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I remember, in the years before Amazon and one click book-buying, ordering a book on Micah from a theologically conservative bookshop. It was local and I wanted to support it.

There was some breathing in through teeth, and shaking of the head, and I was asked if I really wanted to have a book by that particular publisher, and that even more particular writer.

The inward hissing breath and the melancholic headshake reminded me of the dodgy car mechanic preparing to deliver bad news about the repair estimate for that hard to trace rattle that only happened going round a corner.

"Yes", I said. "Is there a problem?" I asked mildly, despite being mildly irritated.

"Well we don't ususally order from them, but if you're sure,", spoken with the heavy pastoral concern of a parent anxious not to curb the child's development, or expose them to too much risk, and so heavily hinting at what would be the wise choice.

A week or two later I had a phone call that my book had arrived. When I went to collect it my pastorally burdened bookseller, suggested another title I might want to buy to counteract the potential hazards of reading this slippery slope, liberal taking liberty with the text stuff. I declined!

The book I ordered was Micah the Prophet, by Hans Walter Wolff. Yes indeed, a first class critical scholar, whose whole academic life was immersed in the Hebrew Bible, and whose critical commentaries on the prophets are amongst the intellectual high points of historical and form criticism. But the thing about this particular volume was, it is a potent exposition of what it sounds like when the prophet Micah is allowed to speak into the chaos, uncertainties, moral confusions and economic realities of each age and every age, and in particular our own age.

Out of deep scholarly study, and the intellectual wrestling required to listen to a text with the whole self, Wolff wrote a book aimed at addressing what he called the cul-de-sacs of our ailing culture, grasping and unjust, oppressive and extravagant, delusional of its own longevity and careless to the point of dismissive of the fundamentals that are the foundations of healthy human community. The last part of the book is three evenings of Bible Study on Micah, conducted in 1977, the year of Baader-Meinhoff threats, atrocities and on October 18th suicides in Stammheim Prison. This is how to do Bible Study – text in hand, television on, the words of the prophet competing with the news announcer, the first speaking words of life and words of judgement, the second struggling to speak such hard to live by words as mercy, justice and humble compassion.

I have a lot of books. Amongst them, books which have significance and value beyond the price paid for them. Wolff's theological and ethical exposition of Micah has been an important companion on the way when I have needed conversation with someone who loved and soaked in the text of the Hebrew Prophets. Immersion in those great oracles of "Thus saith the Lord…" is one of the required antidotes in our own age when mercy, justice and compassion and walking humbly are absent from the political lexicon, and from many a preacher's thesaurus of frequently used words.

When I left College in 1976 and settled in pastoral ministry, I had to decide what I would do for my probationary studies. Quite rightly, the denominational policy was to encourage lifelong learning, and for the first three years there were set assignments ranging from book reviews to a couple of essays. I've never needed much encouragement to read, study and write. It is one of the perils of being a minister that there are so many words to read, write and speak. I guess the skill is in learning to read in the right places, to write well, and to speak only what's worth other people's trouble to hear.

Early on in my probationary studies, I decided I was going to make my major project a study of the Sermon on the Mount. I still have the typewritten manuscript; a long study of the background and structure, and a verse by verse exegesis using several standard commentaries and monographs. That study, over those years, shaped my approach to the Bible for the rest of my life. I have retained an interest in the Sermon on the Mount, exploring the history of its interpretation, being both inspired and perplexed about how it applies to personal, social and community life. I've tried too, to participate in the ongoing exegetical mining operation that is essential when excavating truth that is so deep, radical and transformative.

Study of the text and its background is one thing; living it as the blueprint of the Kingdom of God is something else again. Knowing the text thoroughly can only ever be the first stage in a transformational encounter with a text that today, as much as ever, cuts across some of the most unquestioned and life-shaping values of our culture. So I was keen to get my hands on the most recent exposition: The Sermon on the Mount and Human Flourishing, by Jonathan Pennington.

