Right I am going to have to check my diary to see what I have done. Writers group has started and one of the others commented that I managed to write different poems about autumn, my response was that I have only written two to date, that hardly is an outstanding track record and I actually had more poems about winter. Having checked things over I find that the autumn poems are actually three, one of far lower quality than the other two. I have quite a few winter ones, a few early spring ones but I cannot recall any whose setting is summer. This is self explanatory to a certain extent, writers group tends to meet in Autumn, Winter and Spring and have holidays in Summer. Another writer asked how many poems I had written and excluding the very early ones with writers group where I was all over the place I have in the region of seventy poems.
Work wise i am busy with a variety of things. The building work got on top of me the week before last but a chance conversation with Peter led to me realising that part of the planning was that if it got too much for me I would work at home. So I decided to institute with the result that I worked at home for two and a half days last week. The result was that I was feeling a lot more rested and finding that I was not collapsing into bed every evening if I did not have to be out. Last Friday there was a course on supporting people doing statistics that I went on. It was interestings, not least because Andrew Mead was there, who I rightly guessed to be the son on Roger Mead, one of the Statistics Professors at Reading all those years ago and also an evangelist within the URC. I know he would not like the title evangelist as theologically that was not where he was at but he was active in setting up Trinity Lower Earley although as a lay person you will not read any of that in the official documents.
This week I think I have got myself talked into co-delivering a statistical course for linguists. This is aimed at staff and research students and is an applied course. In that the idea is to get people to The other person leading it will be from MASH. I invited her to sit with me when I started to advise someone. The first person who came (most have been repeats in the mean time) was a student from landscape. It was actually a design of a questionnaire question and so a single consultation but in doing that I was able to put in some useful things. He reported that what people said about me in Landscape was that I change the way they think about their research making it more rigorous.
Last weekend was a writing one, or what time I had when you took out shopping and so on. The result was that I was probably not spending enough time on the background to what I needed to write. I needed to pick up the use of flows within the social sciences. It is quite popular at present and therefore I could argue that I was working with a metaphor that other used and what I wanted to do was to explore it in a different way. This is far easier than it is to argue that a particular metaphor is applicable. Thus it gave me the transition to the interacting with the data from my ethnography and hopefully bring out something new. Actually it nearly always does bring out something new when you are looking at these metaphors. It is as if the metaphor allows you to see things differently from what you did before.
Yesterday I went to St Andrew’s Elders retreat. I will not be back serving until Easter time, when of course Sarah leaves. There are big in progress in South Yorkshire as the big churches start to lose their ministers. The model that is going is far more that of a cell church, with the local congregations being responsible for their meeting for worship week by week and ministers really functioning in an oversight role. There will be only two ministers in Sheffield when Sarah leaves although the hope is to recruit another although that one might well be inducted to the whole of Sheffield which should be interesting as who gets to issue the call.The situation with the chaplaincy is also interesting. I am not sure about what the resolution would be.
I suddenly had a brainwave last night and thought that what I would like is one place I could go to look at a variety of URC blogs. I recalled that something similar was done at work so did a hunt around and eventually came across NetVibes and I created this web page . It is not complete but I am slowly collecting those I can find. If anyone knows of any others then please let me know. They need to be blogs clearly connected with the URC.
Today I went to church because I was doing the sound. It worked fine for me although I did put Sarah up slightly. The theme was musical as it was close to St Cecilia's day and therefore it was a good time to honour the choir and those who bring their musical talents to the worship of the church. However Sarah picked up a theme around musical harmony being a metaphor for church life that I had used in an article I wrote for the Messenger . Oddly enough Anne Cathel’s picked this up as being well written piece the previous day which was why I had just checked what I had written. Otherwise today has been fairly quiet.
Showing posts with label Poetry. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Poetry. Show all posts
Sunday, November 18, 2012
Sunday, February 19, 2012
From a Bright-Cold Winters Afternoon
The Monday before last I took a piece of poetry I had written to writers group as I usually do only this time the piece was written from a voice that was not my own. In this case Jack Frost, it was rather fun to do, but I do think that the cold was getting to me! Since that worked fairly well I have since written a piece that is pure fantasy, well it is a way of talking about feelings that I need to work through but being put in a total fantasy situation. I will see on Monday how well that works.
