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Thursday 23 May 2013

Time for Kid's Spot

At Coventry Jesus Centre we do what we call ‘a Kid’s Spot’ each Sunday morning and rumour has it that this is one of most popular items in the meeting. I mean, it’s a kid’s spot – but is it really? Not when all the adults are present, ear-holing in.

Well, duty fell to me again this week (it does about every 8 weeks or so) and what better idea than to tell the kids the story of Aidan of Lindisfarne.  The reason for this?  a.) He’s one of my top favourite saints b.) It’s a great story – easy for the story teller and c.) It really has got something to teach us today.


OK, it’s a story about monks so why not get the Gallant gentleman himself to dress up as a monk (in case you don’t know, we use ‘virtue’ names in our church and there is a notable – and bald – brother in Coventry with that name). Now, what a shame, I took no photo of this. Gallant looked the part with his make-over brown habit, cross and quill pen and, for sure now, all the kids know what a monk is.


Then I told the story ... I believe if you want an interactive spot, telling can be preferable to reading and in-between my telling I was asking the kids questions: ‘Have you any questions to ask this here monk?’ ‘Do you think Aidan succeeded in his mission?’ and so on. It was OK until the end when I asked what the kids thought may have happened to Corman (see below). Well, one thought he was crucified on a cross and the other three that he surely went and topped himself, feeling such a failure. Now, what are those mums and dads going to say to me if the kids all go home and have nightmares?


Never mind, at the end I gave all the kids my scripted version of the story and, if you’re a big kid like me, you may enjoy it too ...  so here it is! 


The Story of Corman and Aidan

Around 1400 years ago a large community of monks lived on an island off the west coast of Scotland, called Iona. It was rocky, wet and cold but the monks busied themselves praying and farming and copying the Bible out by hand. This took a long time. Printing hadn’t been invented in those days and there were few copies of the Bible. 

The monks on Iona were invited to go on a mission to the north of England by Oswald who was the king there.  He wanted them to tell his people about Jesus. The monks prayed and sent a team led by one of their leaders. His name was Corman.


Corman was a little bossy at times. He liked giving orders and he thought people should do as he said. When he crossed the sea to England he expected people to listen to his message about Jesus. The trouble was they didn’t and Corman got very discouraged. 

When Corman returned to Iona all the monks gathered round him. They wanted to hear how he had got on!

“The English are very ignorant and stubborn,“ he told them. “They won’t listen.”


The monks continued to listen to his sad tale. Then one of them spoke. His name was Aidan.


Statue of Aidan on Lindisfarne
Aidan didn’t want to put Corman down. He said quietly and in a gentle voice, “Maybe Corman, you were a little harsh. Maybe if you had been more understanding and patient the English may have listened to you!”

Everyone looked at Aidan. “Well,” they said, “if you think you know how to win the English, you’d better go and try it!”

Aidan set off with twelve monks. He went to England and told them about Jesus. And do you know what? Everywhere people listened to him. They turned away from their bad ways and followed Jesus.

Aidan was gentle and patient. He shared his money and possessions with poor people and cared for them when they were sick. He didn’t just expect people to listen to him. He listened to them!

And what about Corman?  He stayed in Iona. What do you think he felt like? I don’t know but perhaps he prayed for Aidan. Maybe he learned from his mistakes and became a more gentle and kind person and learned to listen more. I hope so!


And by the way folks, does anyone know of a book ‘Bede for Children’ or something similar? The stories are so wonderful and beautifully didactic that if the book doesn’t exist, surely it should!

Thursday 16 May 2013

Higgedly Piggedly - Perfectly Orderly!

It’s a dream: a shady wood, lit by the speckled sunlight breaking through the stooping, crooked, branches above our heads; bluebells, queens of the wood, dressed in royal purple, bow their gracious heads, whilst golden-yellow celandines and pearls of pure-white sorrel and wood anemones provide a rich carpet between  the windy paths that follow uneven contours of hump and hollow; and here’s a broken bough and there an aging tree lies fallen, angled, rested, refuge to a myriad of tiny creeping creatures; a trickling stream wends restfully upon its well-scoured furrowed bed while birches show off their silvery bark; each tree has a character of its own; horse chestnuts’ crumpled fresh-green emerald leaves stretch forth and aspiring larches reach towards the sky.  A delightful world: God’s world.