That a text so old and counter cultural, should have contemporary purchase on how we live; that a vision of life so inimical of late globalised capitalism and consumer driven materialism, might be the salvation of all of us in a world exploited to exhaustion; that words that sound like a manifesto for the Naive and Otherworldly Party, might instead be the words of hard wisdom, and tough talking, and direction-changing discipline we all need to hear, and heed. That this might be so.

That these might each be a possibility; lives of counter cultural persuasiveness lived as intentional critique and compassionate gift; lifestyles that nurture and nourish our world rather than rip up and tear apart the very fabric of our planetary home; that words, ideas and actions might spring from life giving principles and visions of humane community, and begin to heal divisions, cure our propensity to conflict, teach us again the ways of trust, compassion and hope; that all this is possible is part of the burden and the blessing, the risk and the promise, of the Sermon on the Mount.

Make no mistake. These are words of life, and their negation is perilous.

When Jesus says "Blessed" he speaks a word redolent of risk and new possibility.

When Jesus says, "You have heard that it was said…but I say unto you" he is challenging every status quo we've ever stood on.

When Jesus says, "Consider the birds…look at the flowers…do not be anxious" he contradicts the most powerful drives of our money obsessed, image addicted, and deliberately discontented culture.

And when Jesus warns about the intentional foolishness of building our lives on sand, we go ahead anyway, because the waves will crash on someone else's shore.

So I'm back into the Sermon on the Mount. Over the next while I'll post on Pennington's book, and his take on one of the most destabilising texts our complacent culture can encounter. But that encounter will only happen when there are communities for whom those words of Jesus are embraced as the risky possibility and the counter-cultural critique that is the Kingdom of God.  

"But while he is steadily fixed in his religious principles in what he believes to be the truth as it is in Jesus; while he firmly adheres to that worship of God which he judges to be most acceptable in his sight; and while he is united by the tenderest and closest ties to one particular congregation, –his heart is enlarged toward all mankind, those he knows and those he does not; he embraces with strong and cordial affection neighbours and strangers, friends and enemies. This is catholic or universal love. And he that has this is of a catholic spirit. For love alone gives the title to this character: catholic love is a catholic spirit."

That quotation needs a context. It's from a sermon entitled The Catholic Spirit. It was preached by John Wesley probably in 1749, on the text 2 Kings 10.15. That text reads,

"And when he was departed thence, he lighted on Jehonadab the son of Rechab coming to meet him: and he saluted him, and said to him, Is thine heart right, as my heart is with thy heart? And Jehonadab answered, 'It is.' If it be, give me thine hand. And he gave him his hand; and he took him up to him into the chariot."

John Wesley could be a pain. Dogmatic, opinionated, partisan, stubbornly hard to shift from what he believed was the central ground of Christian faith. But that made him neither an exclusive nor a separatist from other Christians. This sermon is about the spirit of welcome, the formation of a settled and consistent predisposition to love and a commitment divinely maintained to make peace, developing a Spirit inspired instinct for unity of heart and practical goodwill towards others.

When John Wesley talked about the Christian calling to live and think and exhibit a catholic spirit he was unmistakable and explicit in his demand that those who professed faith in the God of universal love are called to mirror that love to other Christians, and even to those who make no such claims to faith. Universal love cannot be selective, a catholic spirit refuses to reject, the "ingrasping love of God" does not exclude or disqualify. The love of God, poured into the heart by the Holy Spirit overflows in goodwill, mercy, kindness, forgiveness, conciliation to those who are friends and those who are opponents, even to enemies, and therefore the love of Christ loves without exception and without excusing.

John Wesley got into trouble for his views on Christian Perfection, and for using phrases like universal love, and yes, for encouraging a catholic spirit in a fractious age. The second half of the 18th Century was a time of denominational jealousies, cultural upheavals, theological realignments, and social unrest. But beneath the surface there were also the subterranean disturbances of established authorities, threatened privileges, competivie religiosity, and these inevitably promoted power games as the Established Church felt the threat and impetus of a rising Dissenting churches, of which the rapidly growing Methodists was one of the more worrying examples.

