turning pink

My son having finished his exams and begun to turn from white to pinkish as he is exposed to the elements again. Watching him go through exams brings back that sickening feeling I had when I did mine...
The prayer I prayed, "lord don't teach me a lesson this time"
The deals I made... "one more page and then another polo mint."
But above all that sense of guilt that there must be something more I should have done.
I guess that still drives me now.
In the meantime the boy has a new suit, shirt and tie and is about to get his hair cut... Ready to face that other nightmare of my youth... Dances.

I must try and hide my fear on his behalf, after all I met his mum at a school dance. Who knows what could change tonight?
Maybe just another opportunity to turn a bit more pink!

The value of sleep

The end of another overwhelming week sends me back to the blog and try and make some sense of it all. The highlight of the week is the progression of the hall project and the arrival of the lighting posts on the square. They are very big! When you chose these things they are three centimetres tall and in a catalogue. They arrive five metres tall and nearly as big as the hall. There are a forest of them too, I think there may be some noisy discussion about them… well at least they make the trees look small.
The depth of the week came when I took a funeral of a young man who had ended his own life. Thursday lunchtime saw hundreds of people of all ages packed the church as all of us felt the weight of what had happened. There was no anger, there was little despair, there was a lot of love. We listened to his friends, we heard his music and we found comfort in the passage from Romans that tells us… “nothing can separate us from the love of God” not even I declared what we do to ourselves or what is done to us.
By three o’clock I was home and turning grey, by the time Catherine was home I was despatched to bed to sleep for twelve hours. The exhaustion came from sheer emotion and trying to carry a community in it’s grief.
A better day today, it's amazing what sleep can do. Talking of which it's time for bed.

learning

It's been a complex few weeks as what I predicted at the AGM has begun to happen. Tiny cracks and fissures begin to open up as project fatigue begins to bite.
It's because, I think people have forgotten how bad things were before we started but are niggled by the fact that it's not perfect yet.
There's an argument that this is the period of the churches history... Caught between the now of Jesus coming and the not yet of his return to finish the job.
I am reminded of what Desmond Tutu said when asked what Nelson Mandela had achieved in his long imprisonment... "he learnt to forgive."
I hope that we are learning that too.

Consultation

I have had a cough/cold now for over a week and so I am still punctuating everything I say with a… cough.  It’s half term which give me opportunity to catch up on a few missed days off. 

There was quite a bit of discussion this morning at church about the three sculptures that have been submitted for the square.  Two are a bit phallic and one is a bit boring seemed to be the verdict but they haven’t seen the full set of documents yet nor met the sculptors so hopefully there’s time yet.  The biggest criticism is that they are not very Christian or more precisely they are not explicit enough in their symbolism.

This is a hard one… is St Paul’s Cathedral explicitly Christian?  A church tower, a spire a Celtic cross which many claim is pagan in origin.

“We don’t want to have to explain it to people” someone said.

It’s going to be an interesting few weeks as we “consult” which is the latest euphemism for having a friendly row!

Doing our best

It has been a week of meetings trying to hold everything together.
It takes a lot of energy to do this. Much of this work would be greatly helped by everyone involved assuming that everyone else involved was actually trying to do their best.
We are trained to be suspicious of each other by the media, by our culture, and sadly by our experience of being let down. It's part of the Christian discipline to forgive and begin again and one which I will continue to have to practice.

Niggles

A niggly kind of day...
The heating is off for its summer holiday and those who have cast a clout even though May is not out are complaining at the cold in church.
"why are there not double sinks in the kitchen?"
"because we have a dishwasher."
This is afternoon things improve with youth group spending a cheerful couple of hours planning a prayer space upstairs in the new hall.
Then off to visit my son Ben in hospital, a bit sore and a lot miserable at a post operative infection raging through his body. At the end of the visit he is able to walk us to the lift and give us big hugs. Once again I am struck by the way in which the sick care for the well.
Now I am back at church enjoying a concert by really good amateurs and reflecting on the beauty of the church and valuing space and stillness in a mad busy day.
I have just won a coffee cake in a raffle, life is improving!

Democracy Matters

To Huddersfield to hear David Steele, a great old political warhorse. "Education is the key to propper democracy" being one of his key themes. Each country has to find it's own way of doing democracy. It made me think about Yemen and whether there could be a tribal way of doing democracy... In this country real democracy could do with being as localised as possible. Where town villages and cites still have meaning and force in people's lives then they should be the places where decisions are made.
As we become a less mobile population we might need to return to the concept of the parish.
Top quote for the evening belongs to Harold Wilson in whose name the lecture took place.
“He who rejects change is the architect of decay. The only human institution which rejects progress is the cemetery.”