Longing for home

So I’m having my tea just now (or dinner, whatever you want to call your evening meal), but sadly I’m having it at work as I’m taking a break between the manic late-for-everything day that I’ve had and the intense when-will-it-be-over? evening I’m about to enter into.

It’s been a weird couple of days.  I’ve heard so much bad news about people that I know or know of in the last 48 hours that I am just longing to go home to the security of my little family and enjoy that taste of heaven I posted on the other day.

And tonight I’m going to help deliver an induction course for this year’s new intake of students, when to be blunt, I’d rather be doing anything else.  I’ve got the perky ‘let’s all get to know one another and do some fun stuff together’ part of the evening, starting in 40 minutes time.  My mind is not really on the games I should be preparing, the theory I should be linking it to (the course is all about play) and the general enthusiasm and passion I should be getting over to these students. 

Home is where my heart is tonight.  I’m looking forward to a bit of sanctuary, a safe harbour from the world I’ve found myself in today.  I’m looking forward to a cup of tea snuggled on the sofa, to not being ‘on-duty’ even when I’m ‘off-duty’ - this is an inevitability of my work, like many others too.  I worked later last night too, and I’m sad that this week and for the next few weeks I’ll be missing my daughter’s bedtime for two nights out of seven.  I’m going to tiptoe into her darkened room tonight and kiss her goodnight, looking forward to tomorrow’s breakfast and the disorganised chaos of our mornings, when I’ll be able to have a few sleepy minutes to chat with her as she wakes up.

Today has not been a day to be far from my family, and yet is the one day this week that we’ve spent the least time together. 

Well, off I go to be perky and enthused.  Have a good evening!

Money worries and a little perspective

How many times a day does the average UK resident hear the phrase ‘credit crunch’ I wonder?  I feel like a conversation isn’t complete until someone’s managed to finagle that nasty little phrase in.

Like most people, I’m not immune to worrying about this, although continuing yesterday’s open-handedness theme and the inspiration of a few really good conversations that have happened over the weekend I’m trying to relax and let God figure it out. 

This article has also provided some perspective.  A dose of humility is good medicine for me…

Sacred space

A wee while back I mentioned I’d been reading a book called “Motherhood and God”.  I’ve been mulling over a chapter in it called ‘Homemaking’, and want to mull over it a little more publicly here.

Homemaking - yeuch, I hate that word.  It sounds so nineteen fifties and Stepford wifey.  It sounds so, well, unfeminist.  And yet, homemaking minus those connotations is something that we all do, male or female.  It seems to be a human instinct to create our own ‘nests’ which make us feel safe, provide us with refuge - physical and more - from the world at large.

The chapter in the book which discusses this looks at the role of the home from a kind of spiritual perspective and it’s really made me reflect on my own valuing of home and why that is.

Making a home is one of the deepest, intrinsic drives of motherhood.  Making your house warm and comfortable and friendly is the necessary physical expression of the emotional security that every mother needs to give her child.  The first home of every human being is its mother’s womb.  There is found warmth, security and softness.  When we plan a house for our family it is a sort of projected womb, so it is natural to want to provide warm, soft beds and safe electric points and space in which both children and parents feel free to develop

And yet how many mothers in the world are able to realise this apparently natural instinct, amidst the poverty and privation in today’s world?

However, I do like to share our home with others although I don’t think we do this nearly enough.  Because conversely I also like the retreat our home provides, the chance to get away from the world for a while.  Maybe I need to recognise that that quality in itself is also one to share.

…it is right and natural that you should go on to share [your home] with others.  It is very satisfying to share some of your family warmth and security with guests, whether they just drop in for coffee, share a meal, or stay a week.  I know I have drawn strength and comfort from being in other people’s houses…Sharing a home is a way of mediating the strength and comfort that we should spread as Christians…We try always to have a spare bed available, and that symbolises something about wanting to offer a continual welcome even when we do not get round to issuing invitations.

This resonates with me so much.  We made a decision when we bought the home that we’re in that we’d really try to use it as what it is, God’s house.  This kind of conscious open-handedness is perhaps easier to talk about or resolve to practice than it is to actually get on and do. 

However, there is a bigger idea behind all this, which the writer goes on to look at when she writes about how we use the idea of home as a way of understanding or expressing life after death.  And for me I think this is why there is a sacredness to ‘home’. 