Wesley's Sermon is a defining document of the classic Methodist commitment to unity and fellowship with other churches. The word ecumenical for Wesley was synonymous with catholic, and both required a disposition of openness and vulnerability to the presence and reality of those with whom he, or his Methodist societies, disagreed. And by the way, this isn't your soft, mushy, marshmallow ecumenism where no matter what somebody believes it's ok. The catholic spirit tries to hold the ground between an exclusive dogmatism and an all inclusive indifferentism, and it is a place where those of different Christian traditions, acknowledging the integrity each of the other, exchange the hand of fellowship and mutual gladness in their shared faith in Christ.

"That we may all love one another as Christ loved us", says Wesley. The past tense is crucial, is a crux point; it points to the supreme evidence of Christ's love on the cross. There, beneath the cross of Jesus, Christians from whatever denomination, tradition, culture or time, stand in the place where all hearts are equal in their need of grace and their sense of gratitude. 

From my earliest days as a Christian I have been passionately ecumenical. From my first serious reading of John Wesley now over 30 years ago I have sensed a kindred spirit. This sermon is one of the core documents of Wesleyan spirituality, and of the Methodist way of being the church. I've gone back to it repeatedly, and I recall it frequently when I encounter those whose primary calling seems to be telling every other Christian tradition how wrong it is, or where its deficits lie, or why they could never be the kind of Christian those other people are pretending to be. And I guess it's kind of quaint to want to answer that spirit of "see me, I'm right" by quoting some words about a guy with the weird name Jehonadad son of Rechab!

But Wesley uses that text to dare his hearers into an act of trust, the shaking of hands between strangers, the measuring of the heart of the other, and therefore the risk of that middle ground where mutual respect and shared grace enable gratitude in duplicate, or in multiples of voices. When this sermon was later published in 1770, appended to it was one of Charles Wesley's hymns, "Catholic Love". Here is one of the verses.

Weary of all this wordy strife,

These notions, forms, and modes, and names,

To Thee, the Way, the Truth, the Life,

Whose love my simple heart inflames,

Divinely taught, at last I fly,

With thee and thine to live and die.

Amongst my many books, and settled on my many shelves, are a number of writers whose work is a balm in Gilead, a tonic for the creeping weariness of spirits jaded by a world too much in our faces.

Isaiah wrote some of his greatest poetry to a people in exile, religiously dislocated, culturally deprived, making the best of alienation and hoping against all odds that one day there might be home for them, or their children, maybe even their grandchildren. So Isaiah the great prophet poet used words like an artist and painted pictures of a desert in blossom, wilderness and parched land ablaze with colour and verdant with foliage, and no mere oasis but springs of living water, streams in the desert, rivers of life flowing freely and irrigating the soul and the spirit and the heart and the mind.

Isaiah is one of those writers who is a balm in Gilead, at least for me. So are several others whose writing and whose thought are like the waters that do not fail the thirsty soul, like the fire that purifies the troubled conscience, the bread that nourishes the stumbling spirit. And amongst those great writers and thinkers whose words and ideas refresh and renew my view of life when I've become jaded by the noise and greed of our culture, or angry at the complacency and selfishness that invade our public and political life, or troubled and unsettled by the divisive rhetoric of power games and image makers and breakers – is Abraham Joshua Heschel.

Even the titles of his books help diagnose our condition in our own country, and wider afield in a Western civilisation which is disintegrating and corroding beneath us: The Insecurity of Freedom: Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity; Man's Quest for God; God in Search of Man; Man is Not Alone; The Sabbath; Who is Man. One of the ironies of our times is that we are unaware of our own lostness, so certain of our cleverness we are blind to our foolishness, so selfish and greedy to possess and consume that we have learned to ignore the destructive impact on the very planet that sustains the life of ourselves and the creatures who share the earth. 

Earlier today I took refuge once more in that small collection of wisdom and wonder that is Heschel's writing. Our contemporary dilemmas aren't so different from the defining issues of the 30 years from the end of the Second World War till Heschel died in 1972. Dishonesty in public discourse, distrust of politics and politicians, war conducted by proxy overseas, the inordinate power of business conglomerates and concentrated finance over the lives of whole populations, the struggle for freedom, civil and human rights and the need to call out injustice, oppression and to call in question the machinery of capital when it is allowed to crush the poor and the vulnerable. 

