Moving Home November 26, 2008

There was an impossible amount of stuff. It seemed that every time we cleared a shelf, all the clutter simply reconfigured itself to fill the extra space. We filled and taped up so many boxes, wondering when we’d see these things again, and if they’d go with the new carpet, and whether we’d miss them during their pilgrimage to a storage container. And we found some treasures concealed in dusty nooks and crannies, long forgotten and yet still precious: old poems, bended-corner photos, bracelets made by toddlers now teenagers.

I found myself wondering what happened to all the words that had been spoken in one hundred years, all the prayers that had been prayed. Did the promises dissapear into thin air? Were the convenants undone as the concrete was stripped away? How would we adjust to losing something that was such a part of our life – quirky, unpredictable, leaky; yet at the same time a symbol, crumbling but not fallen, in the same way that we are pressed but not crushed, struck down but not destroyed.

And trooping out the door that last time, I wondered about the goodbyes we all whispered in our heads. And I wondered how we would adjust to exile, borrowing, impermanence. I wondered if it would break us.

Four hundred days, give or take a snagging disaster or two, and we walked through a new front door. Everything was too shiny, was it really ours?

And repeating the process in reverse seemed to take much more time, gathering our scattered possessions, being reunited with old friends. It seemed the boxes had multiplied, surely they would never fit! And where was the pizza wheel? And was £40 too much to spend on a toaster?

Then came a day to mark the journey. Friends past and present gathered, celebrating not only bricks and mortar but a journey, and a new corner turned. It rained but we were unperturbed. There was standing room only.

And now it really does feel more like home. As a picture creeps up on a wall here, and the pizza wheel is safe in its drawer, and all the packing gear is packed away. Settling in, making our mark on the place, familiarising ourselves.

Most surprising of all, it seems the whisper of those previous prayers still lingers, the new is fuelled by the old. With a thrill I realise that we have not forgotten our foundations. Tangible, the promises once made and the hope discovered there readily transfer to the present. And we look forward to new prayers, fresh promises, and hope flooding every inch of space.

And we look forward to what is ahead. To rhythms reestablished and new ideas born. We don’t take this gift for granted. We are blessed.

Eunoia November 25, 2008

The problem with getting out the habit of blogging is that, when you start to feel like you need to post again, there are all these topics vying for attention. And it’s hard to know which to write about, and in what order.

Being a compartmentalised soul, my least favourite type of post is one of those cheery summative ones, adeptly skating over the surface of life, throwing out a couple of neat sentences about different aspects of it, without delving into anything of real substance. I suppose it feels like scribbling a pencil draft, when I want to draw to scale, in pen, complete with all the minute details.

When I don’t blog, and when I leave my notebooks unopened on the shelf (the ‘God’ notebook, the ‘happy’ notebook, the ‘planning the week ahead’ notebook, the ‘these are my random collection of train tickets’ notebook, the ‘notes from conferences I mean to type up but probably won’t look at again’ notebook), It starts feeling like words are bouncing off the inside of my skull, and suddenly my shopping list turns into a creative writing excercise, I’m planning my next sermon in four different colour pens, and I find myself making up poems in my head about man-hole covers, urban foxes, and the new speaking buses that now regale me on my early morning journeys.

So, summative blog posting is out, I need to think of another way to catch up. I think I shall take my inspiration from a book I found, and immediately coveted, in a freezing bookshop on the south coast, yesterday. It’s called Eunoia, which in itself is a glorious word (It means ‘Beautiful thinking’, and is the shortest word in the English language to include all five vowels). The book is astounding, with each chapter containing only words made from a single vowel, for example: ‘Enfettered, these sentences repress free speech.”

(Sadly you can’t really click to look inside)

I considered trying to write about each of the three main areas of my life: God/Church, Work, and Home/Life, using words of only one vowel, but (though an exciting project) the idea was thwarted by the very titles of the categories (told you I was compartmentalised )

So I think good old fashioned metaphor may just have to do!

The Sheep That Fell From The Sky November 12, 2008

I kid you not!

On Friday, at that point in the pre-new-hall-opening-preparation madness when all caffiene had diminished and energy was but a fading memory, we embarked on a trip to Homebase.

This would not generally be an escapade worthy of a blog post. We went to buy a toilet brush, a pot plant, a couple of bins, and some push/pull door stickers.

I was not bouncing happily round the aisles. Sleepily traipsing is probably a better description of my general demeanor. Even the festoonment of felt christmas decorations had begun to grate on my nerves. And that’s when it happened:

We had come to a standstill in the middle of an aisle. I think we were debating the merits of a beech bookcase at the time. Suddenly, one of my esteemed companions pointed at the floor beneath my feet, and exclaimed quizzically,

“Where did THAT come from?”

I was confused, we were all confused. We had been there for a number of minutes, and we had very definitely not seen a small toy lamb anywhere in the vicinity when we had initially walked into the aisle. None of us had been surprised by it rolling across the floor, having been flung asunder by a small child in a neighboring aisle. It appeared to have quite simply appeared. From nowhere!

So we decided that it was a gift from the Lord. And that it had, in fact, fallen from the sky.

Some of my friends have received gemstones and stuff before, but I thought this was a novel first!!!And isn’t it lovely!

The Freedom Toaster, and Friends November 5, 2008

I’d like to dedicate this post to some old friends I have recently been reunited with. They’re not ’old flames’, (although with the wonders of facebook anything is possible), but a box of collected trinketry I have been separated from for about seven years.

