Happy Hallowe'en!

Leaves

Ah.  The delights of the English Autumn.

Across the Atlantic this is the Fall.  I think they have a point.

We loved living by the seaside which we did for a number of years.  Then, in English terms, we were called far away from the sea (a hundred miles).  Consolation of a locational kind was hard to come by but I tried. 

"At least we won't get salt on the windows in winter gales!"  In this I have been proved right.

"There's all these lovely trees.  'Leafy Bucks.'  You never get all these trees by the seaside."  This is also true.

Another thing you don't get by the seaside is, therefore, a host of 'lovely trees' dispensing most of themselves on your lawn, driveway and car all in two windy nights.  I repeat - this is not Autumn, it is Fall.

But this is the thing.  Although the trees around our house are approximately the same size each year the number of leaves that I have to set to work on is by no means the same.  And this has been a very easy year.

Our driveway has no gate.  Often when the wind blows it does so  (I have always assumed) at the behest of Wycombe District Council.  Leaves that, in deference to my back, have respectfully fallen on the pavement outside have been blown into my drive for me to have extra work to do.  A man in a vehicle that is a cross between a vacuum cleaner and a dustcart purrs merrily by early some morning with no leaves to work on while the leaves that have escaped him wave sneeringly at him from my drive and then sneeringly at me as I wearily chase them around with a humble non-mechanical broom.

This year the north wind blew.  Everyone was complaining.  Temperatures dropped and leaves fell, winter coats hurriedly located, car heaters turned up, extra bedding for the pets, a general sense of winter arriving.  But me?  I was well pleased.

Somehow the north wind (which blows toward my drive) swirls around the leaves and deposits them back north - onto the property of Wycombe District Council Highways Department and the man in his motorised vacuum cleaner thingy.  I went out of the house, swept a few separatist leaves from a corner by the garage, and retreated in the warm to await the family plaudits for all my hard work.

I had a friend who was a Pastor in the East African Revival.  His spiritual experience was like my yard work experience.  His ministry 'work' was to sit in his room with a queue of people outside his door waiting, one by one, to give their lives to Christ.  I am working on ways of persuading the Holy Spirit to blow from the north.

Scrap

Last week my most valuable material possession - a somewhat ageing Ford Focus - made some strange noises that it had never made before.

 

I'm no mechanic but experience (my own and others) informs me that sudden noises from underneath the bonnet (American: hood) are rarely good news.

 

It remained by the house until I could drive it gingerly down the hill to the garage.  In the event this was the last time I drove it though I did not know this at the time.  I knew this only when, later in the day, the service receptionist rang.  Sorting out the noise wasn't going to be cheap but that was not even half of it.  The car was not roadworthy for an entirely different reason that would also cost hundreds of pounds and within six months another urgent expensive repair would be required on a third thing that threatened to make it unroadworthy as well.

 

The calculation was not difficult.  This may have been my most valuable earthly possession but the repair bill was going to be its equal!  It was not worth repairing, it was off to the scrapheap.

 

I observe that the price God paid for the salvation of his people was a crazily high repair cost.  We must be very, very valuable to him.

Gold

As the Metropolitan Police today made a devastating statement about the late celebrity Sir (for now) Jimmy Savile - and as his nearest and dearest decide to dismantle his portentous grave - it seems fitting to revive the memory of a Blog from a year ago.
And to which we might add that golden coffins continue to accrue interesting associations.  Not only, in fact, is the danger of too much gold in your dying place that the living will take it from you, or you from it but that the light of history may destroy it faster than the Yorkshire weather.  Cheap wood or wicker for me please, and regarding the rest I'll keep trusting Jesus'll fix it.

9 NOVEMBER  2011
Prior to today's funeral, showman Jimmy Savile's golden coffin lay 'in state' in a hotel in Leeds.  We'll miss him, epitomised in his epitaph IT WAS GOOD WHILE IT LASTED. 

A couple of days before we've heard of the conclusion of the trial of Michael Jackson's doctor - and the international star also had a golden coffin.  Sadly the story of Michel Jackson, notwithstanding his great talents, was that it was not always good while it lasted.  That was why he died young.

Who else?  There was Carl Williams (2006); he was a killer himself killed in jail in Australia after being a leader of the Melbourne underworld; Nick Rizutto, son of the imprisoned Mafia boss in Montreal (2010). And so on: golden coffins have some interesting associations.

There's nothing new about golden caskets either.  The gilded bed on which old Tutankhamen's remains lay is but one of the golden treasures that, since their discovery, have made his death arrangements among the best known in history.  Sadly for him, the treasures were so wonderful that he (or at least his remaining molecules) were separated from the gold so that museum visitors can see the gold.  So the danger of too much gold in your dying place is that the living will take it from you, or you from it.

The real trick would not be about gold at all.  It would be to be able to exit the place to join the living once again.  Lady Gaga achieved this earlier this year at Radio 1's Big Weekend.  For her first song she emerged from a golden coffin to launch her song set.  Great show!  Sir Jimmy was proud I'm sure.  But the tricky, and achingly important, part of the real trick would be to do that after being publicly dead, say on the third day . . .

Jesus'll fix it.