In a bold and unflinching article published in Jewish Heritage in 1971, a year before he died, Heschel addressed the immorality of the Vietnam War. It is a searing critique of modern warfare and our ability to wage war on others from a distance, with no real sense of the agony, anguish and brutality inflicted on others in our name. And he has no patience with the religiously distorting question, "Where is God in such suffering?" He turns that particular rhetorical subterfuge inside out and declares like the prophet he absolutely was, "God confronts us with the question, "Where are you? Is there no compassion in the world?" The allusion to Genesis is obvious, and the Fall, the hiding away from God in the Garden, and the Divinely articulated question that finds out the moral peril of every attempt to avoid God, hide from God, break free from God, are distilled into this brief essay.

Near the end Heschel moves from essay writing to prayer, and in doing so provides us with a clue as to how people of faith are to confront, resist and seek to overthrow the powers of injustice and all that they unleash on the world. It is these words of Heschel, two brief paragraphs, that once again helped to re-align my own sense of what is important, what my life is about. Reading them I hear gurgling springs in the desert, sense the stirring of new seeds germinating, believe again in the God of hope who enables us to be defiant of despair.

"O Lord we confess our sins, we are ashamed of the inadequacy of our anguish, of how faint and slight is our mercy. We are a generation that has lost the capacity for outrage. We must continue to remind ourselves that in a free society all are involved in what some are doing. Some are guilty, but all are responsible.

Prayer is our greatest privilege. To pray is to stake our very existence, our right to live, on the truth and on the supreme importance of that which we pray for. Prayer, then, is radical commitment, a dangerous involvement in the life of God. In such awareness we pray."

(A J Heschel, Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity, page 231)

This is a wire sculpture which sits above the harbour at Portsoy. The graceful lines of a dolphin leaping towards the sea is a powerful and poignant symbol of life that is wild, untamed, beautiful and utterly natural.

There are many perspectives on the relationship between humans and the biosphere we call earth. My own preference, intellectual, ethical and spiritual, is the Christian calling to a responsible stewardship of the created order. Yes we can talk of "nature", and even personify it with the pronoun she, and the maternal metaphor of "mother nature". These are at least reminders that we endanger other creatures when we see them as commodities, and the earth's resources are exploited as if they were our sole possession, inexhaustible and all the time forgetting our own dependence on them.

However a theological imperative arises out of the Christian doctrine of creation, and its associated doctrine of humanity. To speak of creation means that the natural world is held within a framework of purpose, value and care. Stewardship as a Christian responsibility is therefore a call to responsible obedience, not to a free for all plundering as if there was no tomorrow. Indeed, the mechanised plundering and unrestrained consumption of the earth's resources may well mean a foreshortening of the number of tomorrows humanity can still count on. The Creator calls the creature to care for creation. A Christian theology of creation is deeply embedded in what we believe about Christ. Here are just two texts which are sufficient in themselves to silence the voices that look on the earth as our property, our unregulated superstore where we can take and do and use to our heart's content:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.  He was with God in the beginning.  Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. (John 1.1-2)

So stewardship is an attitude of responsibility, respect, even reverence for that which is the Creator's. Indeed to confess Christ as Lord, is to acknowledge that Lordship over creation. And to believe in the cosmic reach of the cross as renewing, reconciling and redeeming the creation is to hear the deep heart cry of Paul's words as a call to participate in the creative purposes of a God who does not give up on all the He has made. "The whole creation groans in travail, awaiting its redemption…." Romans 8.22

The genesis creation accounts are themselves replete with divine purpose and human blessing. God spoke and it came to be and it was good. God calls all things into being, and gives them to human beings to enjoy, and as the context of their own flourishing. That is why stewardship lies at the centre of the Genesis story, with the good creation entrusted to the care and enjoyment of human beings. Whatever else the story of the Fall brings to our attention, it is clear that the greed for power, the grasp for knowledge of good and evil, the hunger for life and for self-fulfilment was followed by a growing disorder. Toil and struggle, jealousy and violence, theft and murder, guilt and fear, alienation and hate, all took hold in the human heart like the weeds and thorns and thistles that turned fertile ground into wilderness and desert. Cain murders Abel, and the closest human ties are torn. It's no coincidence he wanders in the desert, and suffers the loneliness

