving when her little dog scrambled out of the wreckage of her home. 

The way schools was destroyed and children were trapped and crushed and drowned. 

In the world of social media everyone has something to say. I suppose I do, too, because I sort out my feelings when I write them down, and after half an hour reading about this disaster on the internet news I'm a bit of a mess of feelings. I haven't got anything to say that is helpful, or wise; I wonder if there's anything that anyone can say that helps. 

Nobody told me when I was expecting my first baby that I would one day only have to think of another mother an ocean away one day and find tears running down my face. Nobody told me that a picture of a mother desperately waiting for news would break my heart. 

I've always been a bit of a softie, and I know that even before my babies came along I'd have watched this footage with horror and shock, but when I went into a hospital as somebody's daughter and came out somebody's mother, something shifted. Suddenly there was a little life - and nineteen months later another little life - more precious to me than mine. 

There were mothers and fathers standing in rubble as the emergency services lifted debris, waiting to know if their child would come home that night. Someone with a megaphone started shouting the names of the kids who were alright, who still had breath in their body to say who they were. Imagine waiting to hear your baby's name, waiting and waiting as people around knelt in relief and scooped up their battered, wounded but living-and-breathing child and your little just didn't come out?  

They must have been so frightened, those little boys and girls. They must have cried and shouted for their mummy or their daddy and they didn't come. 

Oh, God. 

The other night my little girl Katy was so tired that she thought of something that upset her and she thought of it so much that she dissolved into tears and she couldn't get herself right again until we'd cuddled and snuggled for a long time. Other people's mummies were to go on a school trip with them next month but I wouldn't be going. Lots of reasons for this, (the main one being that I didn't want to go; I didn't sign up to go) but Katy suddenly, surprisingly, decided that the most important thing in the world was that I would be with her when she went on the school trip. Alas, too late. The class teacher had been inundated with offers of parent helpers (why? I don't understand it) and so it was too late. Katy, for reasons that escape me, inconsolable. She so, so wanted me to be there. 

And this is only a school trip. I felt so guilty. Guilt that I wouldn't be with her on a lovely school visit. That I should be there for her. That in not being there I was letting her down. 

How much more could a heart take - not to be there when your little one is terrified in the midst of a hugely powerful hurricane? When the winds are blowing at over two hundred miles an hour and the roof is torn off and the walls are collapsing and cars are flying through the air? When they're lying contorted and hurt under the rubble of a collapsed building?  Gasping for air before unconsciousness and suffocation?

Nobody told me the all-consuming love that I have for my children. Yes, they get me down sometimes. Yes, I find the job of being their mummy relentless and frustrating and overwhelming sometimes - much of the time. But not to be there when they needed me?  

Far away there are mummies and daddies who will somehow have to find out if peace is possible again the other side of something like this. Like the time a man walked into a school and carelessly took the lives of all those small children and their brave teachers. Like the time a huge factory collapsed in Bangladesh and more than a thousand people lost their lives, some of them barely old enough to operate a sewing machine. The time that we saw on our televisions scenes of skeletal mothers and babies in Somalia in the last stages of malnourishment sitting on the parched ground, waiting for death. 

Why do we think that those mothers love their children less than we love ours? 

I breastfed my babies and I had excess milk that I froze for convenience. I eat so many calories that my hips are well padded for carrying my well-fed children. What must it be like to have a baby knowing that you have no way to feed it, to keep it alive?

What must it be like to send my little one to school with a lunchbox with a cheese and ham sandwich (Elizabeth's favourite) and a bag of raisins and a chocolate biscuit. To put a little 'I love you' note in the lunchbox - or that morning was I too busy to write one? - and then to find out that today was the day she wasn't going to come home? 

What must it be like to wait in the twisted remains of a building for news of my whole family and then the building starts to burn?

It's all misplaced, of course, the guilt, but it goes with the territory of motherhood. To protect and nurture and kiss it all better. To be there to make things right when knees are grazed or bullies say the mean things. It's so deeply ingrained in me that to deny me that need to respond is to rob me of something fundamental. I can't imagine the pain that those mothers must be going through. 