Work wise I have been busy. The work keeps coming in and every time I think it is going to ease I find something more. At present I have four long term bits of work on. An analysis that is ready to role but I am finding it very difficult to explain what the results are and this is once I have transformed into variables that are easier to interpret. Every time I think I have it sorted there is something new. I have a course which I am trying to get into videos so people can study it at their own pace and now have a new analysis which is looking at folate. Then there is the research bids. By the way for sharing documents I am finding Dropbox really good. Once it is installed on a computer it just looks like an extra folder in which you can store things but it shares those things with everyone else who has access to them. On top of this I am dealing with queries that come in and there is hidden reorganisation going on as well. I wonder how I get my department to realise that ninety percent of research computing is not done on big machines. Fifty percent of it is done I suspect using Word, bibliographic searches and such.
On Monday this week I spent sometime with someone from the the Research and Innovations Services and they were saying what I have always known, that researchers want a continuity of care when they deal with CICS, computing queries for them are not one offs but part of the ongoing research process and to have to deal with someone new each time is bewildering. On the other hand the machine room guys don’t want to be hassled with answering the phone. The thing is CICS actually do have more staff than me doing this but none of us publicise our work as their are far to few of us. The fact is that I am run off my feet doing what I do, I suspect if we had a team of a dozen of us doing it we would all be equally busy and we would find the same with some other specialised groups.
The photo is one of two I managed to take with my camera with a macro filter, I am still learning to use it particularly as it seems I need to use manual focus. I might see if I can buy a pot of snowdrops next weekend and have a go taking photos indoors where I can spend lots of time fiddling with the controls without my fingers going numb. I also got a new coffee maker called an Aeropress. This was to replace my large cafeteria that fell out of a cupboard and smashed. Unfortunately the Aeropress though it makes good strong coffee only makes small quantities. I wish I had found that website before I started trying it might have saved me a lot of bother.
This weekend and last weekend have been thesis writing ones. The result has been almost 6,000 more words onto my thesis although and I have also been trying to cut my methodology chapter down to size. It is now under 20,000 (in fact I think it is under 19000) but it could still do with going on a diet. It was in the region of 23,000 all put together so I guess I have lost around 4,000 words. The nice thing has been despite having to cut back like this I have still managed to put in more words than I have cut. So I am getting closer and closer to my end point. I also have crossed the 30,000 point so if things keep going I may make 40,000 words by Easter (or the half way point).
I seem to have got myself a couple of jobs at St Andrews Sheffield, one is being a committee of size one (very convenient for meetings) which takes long term view on audio and media including budget (a bit like the choirs praise committee but with even less members). Then St Andrews is reviewing its committee structure and I seem to have been recommended for being on the working group for that. I hope we can think out of the box as if I and James have read the suggestion right it will be more work intensive than the present one (a single extra level of complexity) but what Sarah has talked to me about is much leaner.
Sunday, July 3, 2011
They call this quiet!
Right I think this will have to be a highlights writing again as life has been busy and I don’t think you want to read a book about what has been going on. Early part of the week before last was a mix between busy and down with a migraine catching me out on the Tuesday and have SRDS which is the annual personal performance review on the Wednesday.
Then on the Thursday it was off to Birmingham for a supervision. It was useful in a number of ways. Firstly even though I have not finished my placement I am now writing for my thesis. The writing before has been exploratory on the whole and I have tended to have based it around essay/article approach. This gives a very intense and immediate focus to what I write, however when I write for my thesis, the pieces are less focused. I am often putting a marker to say here is something that either needs to go elsewhere or will be written about elsewhere. I suspect if I get to writing a Reformed piety it will be rather different to other people’s yet people will recognise it as delineating the area. The reason being is that most people seem to describe as elements that must be there for it to be Reformed, I tend rather to see it as a sets of tensions and forces that have to be negotiated. The form is rarely totally dominated by a single group of thought and different strands include different elements. What makes them Reformed is that the negotiation takes place.
Friday was the breakfast and there were forty six meals served. I was whacked by the end of it but also was officially in work. At one stage Sarah and I had to set up another table so people coming in had somewhere to sit. It seems as if it is more popular in the summer when it is pleasant to get up and go outside but we are not sure. There also has been some grumbling about the Archer project.
Saturday Mum and Dad came over. Shopping list was as follows:
Decaf coffee, fruit, veg, soya dream all from Waitrose
Shoes, black flat with a high buckle strap for Mum
Mobile phone for Dad as his old one was switching on but not maintaining a connection. As you'd guess we spent quite a while going around the shops. Fortunately everything we wanted seemed to come fairly readily to had. O2 does a really cheap phone that has fairly clear buttons which Dad was happy with, Jones had a sale on where a pair of Ecco shoes in just the design mum wanted in her size were available. This was good as the combination is not usually very common in summer. We then made the mistake of going to Marks and Spencers for a drink. I forgot that the cafe is now on the second floor. This is not a good combination with my parents as there is no down escalator from the second to the first floor so with Dad finding going down steps more difficult these days I have to persuade him to use the lift.