We have our own stories today about what the world is, what we each are as human beings, and the relations between ourselves and the earth on which we walk, the environment in which we live and move and have our being. There is the green story, the sustainable development story, the consumerist capital story, the globalisation story, the climate change story and variations and admixtures of these and other ways of looking at the world. It is one of the tasks of Christian theology today to offer for Christians a way of looking at this fragile miracle of a planet that is congruent with our vision of a world that is God created, God loved and into which we are sent as light and salt.

The decision of the United States to renege on the Paris Accord, and that as an act of economic self-interest uninformed by the wider consequences for the rest of the world, is one of the stories that collides with a Christian theology of creation care, stewardship and human behaviour modelled on the image of God. But such reluctance to make any economic sacrifices, and appeals to so-called fairness and national self interest, along with denials of the realities of climate change, are not unique to the current US administration.

My point in this post is ridiculously, and seriously, simple. Christians are not in a position that is neutral when it comes to care for creation. Reckless disregard for the health of this planet is an offence to deep principles of Christian theology. To wreck the work of the Creator, to pollute a creation which is called into being by the Eternal Word, who entered that creation and was crucified and risen as an assertion of life over death, to take whatever we want in a destructive free for all for our own generation – each of these admittedly stark statements offends against the primary doctrines of the Father who is Creator, the Son who is Redeemer, and the Spirit who is Sustainer.

And no, I am not saying this is the only way to view the world; nor the only way that Christian theology brings a different perspective on climate change, resource depletion and planetary pollution. But I am saying that Christians are not in a position to be uninformed, neutral, or hostile to those initiatives and strategies which safeguard, and where possible replenish the health of the environment on which all life depends. At the very least, we are answerable to the Creator, whose greatest command upon us is not to defend our particular exegetical corner on the Creation texts in Genesis. The Creator's imperative, and therefore our obligation, is to care for the creation we believe is created by a God whose purpose is life not death, whose gift is to be enjoyed by generous sharing not by possessive greed, whose will is that humans be blessed and be a blessing to each other.

For reasons I can't clearly remember, I have kept a note of what I read year on year. I can't remember either, why I map my reading from July 1st to June 30th, rather than work with a calendar year. It may go back to University and College days when at the end of one academic year you started planning for the next. In any case my reading over the years has worked within a clear timeframe and framework. I'll write about the specifics of that in a later post.

In 1976 I devised a way of reading across the areas that seemed to me to matter most in what came later to be called lifelong learning, or continuing ministry development. But in reality it was a way of harnessing my own curiosity and diverse interests so that I could read in a number of disciplines and areas of interest. The only time this approach didn't work so well was when I was in an academic context and where reading, study, and research were largely dictated by courses and other programmed work. So by and large since 1976 I have a record of what I read, and it acts as an intellectual diary, a literary biography of books read. Some of the books I read then, are now gone, out of date, no longer relevant, or have been superceded by more recent scholarship and thinking.

But, and here is the point of this post; some books no longer speak to where I am, though once they both reflected and shaped how I thought. Over the years my understanding of life, of society, of myself and of my faith in relation to each of these has changed, and with those changes an inevitable distance between how I now see things and how I saw and thought then. It isn't that fundamental elements of my faith have eroded, or that my early experiences as a Christian are invalidated by later experience. It is more that, as time passes, and knowledge deepens, and intellectual interests change, and the world requires newer considerations of what is important and even defining for Christian mission and ministry, then the engagement of the mind in the service of Christ makes different choices, follows different paths, is required through simple obedience to journey forward to the new things God is doing, and the new horizons which open up in every future.