The teenage Vicki Adams was quite a hoarder. I used to have a ’special box’ for each year, where I kept random things that meant nothing to anyone else, but were invaluable to me. There was the newspaper clipping of the time ’Take That’ came to Northampton, the hastily scribbled notes that my friends and I passed surrepticiously in class, a postcard from ‘BC’, who was the bear who used to read out birthday cards on childrens television years ago, and much much more.

Most of these items were of little consequence, although I did like to look back through them from time to time, and I did have an awful lot of fun on the day I came to consolidate eight shoe boxes into one larger cardboard box (the clippings went, the postcard stayed). But I did do some hoarding that meant an awful lot more to me at the time.

Under my bed, or at the bottom of my wardrobe… somewhere like that, was a box of items that I began collecting when I worked in the cookshop section of Boots (fun days…). It was like a real life version of a game me and my sister used to play as small children, where we went through the Argos catalogue and wrote down the name, catalogue number, colour and price of every item we wanted to ’buy’ for our imaginary houses. (actually, looking back I think it was just an opportunity for me to obsessively classify things… I was a funny child!).

The first item in my real life collection, was a set of five coloured hi-ball glasses. I really liked them. They were red, yellow, blue, purple and green, and they were safely ensconced in a clear plastic wrapping that ensured I could burrow them away safely. I liked to hold them up to the sun and see the different colours. They were cheery things.

Then there was a kettle, which I don’t remember much about, except that it made me feel grown up to own a kettle, even if it was kept in a box and never used. It was its potential that encouraged me.

And then lastly, there was the toaster. And this I can describe in detail (if only because it is sat contentedly in front of me). It is made by Russell Hobbs, and is silver with a black base. There are lots of buttons on it and it has that funky, burnished metal look. (I have just discovered seven year old toast crumbs inside it too, so clearly the freedom toaster had more of a chance to fulfil its destiny before being consigned back to a box).

The best thing about all these items, is that I’d rescued them from the rejected ’sale’ items, in the aforementioned cookshop department. I don’t know why they had been overlooked, and I sympathised with them for their rejection issues, and then I rescued them. And I never paid over £6 for any of them. (I think the glasses were £2.50).

Anyway, why am I rambling on about my strange teenage penchant for collecting kitchenware?

For me, those items were really not about being able to make toast or drink a cup of tea. They sat in my wardrobe as a symbol of a time that I was hoping for but could not yet see. Rather than trinkets from my past, they spoke to me of my future, of new places and explorations.

Philippians 1:6 talks about God completing the good works he started. Every so often I would pull out those boxes, look at those items, and thank him that they were mine. I would pray about the good things I believed he was doing, even when I could see no earthly evidence of them.

And then God moved, and I moved, embarking on the explorations I had once only dreamed of. The toaster, and its companions, became symbols of prayers God had answered; Prayers he had answered in ways that were beyond what I could have asked or imagined. When I set off on my most far-flung exploration, to the frozen wilds of Oldham, I took some of the items with me, while my lovely friends offered to store the others away in a box in their cosy attic for me.

A few weeks ago, said lovely friends were doing some spring cleaning, and there, in their attic, accompanied by a near-exploded bottle of flash bathroom spray (I was clearly a conscientous, house-cleaning teenager too) and some tea towels, was the toaster. They asked me if I wanted it back, I think assuming that, seven years later, I would be well equipped to make toast and therefore we would not need reuniting.

But, I am still a sentimental soul. And even though my current abode is well equipped with bread-burning apparatus, I knew immediately that I wanted to see those items again. I wanted to be reminded of the ways God moved in power back then. How he answered my prayers and set me on a journey that has brought me so much joy and excitement over the past seven years.

So last week, I opened up that box. I wondered what I had been thinking about when I parcel-taped it up. I thought about all the things I know now, that I couldn’t grasp then. I thought about how this journey has had many twists I couldn’t have foreseen; but how God has been with me at every stage, as faithful and true as he was in the days when I collected cookware and could only dream. And I thought about how I wouldn’t swap any of those paths I’ve walked, how grateful I am to him for the lessons I’ve learnt and for the love I know.

And I celebrated. God is awesome.

Aquatic Antics November 2, 2008

Today a group of us braved the inclement weather conditions and the desperate late-running tourists to visit the London Aquarium. We saw a lot of fish. Here are some photos:

I downloaded some of the photos from my camera, and then walked away from my laptop to do something else. When I came back, the screensaver had come on, and it was merrily showing some a random selection of my photos, one after another. I stopped for a while and watched.

Some of the photos I really like, some make me cringe. Some are poignant, while others make me laugh out loud. Some are out of focus and some I wished I’d used a different shutter speed. Some remind me of people or places I see rarely now, others remind me of a time, a season or a holiday.

As I was watching the photos scrolling through, it struck me that life’s a bit like that, like all my photos on random. If you just picked the files I liked, you’d get a kinda skewed view of who I am, whereas on shuffle they give a much more rounded view… of the places I’ve visited, the people I love, and the things that are important to me.

Life strikes me as being made up of a jumble of different experiences, and if we tried to understand them as stand alone events, we’d be probably more than a little confused. But, seen as part of that bigger picture they make more sense, they fit somehow, they are less able to overwhelm us with their good or bad. It’s like looking at the slideshow rather than the individual pictures gives a better sense of perspective.

Those were my random thoughts today.