Inspiration

I was with a wonderful member of our community today who is recovering from a stroke. Life is not easy for her, but she smiled and laughed her way through my visit. From not being able to speak at all two months ago, she is now speaking fine and walking again. And determined to be completely well within the next couple of months. I think she will be.

I'm struck by the fact that in the hour that we were together we didn't complain about the government, or skinner about our neighbours, or even mutter about the weather! It was a privilege to be with someone so grateful.

Vulnerable

This afternoon our boy climbed up something and fell onto our tiled kitchen floor. He chipped his two front teeth and screamed for an hour until the casualty doctor at the hospital gave him something that helped the pain and settled him. When we got back from hospital he played happily all afternoon as if nothing had happened.

We don't feel as resilient. While Kym stayed with James, I went to open a file for him, listening to him screaming all the while. The poor clerk who was getting the details from me had to wade through my tears too. Not a good day. Even as he sleeps now, we both feel as if we're grieving.

I have been in that casualty ward a number of times with frightened, grieving people. Sometimes a hospital visit can be just one more thing to squeeze into a full day. Today's was one of the more trivial cases that casualty would have dealt with, but I hope that I will never again trivialise pastoral contact in that place.

Love makes you very vulnerable.

Missional church

This morning's sermon focused on the idea of being the "sent out" people of God. I used this picture to make the point that our local church is not so much located at a specific address as scattered all around the city - wherever people live and work.

One implication of this is that Sunday is not a good day for being the sent out people of God - on Sunday all the little red dots are gathered in one place. Monday is a good day though...

Time to think

I heard Jenny Crwys-Williams interview an American author this week. I didn't catch his name, but he was talking about how little time we have (or make) to simply stop, and think (the fact that I was driving between meetings with the radio on makes his point!)

He recalled how as a child he would go to his mother and say that he was bored, and she would reply: "that's good. It will give your mind a chance to wander creatively". Not the most sympathetic response, but there's wisdom there. He went on to say that he does much of his thinking while jogging and he said that the sight of runners on the road wearing ipods saddened him because of the opportunity they were missing.

That interview has stayed with me over the last couple of days because I've been challenged by the extent to which I too have made very little time to think creatively. And that's a part of the motivation for this blog.