Where were you, Lord? I think you must have been there; surely you couldn't have stayed away. I pray that you were there with those little ones as the roof was ripped off. There when the teacher shielded their little bodies from the bullets. There when the factory collapsed like a house of cards. 

There as every mother cradles her baby and feels the raw power of the new love in her heart.

You must be. It comes from you.

Oh, God, what's it all about? I've read blog posts about comfort and about your tears falling as rain. I've read articles about why there's suffering in this broken, dysfunctional, terminal world. I've seen people railing against your injustice and hard-heartedness and others thanking you for your mercy and never-ending love. 

I just can't get the images out of my head. The mothers waiting for news. The sure knowledge that I would a million times rather die with my daughters in my arms than live knowing that they needed me and I wasn't there. 

I haven't anything to say. It makes no sense to me.

Well, I have one thing. I don't understand it one bit, but from the very deepest part of me, all I can say is that I know you, Lord Jesus. 

I know that you are love. You are compassion. You are the healer.  I know that you loved those children of yours in Oklahoma, in Connecticut, in Bangladesh and in Somalia. I know that you loved the five little souls who died in Derby in a house fire set by their own father and the little girl murdered in Wales whose body they have never found...and so on, and so on. 

I know that you care. 

I know that we are not lost. Somehow, and don't ask me how, as we stand in the middle of grief and horror in this beautiful and terrifying world, we aren't consumed, for you stand with us. 

You won't be defeated by evil in any of its forms. 

You say that you can bring good out of the most desperate circumstances, but I'm guessing those mothers don't want to hear that right now. There isn't any good, surely. 

When they wake up tomorrow morning and the next day and the days after that and for just a fraction of a moment they can't remember what immense, towering grief it is that looms over them - Lord, do what you do. Comfort, soothe, protect, heal. 

Loving Lord, do what you do.  

Image credits:

IMGP3231.JPG by spiroll

Katrina_LynnMeadows_2.jpg by msand39

downedtree.jpg by taliesin

all from Morguefile.com. Used with permission.

Seeing the sea

It's very beautiful here, Lord.

I have a cup of coffee and a bourbon cream biscuit (alright, two) and I am sitting looking out at the sea. It's warm and still with high clouds and the sea is silver and the horizon blurs where the shimmering ocean meets the bright white of the clouds. It's very, very quiet. Wonderfully, beautifully, relaxingly, smilingly quiet.

The children are at the park with Daddy. 

That'll be why it's so peaceful. Absence of noise. I lay in bed last night and listened to the sea against the seawall on the beach down below our cottage but then the tide was high and right now it's on its way out so there's no splashing. The beach is sandy so there's no shhhhh sound of the shingle as the sea sucks it down the beach.  It's so calm out there that there are no white tipped waves on the sea - it undulates gently, swelling and subsiding. 

Last night we walked for a couple of miles along the cliff top in search of the sunset and I discovered several things.

• The cliff path is, in places, perilously close to the cliff edge.
• There are places along this coast that I remember from holidays of my childhood that are Not There Any More.
• There are buildings along the clifftop that soon Might Not Be There Any More if the coastal erosion continues at the same rate.

I felt a strange mixture of feelings when I worked out that the reason that the caravan site where we used to come decades ago didn't look quite right was that there were whole rows of caravans missing. Nostalgia, regret, awe. The whole place was much nearer the edge of the cliff.  The drive wasn't so long. The place where our family caravan had stood long ago was gone completely. 

Fallen into the sea. Crash, splash. Space.

The sea really is inexorable, isn't it?  Unstoppable. A constant, irresistible force. Day in, day out, year in, year out, wave after wave. Storm or calm, it is. There's no controlling it. Wild or still. Even on a peaceful day like today it is constantly in motion. The surge and swell speaks of power even if there are no crashing waves. It is always there. Intensely beautiful but with the potential to destroy.

Last night I read on the news that a four year old boy was swept into the sea at another seaside resort in our country.  He fell from a slipway into water only two metres deep and immediately his Mummy and Daddy jumped in to retrieve him, but he never surfaced. Powerful currents in that area must have swept him under and away in a matter of seconds.  His parents looked for him desperately but they were also  swept away from the causeway rapidly and needed rescuing. The little boy hasn't been seen since. The coastguard organised a thorough search for a night and a day but... 