Here is one example of what I mean. When I was ordained in 1976 there were significant shifts taking place in a society increasingly impatient with the constraints of a culture less and less Christian. The Church, and the churches, were enaged in a reconfiguration of what mission might look like; indeed it was around that time that missiology became a key focus of Christian theology. In the late 1970s I remember reading John Stott's Mission in the Modern World, and then Lesslie Newbigin's early The Open Secret, and Verkuyl's hefty Introduction to Missiology. All three books are now dated, but not out of date; all three were also part of significant shift in evangelical theology towards a much more considered view of the Gospel, culture, the church and the challenges around evangelism and mission to the wider world.

Around this time the Lausanne Congress on Evangelism launched a global exploration of what world mission might loo like on a global scale that was careful of culture, context, communication and the beginnings of reaction against colonial, imperial and Western based, and biased, views of Christianity beyond Europe and North America. So one area in which there has been a pardigm shift in emphasis is in the developing and diversifying theology, practice and contextual emphases of Christian mission in a globalised world.  One of the lasting fruits of such expanded thinking was the classic and enduring magnum opus of David Bosch, Transforming Mission. This is a book that gathered so much previous thinking into one coherent and inclusive theology, and in doing so also sent out trajectories for continuing wrestling with the great challenges of mission in the endless diversity and powerful agendas of a world in process of becoming globalised and digitised.

Interestingly, amongst the books I read in the first years of my Christian discipleship, several were the all but iconic biographies of missionary endeavour and strategy on the old models. Through Gates of Splendour by Elisabeth Elliot, When Iron Gates Yield by Geoffrey Bull, Hudson Taylor by Grattan Guinness, By Searching by Isobel Kuhn; these and other missionary biographies represented a popular genre of Christian vocational, devotional and motivational writing. They were ubiquitous on bookstalls, the stock in trade of Christian bookshops and were passed on from one grateful reader to another as examples of genuine sacrifice, courage and advdnture, creating in their readers that potent mixture of guilt, admiration and longing to be more effective, fruitful and obedient to Christ's call to evangelise. 

I'm not sure when the last such missionary biography gained bestseller status. But sometime in the 1970's and into the 1980's missionary literature became more strategic in its concern to explore how best to communicate the Gospel. MIssiology grew more theologically self-conscious in formulating a mission theology established on biblical, systematic and contextual principles, aimed at developing new strategies for mission.

These more substantial and strategic studies left behind the model of the missionary hero and the life story of the remarkable exception. The evolution from missionary story and appeal, towards missiology as a recognised theological and academic discipline, and mission as an essential locus in any biblically based Christian theology, has created a status for all things "missional" in contemporary evangelical theology, and that missional mindset as an all encompassing and defining element of evangelical activism and strategic focus. 

Indeed words such as "missional" and "mission" are validating qualifiers for church activities and strategies. Missional as a criterion is also understood as an essential mindset of the kind of church and kind of leadership required for the church to be an effective bridge communty into each church's context. With globalisation, sensitivity to post colonial concerns, the decline of Christianity in the West, and the realigning of Christian weight and influence throughout the 20th and into the 21st Centuries, mission is no longer about overseas, and the missionary church is learning the scale of the tasks in its own contextual doorstep. A case can be made for suggesting that the last 40 years the church has had to unlearn much that was taken for granted, and quite literally repent in the sense of change direction from older models to new ways of the church becoming the Gospel in the changing fluidity of 21st C culture.

A recent book which now sits near the top of my must read list is Reading the Bible Missionally, edited by Michael Goheen, himself a significant thinker in the areas of mission and culture. The increasing interest in "the missional hermeneutic" as an interpretive key to the whole of Scripture is gathering pace and support. Where this will lead remains to be seen; but the age of the missionary biography is now one phase in the history of missions. It is previous, past, a form of apologetic no longer capable of those past feats of inspiration and challenge to personal commitment. But they remain classics of Christian experience, narratives of sacrifice and vision, examples of a nascent missional theology as biography even if the theology has required reformation and reformulation in a very different world.

Like everyone else I have good days and bad days. A good day comes down to a whole number of reasons, of which one will undoubtedly be my attitude. So when I'm having a good day and someone posts one of those motivational positivity things on Facebook, I'm likely to read it with a self-congratulatory nod in my own direction, a kind of self-praise for feeling good about my day, my self, my life. And, perhaps, just maybe, an underlying complacency bordering on arrogance that life is ever and only what you make of it.

