TOMORROW

Our house has always been buzzing with people. For over 30 years we have had people coming in and out. With four children there have always been friends and colleagues and visitors. Over the last 5 years we have had a lot of people-with the three boys living at or near enough to be here most days, added to that their friends and girlfriends and added to that the influx of Americans that has amounted to a lot of people. This year my second son has gone to Africa for 15 months working with Children of the Nations. Our first son got engaged to a lovely American girl and returned there within a few days. Our daughter had already left for Dublin where she is married and working happily. Despite the trauma that this caused our house is still fairly packed as we have our youngest son's friend lodging with us and our nephew and sometimes his girlfriend and sometimes other girlfriends so we are not exactly alone.

We do enjoy sharing our house like this and we do have fun sometimes when we sit around the table and chat-those who are left wondered what life would be like without Mark to "debate " with me! I do miss him a lot and I do miss Peter and Ruth but that is how life goes-our job has always been to raise our children, as best we could , in the fear of the Lord helping them to be mature, confident adults and then release them to the wild [makes them sound like birds].

This weekend the boys are off to Dublin to see the new Batman movie and Gillian, my wife is off for the long weekend with one of her sisters and so, for some of this time its just the dogs, Sox and Fox and me in this big house. I have work to do-a sermon to preach and a service to lead on Sunday morning and there are other pieces of work that I could be doing and yet, when everything changes it can be hard to settle and to get motivated [at least I find that but then I am not as disciplined as I should be]

Some people find silence a great source of comfort-I do not, I have always been surrounded my noise, so I turn the radio on or the TV or some music, even though I need silence to think and to pray but today the house seems very silent! The Psalmist says "Be still and know that I am God"
The thought of being alone is scary, the thought of being left behind is frightening. Yet God says "You are not alone". The Orthodox Christians of the east say that the Christian is never alone, God is always with them and we are always surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses-that can be another scary thought-that people are watching everything you do, EVERYTHING!!!!!
Not only does God see what I am doing, even when i know I should not be doing it but other people who may have had certain ideas about me and the level of my Christianity, can also see me.

There are times when i find it difficult just to live in the moment. That means I am always thinking about the next stage, the next person I have to visit or will never get round to visiting, I am thinking of what is off in the horizon. When I was a boy I was always transporting my thoughts to the future- when i was 6 or 7 I remember lying on my bed looking up at the sky and thinking "In the 2000 I will be 50 years old" and for a moment I felt what, i thought, it was like to be 50! That is like really thinking your life away, a waste of the precious time we have. I need to learn to live in the moment otherwise I will always live life in a state of panic. I need to embrace the now and let tomorrow look after itself, or rather God will look after all my tomorrows.

A new way?

Here is a thought-in a society which is changing is it not time that we, who want to pass on, indeed who have been mandated to pass on the eternal, unchanging gospel, thought about our paterns of doing church and whether or not they should be changed?

Here is one example that has occurred to me , more than once in the last few years: our society patterns have changed to a point that they are unrecognisible from what they were when I was young. Whebn I was going out with my wife, when we were in our late teens, her parents expected her to be home by 11pm. If we were not home by that time or if we spent too much time in the care outside the house she would bring the milk bottles out! Today our young people are not going out until 11pm and they are returning in the wee small hours. When thuis happens on a Saturday night/morning they spend the next morning catching up on sleep while we gather for worship. Sunday jhas become a day for shopping or for relaxing at home or for washing the car and doing those things that did not get done during the working week or they are working: the chances of them coming to church, no matter how dynamic the services are are pretty remote.

One of the key times of the year are the summer months, when the children are not attending school and their parents are desperate for something to relieve the boredom after the first few days of the holidays and what do we do? We shut up for the smmer until September when the children are back at their desks. Why do we not turn everything on its head? Would it not make sense for us to make the summer more of a priority in terms of outreach and evangelism? Not just for a week or two but for the whole summer. Yes everyone needs a rest but why not have that rest in the heart of the winter when nature tells us to rest and the nights are cold and dark? That's what the animals do and thats what happens to the flowers and the trees why would we not do that also. Would this not be more strategic as well as more benificial for the workers who always feel exhausted by Christmas. Would it not make sense to prioritise the holidays like this?

A Father's Thoughts

It’s just a week now since we said goodbye to Mark, our second son and third child. This week we will be saying goodbye to his elder brother, Peter. Sometimes it seems like life will never be the same again, that our family will never be together again. Sometimes I think that it would have been better for my sons and my daughter to have gone to work at 16 and found work at home. Sometimes I feel like God has taken them away from me but then I know that this is not so, I know that they were only ever given to us on loan. They never "belonged" to us and in doing what God wants them to do they will experience life in all its fullness. Sometimes I have this fear of ending up alone, like some of the elderly people I have visited over the years whose sons and daughters are in various parts of the world so that they have no family near them to look after them in their declining years.

A very long time ago I was out with my mum. It was in the days when the buses had no doors and the driver was at the opposite end of the bus. She placed me on the platform, while she got ready to get on herself only to be horrified at he sight of the b us moving before she had a foot on the platform. All I had for companionship was my panic. Thankfully this lasted only a moment as the conductor realized there was a problem and rang the bell to tell the driver to stop. I do not want to be in that position ever again!

In my more lucid moments I know that God will never leave us and He has blessed us with four great children, who are no longer children. Then I remember that God gave us His only Son, to die that we might live. In the last few weeks I have been given just a glimpse of what losing a son must be like, what giving a child for the benefit of others feels like. I have had the sorrow of burying the children of parents who never imagined, for a second, that they would outlive their children. We read the story in the Old Testament, of the sacrifice of Isaac wondering how he could do such a thing. The God we worship is a giving God who tells us that he will "love you with an everlasting love". I have been telling the congregation that this is God's default position and we should take great encouragement from that. We are told in the book of Hebrews that Abraham believed that God was going to raise his son from the dead as. God loves me and He loves you, the reader of this piece, with an everlasting love. Does that not warm your soul? You are loved! Now, I dare you, ignore Him, tell Him He can stick His love. On the other hand you could thank Him and ask Him to be your God for ever.