Sunday was a very busy thesis day. Not only was their worship on the morning followed by church meeting but there was also Baptisms at 6pm followed by socialising. The people getting baptised were all church youth, who had been brought up in the faith. As part of the service they had the poem GodGazer which the two girls had found very meaningful. I found it difficult to connect with and I am wondering why. It is a polemical poem, my work is mainly descriptive and I felt at times that the polemic was allowed to break the poetic voice too readily or used as a “get out of jail free” card when he really should have worked harder at what his was doing. I don’t object to breaking the voice particularly the rhythm but you need to be doing it for a purpose and less is more. That said, I would also say two of the readers were under rehearsed and that that made it harder to appreciate. A performance by the author is also on the web Oddly enough though not directly inspired by this I think the next poem I take to writers group will be more polemical. There is stuff boiling around as well. Anyway the church was packed, about 50% from Herringthorpe and 50% friends and relatives, some coming quite a distance. The moderator Kevin Watson preached and there was a band, partly from musicians in the church and partly from friends who had come in. There were traditional hymns at the start and the finish but officially set to new tunes. Amazing grace at the start was at least in part, one of the verses was used as a chorus and was definitely sung to a new tune however I am not sure of the rest of the verses. The other one was Lord of all Hopefulness, which as far as I can tell was same tune but different accompaniment! However at long last I have seen evidence that my suspicion that there is new music I don’t know is correct. All the songs chosen by the young people to be sung after their baptism were new to me. At about 8:00 pm when the church was emptying I went home, the congregation went around to one of the parents/grandparents home and carried on partying until the wee hours of the morning. Facebook can be quite useful for fieldwork sometimes.
Officially this has been a quiet week. It certainly does not feel like it. During it I have been tackling a dataset for a student doing her masters in Human Nutrition. The problem was the sheer quantity of data and getting it into a form where she could hope to write a paper from it. The problem is that the data is electronically recorded and therefore it is easy to collect but the tendency is too collect too much.
I have also come across something odd. I sometimes been finding that I wanted a chocolate at the end of lunch and it was chocolate and not generally something sweet. I decided to try and see if coffee would do instead. I made filter coffee and see if that did. It did. So I presumed caffeine fix, until I read the packet and found I was using decaffeinated! So that rules that one out.
I am taking this weekend quiet. Friday was my study day and I started putting together the introductory paper for the study day next week as well as serve breakfasts (forty four this week). Yesterday I did some shopping. I bought a long armed stapler as I need it for putting the booklets together. I did a Wordle of my thesis but not exactly. I also bought a cardigan and a pair of pyjamas. All my current summer ones are comfy but old variety and I spending the night in Woodbrooke Hall before the study day. Today I have been in, largely due to the Race for Life being on in Sheffield city centre. What I have learnt is that going to my placement church on such days is a nightmare of logistics, it might well be quicker by train and bus.
Then on the Thursday it was off to Birmingham for a supervision. It was useful in a number of ways. Firstly even though I have not finished my placement I am now writing for my thesis. The writing before has been exploratory on the whole and I have tended to have based it around essay/article approach. This gives a very intense and immediate focus to what I write, however when I write for my thesis, the pieces are less focused. I am often putting a marker to say here is something that either needs to go elsewhere or will be written about elsewhere. I suspect if I get to writing a Reformed piety it will be rather different to other people’s yet people will recognise it as delineating the area. The reason being is that most people seem to describe as elements that must be there for it to be Reformed, I tend rather to see it as a sets of tensions and forces that have to be negotiated. The form is rarely totally dominated by a single group of thought and different strands include different elements. What makes them Reformed is that the negotiation takes place.
Friday was the breakfast and there were forty six meals served. I was whacked by the end of it but also was officially in work. At one stage Sarah and I had to set up another table so people coming in had somewhere to sit. It seems as if it is more popular in the summer when it is pleasant to get up and go outside but we are not sure. There also has been some grumbling about the Archer project.