The park, the formal garden, planted in rows, straight as a dye – not God’s way! Our streets are straight or follow the uniform curve of a surveyors’ plan. Not God!


This wood, a wonderfully disordered, chaotic, full of surprises, masterpiece but underneath I perceive a perfect order, a cycle of life and decay with nothing wasted, coordinated – pure genius.



I soak all this in on this bright sunlit May afternoon. Meanwhile, a wealth of birdsong, un-orchestrated, fills the air whilst silently and stealthily, a tree creeper busily creeps up, around, the trunk of a nearby tree.

 We humans want to organised, to control; it can be good. But let’s not forget God’s ‘way’, the disorderly, orderly. Let life break out, break out from underneath, from all around; let’s leave room for inspiration, for God’s new things; let’s take direction from the unlikely and be a grass-roots church and live  - expecting God’s surprises!

Thursday 9 May 2013

'Reliability' Receives the Gold Rating

 In the last few weeks I’ve been part of a team organising a day’s event for women in our church called Accelerate (we hold it two or three times a year). Walking down the road towards the event venue on the morning of the great day I began thinking of the word  ‘reliable’ and decided it should be reserved a special place of honour in the Oxford English dictionary and written in gold ink. An underrated virtue, I think. Perhaps the Biblical equivalent is ‘faithfulness.’ If you’re required to do something, you do it. No excuses at the last minute. No forgetting and turning onto other things. Reliability is a prime virtue, I would say. Praise God for the reliable .. their names are written in ... my book for being asked to do more things in future … is that the way God thinks? It would appear so from the Bible!

This got me thinking. What other words should receive the gold rating?


 Mercy, definitely. Watching ‘Les Miserables’ touched a deep chord

inside; it sort of set my spirit spinning. I mean, seeing the Bishop of Digne give the beggar, Jean Valjean, his fine silver candlesticks after the violation of his former goodness by Valjean spoke volumes. He showed mercy, a costly act of self-giving with the purpose of redeeming another. 'Blessed are the merciful...'

The next gold-rating word is surely gratitude. Gratitude makes a relationship and mends a frayed one; it turns a tension between two people on its head and transforms ‘reserved’ service into whole-hearted service. It also puts a smile on our faces, puts cheer into a dull day and helps us aspire to even greater things in the future…
Gratitude, I've noticed, also takes our relationship with God a long way and restores the distance we sometimes feel with Him.
 

I like cheerful people so the word cheerfulness will also receive the gold rating today. Cheerfulness is doing what we have to do, even the boring or hard parts, with a generosity of spirit that doesn’t keep adding up the personal cost to ourselves. It can bear the arduous things with a lightness, even  humour, and counts it a joy to do these things for Jesus’ sake.  Its twin is surely wholeheartedness.

Adventure must be another gold-rating word for life without adventure is so dull. In fact, after several hours of furniture removing and sometimes too tired to sleep this week, I woke up on this Accelerate morning with a sense of adventure, a looking forward to the day. It was definitely going to be experimental. Life would be, yes, just awful without adventure.


Humility and willingness are two of a pair if ever there was one:  I love people who are willing, willing to do anything. ‘Would you mind … emptying the bins?’ … ‘Of course’ … ‘Would you be OK with clearing up the mess afterwards?’ ‘Of course … is there anything else you want me to do? ‘Blessed are the humble-willing … they are prepared to put aside their self-interest for the good of us all.


Then there is encouragement – I mean, not everything went brilliantly on this day but those who encourage us do not overplay  the mistakes we all make; they focus on the good bits and build on that.  Many a word of encouragement has halted me at the top, or halfway down, a muddy slippery slope ... helping me avoid the big splash at the bottom! 


I could go on, there’s so many more words worthy of the gold-rating: patience, discipline, grace, justice and more. Patience: I know as a teacher that one word of impatience can undermine many patient words. 


 I believe that in embracing all these we find the freedom that Jesus promised.