Point is, not every day has the same content, circumstances, events and eventualities. There are bad days, and no matter how hard I try to rethink it, reconfigure it, explain it, try on varying perspective spectacles, it's still a bad day. Not all bad days are caused by our own negativity; and not many can be cured by self-summoned positivity. Some can, but not all; and for some people, not many,

For some of us, sometimes, very few bad days are improved by someone thrusting the benefits of self-induced positivity into a face that is wet with tears, or creased with anxiety, or nervous of yet more hurt. And then there are those whose face is rendered expressionless through the utter fatigue of trying to face a world when their sadness of heart is chronic, the wounds of the spirit are deep and sore, and resources to cope are so exhausted the distinction between a good day and bad day has dissolved into despair. And for such folk self-reproach is already so normalised that every one of those blessed meme things merely rubs their face in the rubbish of every bad day.

Those who spend their time alongside people who are going through "the valley of deep darkness", who weep with those who weep and laugh with those who laugh, who befriend the sad, accompany the lonely, listen to the complaints and laments and anger and sorrow of those who are having yet another bad day, realise the importance of editing that meme above. The psalm poet knew perfectly well that we are "fearfully and wonderfully made", that is, that we are complex, complicated, uniquely created, and every one of us flawed, broken, vulnerable and yet with such immense possibility for joyful embrace of life. But not everyone's possibilites come to pass; and it isn't always down to their attitude. Life has a way of shattering hopes as well as illusions, and some things in life can't be so easily fixed, if at all. 

I think of that meme before it was corrected, and the message it sends to folk who are struggling just to get through the day intact, no worse off, maybe even with some regained strength, purpose or hope. And I am full of admiration for their courage, yes, their atttitude. It takes more determination, guts, courage, sheer human persistence against encroaching circumstance, to work through a bad day feeling bad, than it ever will to sail through a good day feeling good.

When I read the psalms of lament, those prayers of anger and anguish, those poems of heartbreak, resentment and complaint against God himself, I am reading authentic prayers from those who know that a bad day isn't all down to their attitude. Psalms of lament show the power of negative thinking, of looking the worst in the face and telling God it is intolerable, unfair, cruel, an affront to faith itself. And instead of trying to change their attitude something else happens.

"Why are you cast down, O my soul,

and why are you disquieted within me?

Hope in God; for I shall again praise him,

my help and my God. (Psalm 42,5)

Not a change of attitude, as if someone so cast down could somehow find the strength of will just to "accentuate the positive". These psalms of lament work by looking away from my own broken resources to the God in whom is hope, and from whom hope will come, and it will come. "I shall again praise him" is an assertion of faith in a different future, but it is not a denial of the hard to endure present. The soul is not telling itself to change its attitude; it is re-orienting mind, heart and spirit around the reality of the God who "by day commands his steadfast love" (v8) Indeed the whole of that verse is about how my personal attitude to good days and bad days is the least relevant thing about them. What matters is the faithfulness of God who by day commands his steadfast love, while "at night his song is with me, a prayer to the God of my life."

And when in that same Psalm the poet let's God have it all, the questions, complaints and pleadings of his case, he addresses all this to the God whom he calls, "My Rock". (9) Whatever else shakes, shifts, shatters, the Psalmist thinks of God as impermeable, durable, stabilising Rock. Or as Samuel Rutherford says,“Believe God's love and power more than you believe your own feelings and experiences. Your rock is Christ, and it is not the rock that ebbs and flows but the sea.”

As a pastor, often sharing those experiences that make up the bad days in people's lives, I read some of those superficial feel good, feel different memes with their underlying wishful thinking. "The difference between a good and and a bad day is…..", well, obvious to those who are having a bad day. And what makes the difference is not being told to change their attitude, but being accompanied and supported in that difficult place, and being free to pour out their negativity and hurt, their complaint and sadness, their sense of loss and longing for hope, to God who is a Rock of immovable love. The Book of Psalms is a wonderful book to read on bad days, because it will never offer the saccharine artificial sweetness of mere positivity. "Hope in God; for I shall again praise him."