Heaven will be like getting home after walking miles through the cold and wet and dark during a bus strike, and relaxing in a deep, warm bath with lots of bath foam and strains of Mozart coming through the open door.  Heaven will be like waking every morning in your own bed to find your husband warm and safe beside you, and your children healthy and lively, bouncing in to greet you, and knowing that it will always be so.  Heaven will be like coming out of hospital, where you did not like the food and did not like the hours, did not know the people and did not like the room, and knowing that now in your own house you can eat what you like when you like, be with the people you like and be surrounded by objects you like, and feeling so relieved about it that you hardly mind any more if you feel ill or not.  When we say heaven is our home we mean it will be a place of uninhibited restfulness where nothing has to be done at any precise time, where nothing grates on our consciousness, and where we do not have to think about doing, but can simply be.

My home is a sacred space to me, not always perfectly realised, but a taste of heaven.  I need to consider how to extend that concept of sacredness so that it can be felt by others.  Because we all need a place to call home, or places we can go and have the experience of a home away from home.  To share that with someone is a true gift, and a true blessing to receive. 

Thank you to the many people who have shared their own sacred space with me and my family.  We hope to return the blessing.

Bye for now

We’re off on holiday tomorrow in the wee small hours, and I don’t expect to be doing any blogging while we’re away, so can I direct you to all the cool blogs on my blogroll instead?  All worth checking out  (but TSTIAI will be on holiday too…)

I’ll be back the week beginning 15th September.  In the meantime, I’ll be thinking of you while we’re working our way round the various foodie venues in Cornwall, and chilling out with our very good friends who are the glue that’s holding our holiday plans together!

I’m away to pack my bucket and spade…

Sick and tired

Yup, sick again.  Only a cold, and one the three of us have, to a greater or lesser extent been sharing.  But I like to do these things well, so I’ve got the Monster 3000 version.  Last night I ended up not sleeping much and then started to get all wheezy and breathless which was scary and lasted a bit too long for my liking.  So I trotted off to our fantastic doctor’s surgery this morning and was told it was a ‘viral induced wheeze - more common in young children…’.  So I have an infantile breathing problem, (and now an inhaler to help me out if it goes pear shaped again tonight), a beetroot red nose which is dripping like a running tap, and to top it all, spots. 

THEN when I was driving back from picking up my prescription and about to head out to work, it begins to bucket with rain again.  I turned my wipers on, there was a horrific grinding noise, and my wipers stopped wiping just like that.  At this point the rain redoubled it’s efforts, so I was now driving effectively blind down one of Edinburgh’s busiest streets in pouring rain at about 5 miles an hour since I could see not much further than the end of my bonnet.  And my nose was running and I had a cold sweat.  Nice.

So the car goes into the nearest garage (which as it turned out, happily, is the one opposite my house) I abandon it there for the nice guy to look at and phone my husband to see if I can borrow his car.  He kindly says yes and heads down to his work car park to bring it to our house.  However, his work car park is in a basement with a car lift for access.  The lift breaks, he’s stuck in the car park wondering what to do for 20 minutes, while I’m at home looking anxiously out of the window for him and counting the minutes to the work meeting I’ve not been able to cancel because I can’t get hold of the person involved. 

Eventually my mother in law kindly gives me a lift to work, my husba nd gets out of the car park (well, he wasn’t stuck, just the cars) and by the end of the day my car is fixed (although we’re £200 lighter to get it that way).  I still haven’t been able to speak to the person I was meant to meet.  Both my husband and I have spent a good chunk of this evening working, although admittedly I spent another good chunk lying in the bath reading my now soggy copy of ‘Blue like Jazz’.  And my cup of tea has gone cold while I’ve been furiously venting all this here.  Okay, those last two aren’t terrible.

Still, sometimes you just wish you could have stayed in bed don’t you?  Hope life is treating you all well.  I’m going to get some sleep now, hopefully, and start afresh tomorrow.  Bring on the joy, indeed.

Good stuff

Whatever is good, whatever is noble…

Here’s some good stuff that’s been inspiring me:

• dufi art - beautiful, creative work that I wish I had thought of first (and had the talent to do…)
• Fin Macrae Photography - this is just stunning work, total picture poetry
• Blue Sky Photography - different kind of photography, but really beautiful, and run as a great business.  Brilliant photography by very very cool people
• Seven Men - a new and inspiring business venture, run on really sound principles by really sound people

They are just off the top of my head just now.  The first two names are recent discoveries for me.  All thanks to the wonder of blogging!

Any good stuff of your own to share?  Recommendations of really excellent businesses, people, projects that have inspired you, moved you, and awoken in you that sense of appreciation for ‘goodness’?

And on the drums we have…

I was browsing Coffee Shop Journal the other day and read this great post in praise of drummers.  My husband is a drummer so anything nice said about them tends to catch my attention.  And this in particular draws great parallels with life and has inspired me to consider, like Marla, how I might be like a good drummer, holding it all together to enable others to exercise their gifts and make a wonderful whole.

