Preaching with a purpose

Instead of yesterday's post about my difficult week I could have made no comment and written you a saintly homily about the Christian life, but that would be dishonest.  If we don't share our problems where can people go when they are in difficulties.  If I pretended the Christian life was just full of roses and mountaintop experiences someone reading my post would wonder why they found everything so difficult when I was floating on cloud number nine.  We need to be honest with one another and admit to the problems we have.  Of course for most of us there are the beautiful days when life is wonderful and that is to be gloried in, but the hard times come too and these are the times that stretch us and make us stronger. We have this idea that life should be wonderful all the time.  Wherever did we get that idea from?  The history of our families before us is one of struggle, why should ours be any different?  This is not heaven, we are not there yet....

Last week I pulled up the drawbridge and went into hibernation.  Everything was just too much for me.  I'm not proud of this reaction to problems but it seems to work for me.  After a week of not knowing why I was doing this, sleeping more or less night and day, I faced up to my problems.  Someone suggested coffee might help, I had a cup and started to perk up.   I was brought up not to make a fuss and this leads me to saying everything is fine when it is not.  Now that I've come out of the womb again I can kick myself into shape and face the world.  After all my problems are minute compared with those of others. "Where was your faith?" I hear you say and you may get a handbag across your head for saying it.  When did faith ever make life easy.  Faith causes you to face battles when you least want to.  Faith is tough to exercise and sometimes the battle is fierce and you need a ditch to lie in to recover.  So look at your own f...

About a week ago I told you I was feeling peculiar due to too much coffee.  Tonight I give you the other side of the story.  This week I have felt rather down and struggled to keep going.  I slept a lot too.  This has been a pattern all my life and now that I am 70 perhaps more likely to happen.  A friend suggested I have a cup of coffee and it helped a lot.  Like many drugs I guess a small amount of it is good for you.

Do you love them or hate them? Do you hate to see the years taking their toll or do you delight in your survival?  I have never worried about anyone knowing my age.  I am 70 and rapidly approaching 71. With age comes the added certainty of death, though that can happen at any age. As a child I was very worried about the thought of death, when I was three a little girl who lived near me and was two, died after an accident. As I have grown older I have been less worried about death and most older people will say the same.  How strange is that?  Dying tends to bother us rather than being dead.  I believe Jesus will take me to live with Him, what could be more wonderful.  I think dying might be something like being born.  The birth process is a traumatic time for the baby. So there is trepidation that dying might be the same.  When a baby is born it soon knows the comfort of its mother's arms, when the believer dies he enters into the joy of His Lord....

So what do my house plants teach me?  I am not the most green fingered of people when it comes to house plants, but I do seem to have some success with orchids and African violets. The orchids need to be stood on the draining board in the kitchen once a week to have about half a jug of water poured onto their roots and allowed to immediately run away and down the sink.  They need feeding about every three weeks.  I find they are happy in a moderate temperature. Recently I have been rewarded with some beautiful blooms, still going strong after six weeks.  Soon, of course the flowers will drop and the plant will need to rest.  The African violet needs a north facing window for preference and needs very, very small amounts of water daily in the dish it stands on. So what do I make of all this in relation to my thoughts on the way young Christians are expected to be.  Well you can give them too much food and too much water(lots of meetings) and wonder why they ...

I wrote recently about gardening and how you should not dig seeds up to see how they are doing and that you should not treat new Christians in that way either. I remembered something from my childhood which also illustrates this in a more radical way.  In the Spring we used to get a jam jar and line it with blotting paper and put water in and then push a runner bean bean between the glass and the blotting paper. (For those who don't know, blotting paper is paper which absorbs liquid and holds on to it.  It was used to blot handwriting written with wet ink, it absorbed the excess ink quickly without causing a mess, so that you could immediately close the exercise book.) The bean in the jar would begin to germinate and send roots down to the water, splitting the bean open.  There followed a shoot going upwards which quickly turned green. This was all very fine for children to see the wonder of new life developing but the poor old bean was usually discarded.  If it was ...

Follow the link.  It's true that under 25's get paid less in Britain for the same work.  I had thought probably that the living wage didn't apply until 20 (still mean) but fancy having to manage on so little for another five years.  So I hope all my readers in the U.K. will get out their internet pens and sign the petition. https://www.change.org/p/greg-clark-mp-paid-less-not-worth-less?recruiter=815977990&utm_source=share_petition&utm_medium=copylink&utm_campaign=psf_combo_share_more.combo_new_control_progress_3nono&utm_term=autopublish