There is a God!

Woohoo!! Sense has finally prevailed and John and Edward have been kicked out of the X factor. Entertaining they might have been. Singers they certainly were not - in my humble opinion. LOL

Nativity Pig

Check out this wonderful antidote to swine flu.

A good talk ruined!

Our Children in Need Assembly today at one of the local primary schools focussed on role models. However the children totally confounded me by choosing the head teacher as their preferred role model over the school jannie. What's that about? They totally messed up my talk and further swelled the already inflated ego of the headie. It's a true saying: Never work with children or animals.:)

Seizing the day

I've been trying to set aside some time to prepare a few reflections for advent. Not being disciplined enough to just blank off time in the diary I'd almost given up on it. Today, however, I found myself with a whole 90 minutes free, so I decided to make a start. Within an hour, I had managed to write a reflection for each week in advent. It would have been easy to find something else to do and postpone the creative bit until conditions were better and more conducive to writing but, it turned out that the time was right however unlikely it seemed. Sometimes it's good to seize the opportunity and make the most of what we have. And it's even better when it pays off.

Alt worship!

In a 20th birthday celebration for a church this weekend, I was asked to celebrate communion in this party atmosphere. It called for loads of flexibility and creativity. The "great prayer of thanksgiving" was replaced by a loop of images of the past 20 years, accompanied by The Kinks song Days. I had no idea that the two guys I asked to help pass round bread and wine had just turned up with friends - there they were behaving like solid church elders! I decided to bring a wee element of Presbyterianism by getting folk to sing a Gloria - in three parts. That was really a goose bump producing experience. The wonder of communion that can be celebrated in so many ways in so many places. Thanks be to God.

Church - but not as we know it

Over on the sermon blog, I was reflecting on the texts for this week. We're being exhorted to provoke one another to love. Nik, rightly called me out on my murky Star Wars past, where the "not as we know it" phrase originates for me. Tonight I'm asking myself - Why is it that "church" so often disappoints. I think it's because our expectations are so much higher so, when folk let us down, when support is not what it might be and when love is not evident, it hurts all the more. And so many of us experience church as being a place of hurt simply because our expectations are so different to what we encounter.

What then? Should we lower our expectations?

Absolutely not!

It's important that we never lower that bar and persist, yes, even through hurt, until we are part of that church that is not as we know it. Provoking one another to love is certainly a good place to start.

Avoiding capture

Elusive, flirtatious

always just out of reach

pausing for a moment

only to fly away

and avoid capture

yet when all is said and done

would I want it any other way?

neat packages are not my style

it's more fun to struggle

more enticing to have to reach

and, even then, never quite grasp

that's the challenge of truth

and the excitement of faith.