Safe

I was recently lent an amazing book called “Motherhood and God”.  Written by Margaret Hebblethwaite and published in 1984, it’s one of those books you wish you’d always known about.  (Thank you to SW & CW for the loan!)

I’ve actually barely started it, but it’s totally enveloped me.  There is some beautiful writing, striking imagery and truth and integrity bursting from every page.  I’ve been getting annoyed with my husband, TSTIAI, for taking forever to read Shane Claiborne’s “Jesus for President”, but he tells me that he just needs to keep stopping and mulling over (for a looooong time) every few paragraphs because the book just says so much.  Which is great, as it’s clearly a great book, but also infuriating because I want to read it NOW!  Anyway, here’s a public apology for my impatience, because in “Motherhood and God” I’m having an equivalent experience.  I’m on page 25, and already I’ve had enough ’stop and think’ moments, or even ‘blown away by profundity’ moments I could spend the next month just blogging on what those few pages have stirred up.  As I said, it’s an amazing book.

If we are God’s children it might be helpful to imagine ourselves sometimes as in her womb.  There could not be a closer image of warmth, security and protection.  There we have all our needs provided for in perfect measure, as the baby receives oxygen and nourishment without deficiency or excess through the umbilical cord.  In God’s womb we can stretch and turn in every direction, just as the baby, suspended in water, is as happy upside down as the right way up, and in the early months can exercise its limbs freely.  Wherever God our mother takes us we will be safe and provided for; whether in cold or heat, storm or drought, we will be protected.  Wherever we journey to we will still be at home, for the presence of our mother’s body is closer to us than our geographical location.  God is closer to us than the ground we stand on.  Even though we have never seen our mother, perhaps are quite unaware of her, or even deny her existence, she is in perfect and constant intimacy with us, and when we are born into the light of her presence we will recognise that she has been with us all along.

When I first read this, I found it so moving, and such a perfect analogy in many ways of how we travel through this life.  Perhaps like me you were initially jarred, or even shocked, by the author referring to God as mother.  I’ve been reflecting on this and wondering why, since both male and female are both in God’s likeness and so presumably it is potentially as valid to think of God as Father or Mother.  I love thinking of God as my daddy, but this passage expressed an aspect of God that is perhaps glossed over. 

And yes, to know that I’m being mothered and fathered by the loving God does make me feel safe.  Being hemmed in by God, as in Psalm 139, is a wonderful thing.

Do you speak the language of hope?

Howies does.

Living in four dimensions

Do you ever find yourself wondering how things would have turned out if you’d done things differently at some specific point in the past?

What if I studied this instead of that?

What if I’d lived there instead of here?

What if … what if … what if …?

Today I was squished in a car with a few of my colleagues, en route back from a meeting.  In the course of conversation one of us said that he loathed Margaret Thatcher, but he had her to thank for making him into the person he is.  In other words, in reaction to her leadership of Britain, he found his own political backbone, and ultimately all that came from that shaped the man he is today.  We mused over what kind of man he might have been, should she never had come to power in 1979 and he had never found himself with a political axe to grind during his teens and early twenties.

And I guess that’s true of us all.  Which road did we choose?  What if we’d gone the other way?  What if that hadn’t happened when it did - or never happened at all? 

What experiences were defining for me?  Some of them I’ve covered in the “As best as I remember it” section of my blog (still a work in progress, so it’s not all there yet). 

• I became a Christian in my teens
• I moved around a lot as a child, which affected my confidence and my character (not all for bad!)
• I dropped out of university (failure is always a good definer!)
• I studied art as an adult
• I studied community education as an older adult (only a bit older)
• I had some longish periods of ill health
• I got married to a wonderful person
• I became a mum

And of course they are only the ones that come of the top of my head now, there will be many more defining moments.  But if any one of those hadn’t happened, what would have changed?  I am imagining a kind of parallel universe, where I didn’t drop out of uni aged 17.  As a result I never returned to my home town, I never met the man I married, didn’t eventually become a mum.  Never studied art, had an entirely different kind of working life.  I wonder what would have happened instead?  It’s not a very pleasant train of thought.  I’m so thankful for the life I have.  The only thing I would change is that the day would be 26 hours long so I could sleep for 2 hours more each night. 

But then there’s the whole idea of predestination (which I don’t know much about to be fair).  Is this the only life that God ever had planned for me?  Because I know that some of the things that happened were as a result of really bad choices I made, or just the result of the world being a messed up place.

It’s making my brain ache to think about it all too much. 

Note to self: avoid hard thinking in the future

What were your defining moments?  Which road might you have gone down?  How do you feel about the road you’re now on?  Personally, I love my road because it’s the only one I know, and the alternatives aren’t that attractive.  The future has possibilities too, which this same road has led me to.