Saturday Mum and Dad came over. Shopping list was as follows:
Decaf coffee, fruit, veg, soya dream all from Waitrose
Shoes, black flat with a high buckle strap for Mum
Mobile phone for Dad as his old one was switching on but not maintaining a connection. As you'd guess we spent quite a while going around the shops. Fortunately everything we wanted seemed to come fairly readily to had. O2 does a really cheap phone that has fairly clear buttons which Dad was happy with, Jones had a sale on where a pair of Ecco shoes in just the design mum wanted in her size were available. This was good as the combination is not usually very common in summer. We then made the mistake of going to Marks and Spencers for a drink. I forgot that the cafe is now on the second floor. This is not a good combination with my parents as there is no down escalator from the second to the first floor so with Dad finding going down steps more difficult these days I have to persuade him to use the lift.
Sunday was a very busy thesis day. Not only was their worship on the morning followed by church meeting but there was also Baptisms at 6pm followed by socialising. The people getting baptised were all church youth, who had been brought up in the faith. As part of the service they had the poem GodGazer which the two girls had found very meaningful. I found it difficult to connect with and I am wondering why. It is a polemical poem, my work is mainly descriptive and I felt at times that the polemic was allowed to break the poetic voice too readily or used as a “get out of jail free” card when he really should have worked harder at what his was doing. I don’t object to breaking the voice particularly the rhythm but you need to be doing it for a purpose and less is more. That said, I would also say two of the readers were under rehearsed and that that made it harder to appreciate. A performance by the author is also on the web Oddly enough though not directly inspired by this I think the next poem I take to writers group will be more polemical. There is stuff boiling around as well. Anyway the church was packed, about 50% from Herringthorpe and 50% friends and relatives, some coming quite a distance. The moderator Kevin Watson preached and there was a band, partly from musicians in the church and partly from friends who had come in. There were traditional hymns at the start and the finish but officially set to new tunes. Amazing grace at the start was at least in part, one of the verses was used as a chorus and was definitely sung to a new tune however I am not sure of the rest of the verses. The other one was Lord of all Hopefulness, which as far as I can tell was same tune but different accompaniment! However at long last I have seen evidence that my suspicion that there is new music I don’t know is correct. All the songs chosen by the young people to be sung after their baptism were new to me. At about 8:00 pm when the church was emptying I went home, the congregation went around to one of the parents/grandparents home and carried on partying until the wee hours of the morning. Facebook can be quite useful for fieldwork sometimes.
Officially this has been a quiet week. It certainly does not feel like it. During it I have been tackling a dataset for a student doing her masters in Human Nutrition. The problem was the sheer quantity of data and getting it into a form where she could hope to write a paper from it. The problem is that the data is electronically recorded and therefore it is easy to collect but the tendency is too collect too much.
I have also come across something odd. I sometimes been finding that I wanted a chocolate at the end of lunch and it was chocolate and not generally something sweet. I decided to try and see if coffee would do instead. I made filter coffee and see if that did. It did. So I presumed caffeine fix, until I read the packet and found I was using decaffeinated! So that rules that one out.
I am taking this weekend quiet. Friday was my study day and I started putting together the introductory paper for the study day next week as well as serve breakfasts (forty four this week). Yesterday I did some shopping. I bought a long armed stapler as I need it for putting the booklets together. I did a Wordle of my thesis but not exactly. I also bought a cardigan and a pair of pyjamas. All my current summer ones are comfy but old variety and I spending the night in Woodbrooke Hall before the study day. Today I have been in, largely due to the Race for Life being on in Sheffield city centre. What I have learnt is that going to my placement church on such days is a nightmare of logistics, it might well be quicker by train and bus.
Sunday, November 21, 2010
A more straightforward week
This week has been quieter, although Stuart has been given compulsory leave (he’d got himself in a situation where he was not coping and needed time to rest and recuperate) so been around slightly more often than he is usually.
Monday was writers group on sequencing poems. This was interesting although I don’t think I am up to deliberately writing a sequence of poems at the moment. The other way around where I accidentally write poems that form a sequence seems far more likely. I do seem to work on themes at least unintentionally. There maybe a sequence developing from Autumn to Spring. I am also beginning to realise that I may be a halfway decent amateur poet, which is surprise, as I took to poems largely because I could not find the time for consistent concentration to write longer fiction. Interestingly another person in the group seems to be following much the same line. Before anyone asks, until I have finished my PhD I an not even considering trying to get any of them published more formally. It takes time and effort that I do not have. By the way I have a memory of Browning referencing Shelley’s Ozymandias in one of his poems but am unable to find the citing.
Tuesday I manage Bible study, which was quite quiet although people hung around afterwards which is unusual for this congregation. If this was Parrswood I would just treat it as normal but as a rule everyone is out by 9pm prompt. I think it might be due to a couple going on holiday but I am not sure.
