Kids today. In church. Five of them. Of their own free will.
Delightful, eager, chatty children. Looked all around, helped me set the altar, rang the bells, then went home to dinner.
They brought two adults with them too.
So exciting. One of them even lives near by.
(This must be how twitchers feel on sighting a rare bird…)
A good day today. It began with a slow morning of deer watching with Molly, followed by a sparkly ferry crossing with divers flashing wings and shaking tail feathers all around.
A friend rang just in time for us to meet for lunch. Restaurant criteria: no Piskies.
Two book shops, a quick pass through Starbucks and out of Glasgow ahead of the traffic. Off to the cinema to see Harry Potter; home via Tescos, and an other beautiful ferry crossing with golden light shearing down and low white clouds curling around the hills.
The present Harry Potter film is of the book most people hated. I suspect the film will be equally unloved. But I have always liked the fifth book. It is angry and dark and it doesn’t seem to go anywhere. The plot is thin, and the characters don’t progress much, caught between wanting love and sulking off in solitude because they can’t trust it. Which is, it seems to me, the very essence of being 15. Some years just have to be lived through. Rowling’s skill is in so perfectly charting the journey from childhood to adulthood — even if that means that book five has to be awkward and difficult and hard to love.
A long time ago, I helped a friend and her fiancé move house. Whoops. I wasn’t supposed to say that. I helped a friend’s fiancé move house. She never lived there. No, not at all… (‘yes, Mrs Mother, it was lovely to see so much of your daughter all those weekends she stayed with me. What a white wedding it’s been.’)
But my enduring memory of the moving day, after all the boxes were unpacked and the stairs climbed, is of dinner arriving. My friend snatched her fiancé’s wallet, pried it open and waved it about saying, ‘breathe, breathe!’: a subtle comment on how seldom his wallet saw the light of day and how liberating he would find it to buy us all dinner.
Thankfully, he laughed. He was, at heart, generous; though by habit very cautious with money. He knew it was good for him that his beloved would, just occasionally, wave his wallet around with great abandon. She gave him a sense of freedom and of joy.
Giving should be like that.
I spent much of today thinking about church finance. You will all know, or be able to guess by now, that finance is neither my love nor my strength. I’m sure that’s why I always hated Monopoly. (Once I had obtained Park Avenue and all the other lovely dark blues, why on earth would I want property in Pennsylvania?)
So, to think and talk about giving and church finance makes me think of people who are better at it than I am. My friend and her fiancé. The school chaplain who very matter-of-factly said, ‘I’ve learned that if I give 10% away even when there is no way I can reasonably afford to, God makes it work out.’ The then French-teacher who would get all stressed in late November, looking for more people to send money to since she hadn’t given enough away.
I am thankful for these people who were unembarrassed to speak of giving. Who thought tithing was natural. Who could wave wallets and cheque-books around freely saying ‘breathe, breathe.’
A few deep breaths like that, and we might even be able to avoid the sharp gasp that comes of seeing treasurer’s balance sheet.
Someone was telling me about a book on change called One Small Step can Change your Life. I’m not sure I’m going to rush out and buy it, but there were a few tidbits worth experimenting with.
Apparently, the idea is (obvious enough): big change means big fear. Little change means no fear. It seems to have to do with primitive survival instincts. Too much disruption and our fight-or-flight mechanism sets in. The flight-mechanism diverts all our energy from the parts of our brain that could respond creatively or wisely, so we run away from change rather than engaging with it productively. But apparently, if the change is small enough, the panic response lies dormant, and we can get on with being creative, adaptive human beings. Now I have no idea if this is scientifically true, but it sounds intuitively plausible, which is good enough for now.
So that means we need to look for tiny little steps towards change — something I suspect we all know, but often fail to apply.
The other helpful reminder was about how easily our brain can be programmed. Apparently, if we ask ourselves the same question every day, our brain learns to track the information for us throughout the day. That means that if we ask the question, ‘where was God’s blessing’, our brain will tag and sort blessings throughout the day; whereas if we ask ‘how have I failed?’ our brain will tag all our downfalls. (This is ‘Pavlov meets Ignatius’, isn’t it?)
If that’s true, it means we need to choose our questions wisely. But imagine if by the simple act of asking, we found that our brain got in the habit of noticing blessing, or beauty, or laughter, or forgiveness… if we got in the habit of noticing God.
So, here’s a one-off question (or two) for anyone who will join in:
What’s the best question we could ask ourselves each day? What will draw us closest to God?
wonderful exchange 