My goodness. I sat and pondered how different that family's day was from ours.  We ate ice cream on the pier, we walked along the seafront, we bought souvenirs, we sat on the beach and swam in the sea. We came home, had tea and tucked the children safely up in bed. We had a glass of wine and we found out that somewhere around the coast another mummy and daddy were wild with grief for the little boy they lost. They went on holiday by the seaside and he died. They too packed their buckets and spades and tried to think of endless entertainment on the car journey to the beach and soon they'll be making their way back home again without their precious son.

Oh, God. 

What a nightmare. I can't begin to understand why. Why their boy and not my girl? Oh, please, Lord, it makes me go cold. Keep us safe. Hold that family in the palm of your hand, Lord. Soothe them, comfort them, numb them from the pain they must be in. Why didn't you help the little boy pop to the surface, God? Why did you allow him to be taken by the sea? Why couldn't it have been a near miss, where his Mummy caught his arm as he stumbled and then told him off for being too close to the edge?

It makes my heart hurt. 

I'm sure the sea where they were looked as innocuous as it did here as we watched a family run along the lower promenade path challenging the high tide to splash them as it crashed against the stone wall. The small boys hooted and shouted with glee and their parents watched them and smiled. Earlier on that day we sat on the smooth sand with our backs against the stone and so I knew the water was only about two metres deep. If it were a swimming pool that's nothing; you could see the bottom. Touch the bottom with fingertips out of water, but the sea is a different creature altogether. It lives. It never stops. It does its thing regardless. 

Danger is everywhere. How can you allow a child to be a child and not wrap them up in cotton wool and diminish the possibilities of their lives and yet at the same time limit the risk-taking? The sea deserves infinite respect, but it is also there for swimming and paddling and standing in the splash from the breaking waves. Did that family take an unnecessary risk? Did the people we saw on the promenade last night? Did we, when we let Lizzie swim out of her depth, Bryan always the seaward side of her? Had she disappeared under the sea we couldn't have seen where she was...

I don't know what it's all about, Father God. You don't love that little boy less than you love my daughters. You don't love that broken Mummy any less than you love me. It's hard not to walk in fear when you see how swiftly and easily a life can be smashed completely, and yet you ask us to trust. Trust without understanding. 

All I can do is hold it out to you with my eyes filled up with tears. I love the sea, and I love my girls. That Mummy loved her boy. 

I don't understand how I am so blessed with my seaside experience and yet elsewhere tragedy is so close. I can only be thankful. I am so grateful that my children splash and play in the sun and surf and they are enjoying the sea so much. They're not afraid, and yet we're trying to teach them respect for the ocean, with it's immense power and capacity for deception and destruction.

Getting on for two thousand years ago a few fishermen were in a boat on another sea, and a storm blew up. They were afraid. They were seasoned fishermen, so they knew the waters. They knew how to handle a boat and they were used to going out day after day whatever the weather to bring home the bacon. Fish. A little squall wouldn't have fazed them as it would me, but this was something different. It was a Storm. A big one. 

You are Lord of the Storm. You control the uncontrollable. You are greater than the mighty sea and stronger than the wildest gale. You not only calmed the storm but you walked on the water while it was foaming and crashing. The same sea that gives life and takes it away, the sea that is smooth and silvery today and yet elsewhere yesterday was brutal and unforgiving - it bows to you and no-one else. 

"'The men were amazed and asked, 'What kind of man is this? Even the winds and the waves obey him!'"

Matthew 8:27

I can't think of anything more powerful than the sea. Vast and impersonal and fathomless. Yesterday I saw the effects of the sea on the cliffs, on buildings and on my memories and emotions and I read about a family ripped apart by a random wave. I gazed out at the new landscape and the silvery, benign looking sea with a new respect.

And yet - a word from you and the storm was still. You are almighty and all-powerful. You are in control of the elements. You are in control, full-stop. Nothing is beyond you.