Hey, but above all, there is the Word of Words, the twenty-four karat one, love, that encompasses all these things, the sum, the total of our Christian calling, the word that is synonymous with Love Himself, love’s epitome, Jesus Christ. 





Editors of the Oxford Dictionary ... here is my non-definitive list of golden words! Take note!

Thursday 2 May 2013

Three funerals, three women, all from different walks of life.

Yes, there’s been a spate of funerals …

First there was Tina. Yes, life was a struggle for Tina; she’d suffered serious mental health issues for much of her adult life and had been in and out of hospital many times. The weaknesses, however, seemed to have given room for God (now, that is scriptural) and I felt humbled for I had no idea that she had made such an impact on so many people. I mean that room, full of people, saying their goodbyes, was packed. She had loved many ... the tears spoke for themselves.


A few weeks before she died, Tina had made a vow of celibacy. I was there, in the room, while she made it; she was earnest, just wanting to live her life fully for Jesus because she loved Him and wanted to live it singly for Him.  We didn’t know …


Well, I didn’t receive a personal invitation to Margaret’s but watching on iplayer and leaving politics aside, I can’t help being a not-so-secret admirer of someone who had the humungous courage of their convictions -  and however did she climb through the ranks, battling with the enormous male prejudice that must have waged so heavily against her? She deserved a good send off, I reckon – and, as I said, leaving politics aside.


Gladys, 87, an old lady, struggling with bodily weaknesses and who, it appears, tried many things in life and sometimes seemed to fail: missionary work, book selling, church planting - but actually greatly succeeded in the things that really matter: ‘loving the brethren,’ loving the poor, prayerful, humble and glad service. Gladys, your funeral encouraged me; some things I’ve worked at for years have failed. For instance, I’ve spent 26 years of my life church planting/growing in Nottingham only for the scene to eventually fold. Looking at your life encourages me: I’d never say you failed at all because you won, hands down, on the eternal things that really matter.


Funerals can be awful but, in remembering, in learning from, in honouring and being grateful for the deceased, they can be brilliant occasions and one of God’s prime ways of getting through to us. Stopping still in the midst of our busy lives, time seems to stands on hold for a little while and carries a unique poignancy.  We need such times; speak to us, God.

Lessons From a Honey Bee


Spring is in the air ... I can hear the dull drone of a worker honey bee; see, there she is - hovering and settling down a brief while upon the subtle-fresh-pink petals of the apple blossom or, irresistibly enticed by the sugary-sweet nectar, crawling into the inner recesses of a foxglove or the cone of a bluebell’s bowing head, hidden quietly in the shade. 

These restfully-busy creatures are intent upon one thing only: to collect the pollen and nectar needed for the well-being and prosperity of the hive. 


Brushing against the pollen-covered anthers of the plants, inadvertently collecting that precious powdery dust and carrying it with them, from flower to flower, they so happen to be about one of nature’s most vital tasks – uniting male cells (within the pollen) and female parts (the ovules within the pistils at the centre of the plant) to bring about a fertilised seed – what genius - the beginnings of a new plant. 

It is claimed Albert Einstein said, "If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe, man would have only four years to live". Whether he did say this and whether he is overstating a fact I don’t know. Let’s just say, bees play a crucial role in the cross-pollination of much of our plant life. 

 I think it is fair to say that these busy honey bees have a conscious and unconscious task, one intentional, the other quite unintentional. 

We Christians set about our daily lives, to live, to work and hopefully to pray - to God. This is our conscious task. Sometimes we evangelise, again a conscious act. But what is it we unconsciously achieve? Like the honey bee, this is usually quite unknown to us. God’s designs arch high above the smallness of our human desires and plans.


Earlier this week I was discussing with some friends what heaven must be like. I said that perhaps one of the greatest pleasures of that place will be that we are blissfully conscious of the fruit of our lives - not what we can see now but what has actually been achieved by the laying down of our lives, by our daily surrender to Jesus Christ.  For many it will be shocking – brilliantly so. But now we are unaware of perhaps the greatest tasks God has given us – like the humble honey bee. 


See my blog 'Nothing Big, Perhaps Not' (18/1/12) for an example of what I mean.