Wednesday I managed to not notice that I was meeting my boss at 9:30 (it had changed several times and my brain still had it as 11:30 which I think was one of the earlier times. However otherwise the day went fluently. Stuart came around in the evening and I think I managed to talk him into going to Castleton on Friday so that he did something.
Thursday was my day off and I had a bitty sort of day, Cliff was coming to set the sound system us so that it could take sound from a PC. This appears not to be difficult but it was something new to me. However Cliff was ill on the day, so he postponed it from 9:30 to when he was able to come out (about 3:00 p.m.) I had said to my supervisor I would put up a discussion board for his tutorial group. I had tried the previous Friday evening but the straightforward method had not worked. So I was trying to do one in Drupal. This was more complicated but also a better solution. I also managed to finally get around to organising things so that I have a separate web address and the ability to put it up for “Wigtonshire Wandering”. I need to learn some more Drupal then I can set up the basics of the website and we can go on to develop from that.
Friday I saw my boss, she rather threw me saying she would be five minutes late as the queue was long in Coffee Revolution and would I like anything. In the end I asked for a black coffee and said that next time it is my treat. On the evening James and Jean took me out for a meal at Panahar's an Indian restaurant at the bottom of Tom Lane. It does not have an alcohol license but you can bring your own and it serves a decent range of soft drinks. The interesting thing being that I don’t think anyone in our party was drinking. James was driving and Jean and I were too tired to actually want to drink anything. The food was good but they put what I suspect are Asian or Thai chilli peppers in their vegetable dish. Unfortunately I mistook them for green beans. This was not a good idea and the main problem was that it blew my taste buds, so eating any level of spiced food afterwards was painful. Before that I had tried the food and it tasted good. I had dessert of sorbet which cooled my mouth and took away much of the stinging, although if my mouth gets slightly dry it returns.
Yesterday was bitty as well. The tiredness in part was due to a not quite migraine, so I felt fragile on Saturday morning. I then went down town, bought a number of things I needed including a folder for my poems. I realised that I was actually developing quite a collection and it needed some sort of sorting rather than all just bunged in my writing folder. What I actually also need to do is produce final pieces as most of the work is in draft state. Some only require words changing, others require quite large re-writes. I also found out that my home phone is not working. I have reported it and at present if you ring my home number you get through to my mobile. They should let me know what is going on in the next twenty four hours so they have found a fault. I was worried that Cliff had just not managed to hang up as he was the last person to call me or that the phone itself had given up. I got in and then messed around, doing so reading on Drupal, until Sarah rang to say she and James and Jean were heading down to St Andrews after the elder’s retreat, I assume at St Luke’s Lodgemoor. For those who wonder why this has moved, the Church Army College is having lots of work done at present and there is no way they could accommodate it. We were setting up the church so that today Sarah could play a video through her laptop. Stuart came around again in the evening.
Today, I was officially not going to church this morning. Just as well as my body clock had not got itself back on track after the disturbance of the almost migraine. Sarah rang me early because one sound operator was down with the flu and the other had injured his ankle. Unfortunately I can’t get my mobile phone to ring loudly enough to wake me when I am having a lie in. So I only picked up the second phone call when Ray Smith had already agreed to do the sound. However it did mean I made sure I was up and dressed by 10:30 just in case. This evening I was leading worship at Herringthorpe. Now before anyone gets any idea about what sort of thing this is, just think of leading bible study. That is the group gather over a coffee and biscuit, sing a few songs and then discuss a chapter in a book which has a bible passage attached and about an hour later we say some prayers. This is NOT PREACHING and it is no indication that I think I should be leading worship in other settings. Oh and the theme was the discipline of joy. Unfortunately that comes across as people saying “be happy” when I think the theme really was a lot better, about savouring/appreciating/enjoying things as they happen, practising gratitude and then allowing yourself to celebrate. The third thing arises naturally out of the previous two and when it doesn’t there is no reason to stick a smile on your face because Christians are joyful. As I said I can do five minutes a day of the first.
Monday was writers group on sequencing poems. This was interesting although I don’t think I am up to deliberately writing a sequence of poems at the moment. The other way around where I accidentally write poems that form a sequence seems far more likely. I do seem to work on themes at least unintentionally. There maybe a sequence developing from Autumn to Spring. I am also beginning to realise that I may be a halfway decent amateur poet, which is surprise, as I took to poems largely because I could not find the time for consistent concentration to write longer fiction. Interestingly another person in the group seems to be following much the same line. Before anyone asks, until I have finished my PhD I an not even considering trying to get any of them published more formally. It takes time and effort that I do not have. By the way I have a memory of Browning referencing Shelley’s Ozymandias in one of his poems but am unable to find the citing.