Lord God, thankyou for the sea and for the wonder and inspiration it gives and for the way it makes my soul sing to be near it. I feel close to you by the sea and I suppose that it's fitting that I can see it's power and relentlessness as well as its elegance and beauty.

You are Lord of all. And you're my friend. However much I hold onto you and snuggle up to you and joke with you and shout at you, it's worth remembering that you are the all-powerful Creator God.  The God who calms the storm and stills the ocean with a word. So this vast majestic expanse of silver in front of me that brings fun and anticipation and laughter and happiness and yet can erode and destroy and bring fear and horror and grief - it's subject to you.  It's strong; but you are stronger.

You are great. You are God. I am in awe. 

'Let heaven and earth praise him, the seas and all that move in them.'
Psalm 69:34

Amen.

Standing still

Oh Lord. And so it continues.  Yesterday I decided I wasn't going to church this weekend and I was encouraged to go, so I did. If I'd known the passages that were going to be explored in the sermon there's no way I would have gone, so I suppose it's good that I went. I'm sure that there were things I was supposed to hear. 

I arrived at church feeling emotionally fragile (I seem to have felt that way for ages now, but the last few days have been like nothing I've ever had before in my life). The band was playing and I realised that the hearing in my right ear had gone completely and been replaced by a distorting noise a bit like static on a radio. (This happens to me sometimes - if you could see your way clear to healing this it would perk me up no end, but that's by the way). I was chatting when someone came to ask me if I was still ok to do a reading; I hadn't realised that I was supposed to be doing a reading. That's never happened to me before. I nearly didn't go at all; and how awful would that have been, just not to turn up on the day I'm down to read. I continue to amaze myself at how far removed I am at the moment from the control freak who has every day timetabled - I'm missing so many things. I'm becoming so unreliable and I hate it. Where is my rota?

So it turns out that the reading is the bit in John's Gospel about Jesus and Lazarus. 'If you had been here my brother would not have died...' and 'Jesus wept.' and then the resurrection of Lazarus. The sermon was about pain and loss and suffering and referred to the part in Revelation where God wipes away every tear.  Eric Clapton's 'Tears in Heaven' was played, which is the sad, sad song full of grief and loss that he wrote just after his four year old son had fallen to his death from a high story window. My goodness, it was an emotional service. The atmosphere was definitely subdued. People carry around such pain, don't they?

Lord, if you needed to break me down a bit more, I didn't need any of that; I started to cry during the opening song, 'Here I am to Worship' and could hardly stop for long enough to scrounge a tissue or four from my friend next to me (to have come to church without any was uncharacteristically shortsighted as well; usually I can be counted on in times like this to have a bagful of hankies). 

The presence of the Holy Spirit moves me at the best of times and this certainly isn't the best of times. How much greater was the likelihood that today of all days I would start to cry?  I managed to do the reading but I don't think I sounded like me. It was very hard to keep it going and try to limit the voice wobbling. 

I know that you are in your heaven and all is right with the world. I know that you are in control, so the way I'm feeling has some reason behind it. I know (or at least, I hope - I believe) that there is light at the end of this tunnel. There is light at the end of this tunnel, isn't there,  Lord? 

I know that you are working on me and I know that there is a battle to be won. I don't flatter myself that I am so important that the fight is on an apocalyptic sort of scale, but I am aware that whatever my immature and skewed interpretation of the battle between good and evil, I am caught in the middle because this year for some reason I have felt that my relationship with you has been developing. 

Maybe it's because my smallest daughter is starting school in September and I am 'waking up' from the preschool years where time is at a premium and headspace is reserved for children and family matters only. I might have some time coming up and I might have the chance to rediscover something about me - make some choices for me...and I decided this year that I want those choices to involve you. I wanted you to show me what I could do for you. I guess that even though I am an amateur in these matters, this doesn't go down well with the opposition. Maybe that's why this year has been a year of climbing ladders and falling down snakes. Maybe that's it. 

Understanding doesn't actually help that much, to be honest.  Knowing that your leg hurts because it's broken and it'll one day mend doesn't stop you reaching for painkillers. I just wish there were painkillers at the moment. 

