Erin

This evening Erin Pac is racing for her nation in Vancouver. Here's the Winter Olympics, the Christian faith and some advice on dieting for those who need it, all in a few seconds. Cool!

Lent

Here's my book for Lent.  Andrew Rumsey works near where I once lived in North Croydon.  His Lent thoughts are hilarious and thought-provoking and here is a taste

. . . my limousine had inexplicably broken from the pack somewhere around South London's heart of drabness, Thornton Heath, and arrived at the cemetery with several minutes spare for the driver and myself to get to know each other a little better. As we stood stiffly by the graveside, he leant over and, in the conspiratorial tone beloved of undertakers, remarked,

'I don't know whether you've noticed this, sir, but if you look closely around the cemetery, you'll observe that all the headstones face towards Croydon.'

'It's quite deliberate,' he added, just to hit the nail home.

Gawping about like a halibut, I realised to my astonishment that he was quite correct. Taking myself in hand, I recovered sufficiently to counter that, if my friend were to look even closer, he might detect the residents ever so slowly turning back the other way. Nevertheless, his remark had left a deep impression: the thought of so many prone souls gazing for all eternity, not on the heavenly Jerusalem, but on the pedestrianised purgatory of the Whitgift Shopping Centre was fairly discomposing.

This memorable episode reinforced the truth that mortality is the basis or all humour . . .

Happy Valentine's Day!

'Valentine' comes from the word for 'worthy'. Many of the first Christian martyrs had this name, and it is a reasonable guess that they earned the name for their bravery before they were put to death. St Valentine's Day celebrates martyrs of that name.

What has that to do with Jack and Jill giving each other kisses and chocolates?

Not much perhaps. But love and worthiness (or 'worship') go together quite well when focused in the right place . . .

Pipes

On Monday I went to the funeral of a lady who had been involved with our church many years ago.  The service was in a little village chapel.  The chapel was in a little village lane (we were directed to park in something between a car park and a farmyard).  The chapel looked like a house (as all good old-fashioned non-conformist chapels do).  There was ice on the roads and as it didn't, from the outside, look like a building that had benefited from heavy investment I feared there might be ice on the pews. (It was pleasantly warm in fact). 

We walked in.  The entrance was sufficiently narrow to make me grateful I'd lost weight recently, not a funeral director's favourite kind of entrance.  But on this occasion I was congregation not platform participant and as I finished squeezing into the pew, designed for that earlier generation that was rather less than my 6 foot plus, my eyes were transfixed by the pile of metal material in the corner of the room.

My initial thought was that a local farmer may be using that corner to store old pipework.  Pipes stood behind the single keyboard organ as if they had been thrown there.  Some were straight others at various angles, there were gaps where pipes seemed to be missing, some looked kind of rusty.  Perhaps an old space satellite had landed in the village punching a hole in the chapel roof which was now repaired.  However, in the end, I was forced to conclude this pile of pipes had really been the organ, uncased, disused and left in miserable decay in the corner of the chapel.

An older lady stood up.  Well she stood more than stood up on account of not being young enough or tall enough to do the 'up'.  She had a music bag!  And then the horror dawned.  She was making her way to the pile of pipes!!  I braced myself.  Here I was, with a grieving family and some thoughtful and kind members of my church sitting beside me and I was about to hear the most pitiable example of what passes for church music played on an instrument that the local museum would laughingly refuse to consider as a free gift.

Christine climbed and sat on the organ stool.  She spread out her music. She began to play.  A J. S. Bach prelude floated from the corner.  There were no missing notes.  There were no missed timings.  There seemed, after all, no missing pipes.  Simply masterful music beautifully played by a more-than-able musician on an instrument that my ears told my eyes was not as ugly as my eyes had imagined.

Some chorales and hymns later I was remembering not only a lady I had often visited but (thanks to Christine) also the words of the Lord Jesus,

Stop judging by the way things look, but judge by what is really right.