Tuesday I manage Bible study, which was quite quiet although people hung around afterwards which is unusual for this congregation. If this was Parrswood I would just treat it as normal but as a rule everyone is out by 9pm prompt. I think it might be due to a couple going on holiday but I am not sure.
Wednesday I managed to not notice that I was meeting my boss at 9:30 (it had changed several times and my brain still had it as 11:30 which I think was one of the earlier times. However otherwise the day went fluently. Stuart came around in the evening and I think I managed to talk him into going to Castleton on Friday so that he did something.
Thursday was my day off and I had a bitty sort of day, Cliff was coming to set the sound system us so that it could take sound from a PC. This appears not to be difficult but it was something new to me. However Cliff was ill on the day, so he postponed it from 9:30 to when he was able to come out (about 3:00 p.m.) I had said to my supervisor I would put up a discussion board for his tutorial group. I had tried the previous Friday evening but the straightforward method had not worked. So I was trying to do one in Drupal. This was more complicated but also a better solution. I also managed to finally get around to organising things so that I have a separate web address and the ability to put it up for “Wigtonshire Wandering”. I need to learn some more Drupal then I can set up the basics of the website and we can go on to develop from that.
Friday I saw my boss, she rather threw me saying she would be five minutes late as the queue was long in Coffee Revolution and would I like anything. In the end I asked for a black coffee and said that next time it is my treat. On the evening James and Jean took me out for a meal at Panahar's an Indian restaurant at the bottom of Tom Lane. It does not have an alcohol license but you can bring your own and it serves a decent range of soft drinks. The interesting thing being that I don’t think anyone in our party was drinking. James was driving and Jean and I were too tired to actually want to drink anything. The food was good but they put what I suspect are Asian or Thai chilli peppers in their vegetable dish. Unfortunately I mistook them for green beans. This was not a good idea and the main problem was that it blew my taste buds, so eating any level of spiced food afterwards was painful. Before that I had tried the food and it tasted good. I had dessert of sorbet which cooled my mouth and took away much of the stinging, although if my mouth gets slightly dry it returns.
Yesterday was bitty as well. The tiredness in part was due to a not quite migraine, so I felt fragile on Saturday morning. I then went down town, bought a number of things I needed including a folder for my poems. I realised that I was actually developing quite a collection and it needed some sort of sorting rather than all just bunged in my writing folder. What I actually also need to do is produce final pieces as most of the work is in draft state. Some only require words changing, others require quite large re-writes. I also found out that my home phone is not working. I have reported it and at present if you ring my home number you get through to my mobile. They should let me know what is going on in the next twenty four hours so they have found a fault. I was worried that Cliff had just not managed to hang up as he was the last person to call me or that the phone itself had given up. I got in and then messed around, doing so reading on Drupal, until Sarah rang to say she and James and Jean were heading down to St Andrews after the elder’s retreat, I assume at St Luke’s Lodgemoor. For those who wonder why this has moved, the Church Army College is having lots of work done at present and there is no way they could accommodate it. We were setting up the church so that today Sarah could play a video through her laptop. Stuart came around again in the evening.
Today, I was officially not going to church this morning. Just as well as my body clock had not got itself back on track after the disturbance of the almost migraine. Sarah rang me early because one sound operator was down with the flu and the other had injured his ankle. Unfortunately I can’t get my mobile phone to ring loudly enough to wake me when I am having a lie in. So I only picked up the second phone call when Ray Smith had already agreed to do the sound. However it did mean I made sure I was up and dressed by 10:30 just in case. This evening I was leading worship at Herringthorpe. Now before anyone gets any idea about what sort of thing this is, just think of leading bible study. That is the group gather over a coffee and biscuit, sing a few songs and then discuss a chapter in a book which has a bible passage attached and about an hour later we say some prayers. This is NOT PREACHING and it is no indication that I think I should be leading worship in other settings. Oh and the theme was the discipline of joy. Unfortunately that comes across as people saying “be happy” when I think the theme really was a lot better, about savouring/appreciating/enjoying things as they happen, practising gratitude and then allowing yourself to celebrate. The third thing arises naturally out of the previous two and when it doesn’t there is no reason to stick a smile on your face because Christians are joyful. As I said I can do five minutes a day of the first.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)