The reading last night on my little iPhone version of the works of Charles H Spurgeon was just for me, wasn't it?  He quoted Exodus 14:13:

I looked all over for a picture of
Mr Spurgeon smiling. This is
the closest I could find.

'Stand still, and see the salvation of the Lord.'

To paraphrase, he says that this is what God says to his follower (me) when they (me) are in 'extraordinary difficulties'. When I can't go back, and I can't go forward; when I turn about looking for the answer but no answer is to be found, then God says 'Stand still'. 

Alright then. 

Spurgeon tells me that other 'advisers' might tell me something different:

"Despair whispers, 'Lie down and die; give it all up.'"

But if I listen to you I should take courage and rejoice in your love and faithfulness. I haven't contemplated lying down to die, but I have definitely heard that 'give up' voice in the last couple of days.

"Cowardice says, 'Retreat; go back to the worldling's way of action; you cannot play the Christian's part, it is too difficult. Relinquish your principles.'"

But if I listen to you, I cannot do this because I am your child, and I should not allow anything or anyone to divert me. I don't want to. I like who I am in you much better than I like who I am on my own. 

"Precipitancy cries, 'Do something. Stir yourself; to stand still and wait is sheer idleness.'"

"Presumption boasts, 'If the sea be before you, march into it and expect a miracle.'"

Not so sure about these two, as I don't feel much like leaping into action to do anything, let alone do something spectacular and daring. 

Still, Spurgeon finishes well by saying that if in doubt, I should stand ready for your next order like a soldier in an army, and it won't be long before I hear your voice telling me that it's time to go forward again.

'What, if for a while thou art called to stand still, yet this is but to renew thy strength for some greater advance in due time?'

So I am waiting. Still hanging on; I don't really see myself standing with much poise or patience, but I am standing still nevertheless.  I don't have anywhere to go and if I did I don't have the wherewithal to get there right now. So I stand and I wait and I am waiting for you to direct me. Actually I'm waiting for you to come and take my hand and lead me somewhere, but if you did just that I'm sure that you'd find me ready to come with you. 

I'm standing and waiting. 

The passage of time, girls and boys...

I'm here and I want to talk to you but I don't really know what to say. I'm tired and I've been impatient with the kids, and there's a pile of things that I should do this evening but I'm sitting here staring at the computer and I can't be bothered. I'm so tired. I should go to bed. I will go to bed. As soon as I can find the energy to get up.

Bryan went to his Uncle's funeral today. I've just seen part of a programme on TV where an elderly man strokes his wife's hand as the doctors tell him that there's nothing they can do. This afternoon I was reading an anecdote from Tony Campolo where a couple love each other so much that they both want the other to die first. I've been thinking about death quite a bit recently. My little piece of peace the other morning was in a graveyard. 

I'm not a morbid person. Yes, I worry about death, but more about the people I love who don't know you, Lord; I worry about their death. Mine, I suppose I worry that it might hurt. That it might be lingering, painful, undignified. Or that I might be a burden to those that love me. But I don't worry about dying, because then I'll see you. I'll get to be with you because I am your child. I will sit at your feet for eternity and sing to you and I won't sing out of tune and I won't have to read music or try to remember the words. 

I've been thinking about death more in terms of the fragility of life, I think. How short it is. How it's all we have and we value it above everything and yet in your terms it's over in an instant. 'Just the cover and the title page,' CS Lewis described our earthly life. The rest of the Story takes place after that. 

I want to make sure that I live my life before I die. I don't mean swim with dolphins or see the Taj Mahal or whatever, I mean I don't waste it. I don't want to waste my life living only for weekends, or waiting until the children grow up and become less frustrating. So many days of my life I find myself thinking, ''It'll be easier when...' or 'I'll be happy when...' and that day never comes. 

I'll be OK when this hurdle is over. When that essay is handed in. When I get my exams. When I get married. When this injury heals. When I get pregnant. When the children are self sufficient and I have more time. When Bryan gets home. When this, when that. 

