The last few weeks have been full of experiences. Well, yes, I know that's what life tends to be, a flow of experiences that we live through, respond to, swim in, dance around or whatever other metaphor helps us grasp the remorseless happening of things. One of the causes of fatigue is unassimilated experience, when so much happens there isn't enough time to process and understand and respond before the next significant happenings happen. Fatigue could be described as that underlying tiredness in which energy is still available but like a lowering bank balance you're aware it doesn't last forever, and will need replenishing soon, but you still have stuff to buy, bills to pay, gifts to give and food to get in.
This post isn't a sermon, homily, or paraenetic essay – that word is a cracker to use if you want a fancy term for a team talk! This post is unashamedely about me, and anyone who reads this is welcome to apply or dismiss what are essentially out loud thoughts about why I feel as I feel. Which is not sure how I feel about a number of things just now. I'm not worried about that. It can actually be quite a helpful spiritual discipline to do some intentional introspection.
The post Referendum doldrums are not unexpected. After the excitement and engagement, the hoping and the worry, there is the inevitable sense of loss, disillusion and, for much of what happened and how it happened, distaste, anger, determination to go on hoping, and much else.
This coincided with the joyful significance of beginning a new ministry with the good people in Montrose Baptist Church. Regularly preaching amongst a community I am now getting to know, and sharing more and more in the rich mixture of Christian experience that is always the fertile topsoil of a church, I'm looking forward to the learning and teaching, the giving and taking, the praying and playing of life together.
The death of an aunt leaving only one tenuous connection now with my mum and dad's generation was an occasion of sadness, but the loss compensated by a life lived well within the limits of circumstance that are different for us all. I did the eulogy which was easy enough, if only because she was someone it was easy to talk about honestly, affectionately and with confidence that she would have approved of what was said, in her own modest way. The rose is for Aunt Etta.
Then there's the options and opportunities for further ministry, whether teaching, training, writing or engaged with people helping in personal development. Like John Wesley "Lord let me not live to be useless"; but then allowing for a moderate answer to that prayer, who wants to be as driven as that small revival dynamo for whom usefulness, maximum efficiency and minutely precise time management verged on the neurotic?
Much of the above is an artificial but useful separating out of current personal life streams which in fact are a confluence not so easily or tidily analysed. Unassimilated experience; a lowering bank balance of requisite energies and emotions; the flow of circumstance and the continuum of happening; these are three of the best reasons I know for taking, making, and wasting time in prayer. Taking time from other things to make time for God and spend that time with no eye to productiveness or profit other than being with the One in whom I live, and move and have my being. Sometimes it isn't guidance we need, but grace, not more energy about our work but more humility about our perceived importance, not more time but less agendas, not more commitment but more patience, and therefore not more personal development but more abiding in the vine which nourishes and fructifies, and given time, turns the water of rain falling on roots, into the grape juice that becomes wine.
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