Perish the thought

We thought about many things at our Harvest Thanksgiving on Sunday.  One thing we thought about was perishability.  How long would anything last that was on display?

 

 

 



Typically, the Star of the Show - homemade bread without preservatives - though much admired was deemed to be the first to go in the perishability stakes.  So we ate it for harvest Lunch, which was very nice.  It seems that so many wonderful things just don't have the legs to last (or in the case of food items get legs and for that reason don't last . . .).

What, though, would last the longest?  "Canned stuff", was the general answer. The question was spontaneous, so I am quite proud (sorry) that I may have even got the answer right as I looked at the display and made my own guess - Bisto.  The combination of being sealed and dried and salty makes it almost everlasting - certainly half a lifetime.  Not much fun compared to homemade bread though.

What I was really looking for, though, (and it wasn't there) was honey.  Honey lasts for a very long time too and is great to eat as well!

 

Then there is the honey for your soul:

 

My son, eat honey, for it is good, and the drippings of the honeycomb are sweet to your taste. Know that wisdom is such to your soul; if you find it, there will be a future, and your hope will not be cut off.

Trust or Rust

How brilliant it was to think about these words on Sunday. 

Yesterday I was waiting for a bus.  Maybe my eyes played tricks on me but I thought I saw one coming in the far distance of a straight road where I was waiting.  I was wrong.  It wasn't a bus but a truck.

 

So did I stop waiting?  Of course not.  I trusted that, with no sight of it, a bus would come.  We must learn to trust if we are to wait upon the Lord and be made new.

Falling Apart

A few blog readers will know to whom I refer , but out of internet modesty I will content myself with the relative anonymity of writing that I was recently in a meeting with a Government Minister.  The purpose of the meeting was itself interesting (and not at all confidential).  What caught my attention was a little phrase that the minister used in passing:  referring to the general state of the nations the minister commented, "things seem to be falling apart everywhere at the moment".

 

 

In itself it is plain obvious.  Libya, Syria, Iraq, Ukraine, Nigeria, Somalia, Central African Republic, South Sudan, Egypt, Tunisia, Palestine, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Mali and even, in its own way, the (formerly) United Kingdom.

 

I suppose if I'd heard two congregants in Church, two people at a bus stop or two people watching the news on TV saying it I'd have barely noticed.  But a Government Minister?  So even up there at the Top it looks scary?

 

Well, thank God that Top is not the real Top.

 

Among a thousand Bible verses that help - but less well known than most - the disasters of the human story are characterised as God gathering grapes . . .

 

Still another angel, who had charge of the fire, came from the altar and called in a loud voice to him who had the sharp sickle, "Take your sharp sickle and gather the clusters of grapes from the earth's vine, because its grapes are ripe."

 

From the real Top it really does look different.