The day never comes. Or when it does, there's another 'When...'.  How do I live in the present more? I often wish that my life had a 'rewind' button, or a 'fast forward button. Occasionally a 'pause'. Even once or twice a 'stop/eject' but rarely do I seem to want to press 'play'. I'm either worrying about the future or longing for the past, or hanging onto a moment. My autocue seems faulty. 

My headmaster at school used to stand on the stage at assembly and exhort us not to let the years slip between our fingers, 'The passage of time, girls and boys...' he would say, and we'd mimic him as we walked to the next class. 'The passage of time!'  I know what he meant, now. Those days were thirty years ago. Thirty!  He's now retired, his two deputy heads are dead. Sometimes it hits me that if the last thirty years have gone in a flash, so will the next thirty, or sixty. 

This is cheerful isn't it? 

I can't live my life any faster, or any slower. I can't make it pause just because I want longer to process something or I've temporarily had enough and need a break. I can't do anything very much because I am not in control. I am sitting on a conveyor belt just being carried along at a pre-ordained pace and all I can do is make sure that I don't waste the ride. It'll stop before I know it. 

I just find that hard, Lord. I am full of worries. I want my children to grow up and I want them to stay just as they are because they are perfect in all their imperfections. I want to learn and yet I am so bad at listening. I want to know you but quite often my eyes are looking down, not up.  

That poor man on the telly is losing the wife that he loves. He has tears in his eyes. She is unconscious. His face is lined and blemished and his eyebrows are bushy and his brow furrowed. His eyes are pale and full of tears. His mouth is trembling. I wonder if he said what he wanted to say before she had her stroke. I wonder if he took it for granted that she knew he loved her. Maybe she did. Maybe they both wanted to be the survivor just so that the other would not have to bear the grief. 

I don't know what I'm trying to say. I so often don't. As I lie in bed tonight it will probably occur to me, but right now I feel for that man and it seems important to tell people that I love that I love them. I want my loved ones to know you because there will be a day when it's too late. I want to live each day as you want me to live it because I don't know what you have down for me - whether my final breath will be this very night or in another fifty years, or somewhere in between. I don't know that, so I need to make sure that... that... I don't know. 

Today all day I've felt uneasy. There's been more bad news today and, worryingly, an absence of any news about a friend of mine who is seriously ill. I'd hoped to hear that her surgery went well and she was stable. No news is just no news, though, I guess. 

I'm tired. Things look worse when I'm tired, don't they. The sun'll come out tomorrow, as the song goes. Lord, help me to wake up tomorrow with a sense of purpose and a new energy to face the next thing in this never ending heap of rubbish that I'm wading through. Help me to hand over the worries to you and not hoard them as if they were treasure. Help me not to be weighed down by all the things but to care about people without stumbling beneath the burden of it all. 

Lord Jesus, be with Bryan's family as they grieve his Uncle. Heal those who are ill and suffering now. Give surgeons skill. Those who need divine help to get their life on track, may they find the help they need in you, the Lord of Compassion, the Healer, the Comforter. May the people I love who haven't found you yet please, please open their eyes. 

Please be with Katy and I as we go for yet another dressing change tomorrow. Be with Bryan as he goes back to London when he'd rather be with us. Be with Elizabeth as she wobbles her first wobbly tooth and worries so much about when/how/if it'll fall out. Lord she is so like me in the way she frets about things. That's not a legacy I want for her.

Show me what you want me to do, Lord. Show me the next step. Give me an appreciation of time and your plan for my life. I don't want to waste it. Help me to ride my little conveyor belt with confidence instead of desperately running to stand still and missing so much. 

A Good Night's Sleep wouldn't go amiss either. 

There's always someone having a worse day than me

I want to tell you something, God.

I was walking down the road the other day and I had my iPod so my music was in my ears, and I was walking along in time to the music, and singing (in my head, I'm not yet that disinhibited) and it was sunny, and I was having a Good Day, and I think I was even smiling.

I was thinking how life is good, and this song makes me happy, and full of the joy of living and being in your family. 

All good.

