Pre Seasons

The new Football League season kicks off at about the time everyone is off on their holidays.  The reason is next summer's World Cup in Brazil and the need for the English season to be wrapped up well before it.

 

Here, then, ends preseason.  This is a strange time of sweaty endeavour to get fit for the winter to come.  In blistering heat the lads run themselves into shape for the wet and windy nights in some football outpost on a Tuesday night in November and blistering heat is a distant, incredible memory.

 

The disconcerting thought occurs to me, though, that the actual season is also a preseason - which is why it starts so early.  Beyond the parochial ranks of the local supporters the big world of football is looking at next summer and the season for which we have just had the preseason is itself a preseason.

This week hundreds of local families in and around Wycombe will have sent their children and teenagers to Lighthouse Holiday Clubs and Fresh Cafe youth nights.  These are brilliant events.  We are very blessed to have them.

 

Certainly one way of approaching Children and Youth ministry is that it is a kind of preseason.  This is alarming for two reasons - the most obvious being that children and young people are real people (and may not make adulthood) and need to know forgiveness and faith right where they are. The second reason is that the attrition between children's ministry and adult faith is appallingly high.  No truism seems less true now than the old maxim, Give me the child for seven years and I will give you the man.

 

I am somewhat of the view that, like the season about to unfold, the whole season of life is preseason.  Admittedly the World Cup with its gathering of the nations under a near equatorial sun seems a distant dream right now.  Yet it is shaping everything about football in months to come.

 

And so our whole life, even to what we misleadingly describe as our last breath, is a season that is really a preseason.  And under the same Son that we now live, the nations will gather for the Real Thing and the momentary things of preseason will give way in the shadow of its glory.

 

Maranatha.

Life

The other day we were walking round an amazing landscaped garden.  Water features, wisely placed roses, glasshouses and beautiful shrubs and flower beds adorned the summer scene.  It was very beautiful, even to a relatively untrained eye such as mine.

 

Then there was a startling section.

 

Simply enough, it was left wild and in such a setting it looked quite wrong (in my own garden it would have blended somewhat better!).  That was not what was startling though.

 

It was startling because it was absolutely full of life.  I don't mean that, instead of one flying insect for every 20 flowers there were two.  I mean startling.  Instead of a decent few insects this area was teeming with them, large butterflies and tiny gnat-like insects and all points in between.  Soon I was hardly looking at the somewhat common looking wild flowers but was staring at this flying sea (to mix the metaphor) of life.

 

We have just spent much of a year in 1 Corinthians.  This letter dispels any notion that the Church of the 21st century is in some kind of qualitative decline for there is portrayed a wild church such as even the trendiest, most rebellious of Christian outlaws in the 21st century would find hard to emulate.  More to the point it was wilder than is the Sunday Assembly, the atheist parody of Christian services but is actually more decent than Corinth was.

 

Wild. 

 

But there was life there.  Like the insects he created, God does not seek out human formality and order for its own sake.   He is the author and partaker of spiritual life and if that is in the chaotic meadow it is better to him than a neatly ordered spiritual mausoleum.

Focus

I was delighted to read that someone of international standing has recommended my car!

 

Pope Francis said: "It hurts me when I see a priest or a nun with the latest model car, you can't do this.  Cars are necessary. But take a more humble one. Think of how many children die of hunger and dedicate the savings to them."

Further investigation proves, allegedly, that he practices what he preaches. The Pope himself shuns comfortable expensive transport and when driving around his city he uses . . .

. . . a humble Ford Focus.

I was really feeling quite good about this.  Though not under Pope Francis's administration or tutelage I was conducting my ministry from the same humble transportation that he himself uses by way of example.

 

Then something bothered me.

 

When, in something of an emergency as my previous car clapped out, I bought my Ford Focus I thought it was a nice car, a good one that made me wonder whether, well, I should have bought something more humble.

 

Which only goes to show that a Pope's humility is a Baptist Pastor's luxury (at least in Britain!).

 

There again, Jesus walked . . .

Free

It wasn't especially hot today.  But for me it was extraordinary none the less.

 

First, I was walking along through the town and decided to buy a bottle of fizzy water.  It's Market Day.  There are people everywhere and lines of people in all the cheap shops.  I decide that I have no time to line up so I'll get my drink in a more expensive shop.

 

A strange conversation ensues.  I don't have enough change so I offer a £10 note.  This requires over £8 in change.  As the lady (I think she is the owner) starts to get the change together I hit upon some extra change in another pocket.  I offer the change to make it easier for her.  She looks at the change.  Says in slightly broken "English you want the change?" and proceeds to give me the ten pounds back while taking her change back.  So far so good.  So I offer the right money.  She says, "You have paid" and I say "I have not" and she says, "No, that is good -it is finished - you paid" and (she is a slightly irritable lady) shoves the till shut and sits back down saying thank you and expecting me to leave.  I have a free drink having placed all kinds of stuff on her counter but having been given it all back, and a drink.  All of which might not be very bloggable were it not for this afternoon.

 

This afternoon I was visiting the hospital.  It is a decent journey and with no drink in the car I headed into the Café before doing my visit.  As it happened, and keeping the calories decently low, I set out to purchase the same kind of fizzy water again.  And a dark chocolate  because I'd had no lunch.  The lady in front of me was served.  Then a young, business-looking lady kind of pushed in the line in front of me (I think I was dozingly debating whether to have exactly the same bottle as in the morning).  I was politely  frustrated as I was in a bit of a hurry and she asked for four different drinks for her party.  Ah well.

Then she said, "And I'll pay for this gentleman's drink and chocolate too".  I looked up. "Please", she said.  "I have to use up the company expenses or Ill get offered less next year.  I know it sounds ridiculous and it is.  But I'll buy them".  And so she did.

So I sat down and drank my second free drink of the day (this time with a free chocolate too!)

Or was it the third? Let the one who is thirsty come; and let the one who wishes take the free gift of the water of life