Then I came to our church, and just at the kerb were a series of funeral cars, and the hearse was there with the pallbearers lifting a coffin onto their shoulders. The vicar was there in his robes leading the mourners up the path into church and people were crying and leaning into each other.  Everyone was in black. Couples were holding hands, clutching tissues and grief was visible on their faces.

I stopped abruptly about fifty yards away. I needed to walk past, but weaving through the throng wasn't on.  I glanced across the road as it crossed my mind to walk on the other pavement for a way but the road was busy and people had stopped on the opposite side out of respect as well. I yanked out my earphones and turned off the music and stood still and watched. It only took a couple of minutes for the crowd to move off into church.

The coffin top was full of flowers; pink and purple and white and lime green foliage. Gerberas and lilies and carnations and roses.  Someone had chosen them with care. They were lovely. I don't suppose the beauty of the flowers made anyone feel any better. I don't suppose it mattered to anyone in their party that it was a bright sunny day and spring seemed to be prematurely in the air. It was very sad.

I carried on where I was going but I didn't put the music back on. The moment had gone.

Life and death, hey.

Funeral processions always remind me that someone is always having a worse day than I'm having.

I'm so used to having that thought about funerals that I had it as I watched the cars pull up in front of our house on the day of my Dad's funeral. 'Someone's having a worse day than me.' Hot on the heels of that thought was another which said, 'Not today they're not.'  I guess that somewhere in the world someone was indeed having a worse day, being tortured or burying their child instead of their Daddy, but you couldn't have said that to me on that day. It wouldn't have been a good idea to suggest it.

And there were those people, so sad because they were saying goodbye to someone they loved. I felt tears behind my eyes just standing a distance away and witnessing it.

I don't know what I'm trying to say, here, Lord. In the midst of life, we are in death, is that it? All I know is that I was thrown into confusion in an instant. Brought up short. Like on a film where there's boisterous music and then something happens and the music stops with an abrupt Zzzzzppp noise. (I know you know what I mean. If you're omnipresent you've certainly seen at least one film where that happens). Anyway.

How fragile are we, Lord?

A friend of mine miscarried this week. Another friend and former colleague is sitting in intensive care right now as I type, not knowing if her Mum will get better after a heart attack. I know of some people precious to me who are nursing a seriously ill friend of theirs who is surely dying. Some family friends called in tonight on their way back down south after attending the funeral of a lifelong friend of theirs.

We're all affected by it, aren't we?  I've cried for my friend whose tiny tiny baby died. I'm worried for my friend that her Mum might die. I'm sad for the people who are watching someone they love inch closer to death. I sympathise with those who said farewell to a friend this afternoon. I had a tear in my eye as I saw the grief of the strangers outside church the other day.

John Donne said:

 'No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were: any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee.' (Meditation XVII) 

The ripples spread further than we think.


I don't know who that funeral was for, Father, but in death, that person touched me.


How fragile is life, Lord. How short, and how delicate. We look at butterflies and marvel that they only live for such a short time, and we pity them, because we can't see beyond our threescore years and ten, (and another couple of decades, hopefully...) but we are like that to you, aren't we? This life is over in a blink and the longer and more wonderful part is yet to come. I guess we shouldn't lose sight of that.

It's a fine line between enjoying the here and now because you want us to enjoy all the gifts you have for us, and not realising that the here and now will be back there and back then before we even notice that it's gone.

I don't know what else to say. It was a powerful moment that changed my day. Not as much as those of the folks at the funeral, of course.  I went on to where I was going and I still had a Good Day, but there was something profound about that moment when I went from happyhappyhappy, walking along feeling that my life was painted in bright colours, with happy sounds and lots of exclamation marks, and then...whoosh...to a silent, stalled standstill and achingly sad for a group of people that I didn't know.

Thankyou for the happiness I felt as I walked down the road the other sunny morning, for the sun and the music and whatever it was in me that was singing away.  Thankyou for the love that those people at the funeral had for the person they were missing. Thankyou that you care about us whether we are euphoric or at rock bottom, and all the shades in between.

Thankyou that you have promised us something wonderful when we die, Lord, and that the knowledge of that actually changes things in this life, now, today and tomorrow.