Generally, consistency is considered a good thing, as I alluded to above. We get results by being consistent; desirable outcomes are achieved by maintaining certain standards. There are obviously going to be exceptions, but when we see someone with a good job, we assume they worked hard consistently at school and/or university. When our team is riding high in the table, we know that they have been consistent in not losing, or conning referees into awarding dubious penalties. It’s rare that to consider consistency a negative attribute; at worst, we might consider a consistent person to be dull or predictable, but these qualities aren’t inherently detrimental. In fact, we could consider consistency to be an essential quality. I can’t think of any jobs or roles in which at least some degree of consistency is required.

The problem is that being consistent is often – in fact, usually – hard work. Just turning up for work day in, day out is a tiring process after a while, particularly when you leave and return in total darkness. I’m struggling to be consistently enthusiastic about my kids’ eight o’clock Saturday swimming lessons for that very reason. To be consistent in some areas is relatively easy – we get into routines after a while – but to be consistent when the goalposts are constantly shifting is much more difficult. This requires a mental toughness and resilience, and the ability to adapt, often at short notice. I find that this is the most draining aspect of trying to maintain consistency – much more draining than physically doing the same actions again and again. Writing on this blog is one example; having set myself the informal precedent of writing something at least every 2 weeks, it can often be difficult to see that through. Last night I stared at the screen for half an hour or so, trying to formulate what I’m saying now, but failing, as I hadn’t thought it through much.

But as we’ve been so often told, in order to achieve something you have to work at it. And if we’ve worked hard at something, we can rightly assume that there will be benefits at the end of the journey. In terms of our jobs, the amount of respect we gain, our relationships – it’s clear that being consistently positive, consistently doing what’s right, brings us success. In the Bible, we’re told to be consistent in talking to God in prayer, and in living out our relationship with Jesus. This gives us inner strength and builds us up. We’re told to speak always in a graceful way to other people, in order to convey the fact that Christ lives in us. And we’re told to meet together regularly, to share our stuff and to praise God. This leads to the outpouring of God’s joy, both amongst us as believers and amongst those who don’t yet know him. The Bible also says that one of the benefits of being consistent in our thinking as Christians is that there will be no division amongst us – and therefore no conflict (I’ll just put the can of worms back on the shelf…. there we go……) 

I’ve just started reading the book of Exodus as part of the E100 challenge that our church is doing at the moment. At the moment it’s the story of Moses (you’ll know it if you’ve seen Prince of Egypt). A couple of verses in the story spoke to me of God’s consistency. In chapter 3 v6, God says to Moses, ‘I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob.’ (God is saying that he’s been knocking around for a long time). He repeats that phrase a couple more times in chapter 3, and adds, ‘This is my name (I AM) for ever, the name by which I am to be remembered from generation to generation.’ God intends to be around for the whole of known time, and is himself outside of it (his name is always I AM…..). A few hundred years later, David cottoned on to this idea of God’s consistency when he wrote the Psalms, with lines like, ‘The skies proclaim the work of his hands. Day after day the pour forth speech…… God is…an ever-present help in trouble……. The Lord’s unfailing love surrounds the man who trusts in him……. The Lord remembers us and will bless us….. The faithfulness of the Lord endures forever…..’

What should our response be to God’s consistency, and our own frailty in that area? More advice from the Bible: ‘Look to the Lord and his strength; seek his face always….. Let the name of the Lord be praised, both now and forever more……’

I have been shortlisted for some poetry prize or other, for a poem I wrote about Hillsborough (or at least I think it’s for that one; it was a competition on the theme of locality, so that would make sense). One of the books that I’m due to have a poem in, The Mind’s Eye, should be available after the first week of March. I may or may not, depending on how brave I’m feeling, perform some poetry at the Burton Street Project’s open mic night on 7th Feb. I entered Sheffield Hallam’s ‘UniVerse’ competition, with a poem that I was really proud of when I’d finished it (I will publish it here in the future. It contains the adjective, ‘krillish’, which I was quite proud of). And finally, Ryan Adams is playing at the City Hall in April, which I intend to purchase tickets for.

I’ve had a busy couple of days over the last week focusing on my Mentoring course that I’m doing. On Saturday I had a tutorial day, during which I managed to take several steps backwards on the journey towards completing the first assignment. On the plus side, my new idea is a lot better and will be easier to complete (I hope). Now, how to make this sound more interesting….. I’ll be looking into how models of reflective practice (there are several, including one I invented) lead to changes in classroom practice amongst teachers. One of my colleagues has kindly agreed to be my guinea pig. As part of the tutorial, we thought about our own definition of reflective practice, and here’s mine:

The ability to view what you do, in the light of the thinking of others, with an intention to change it for the better.

This is where the idea of meta-cognitive thinking comes in; it’s the kind of high-level reflection that allows you to think back, compare, relate to previous experiences, assess other viewpoints and ultimately clarify your own understanding, and hence, your own way of doing things. What is interesting (no, really, it is) is how some models for this process are linear (ie: the process of reflection results in one definite change, then the process ends, the assumption being that no further improvements can, or need to, be made), and some are circular (the process begins again once the reflection/change sequence is complete, and further refinements could be made to the same activity). Yet it was suggested during the tutorial that there should be a third, cyclical version of a reflective model, in which each change process leads to a higher level change each time, building on the previous activity and applying to a new one. This is where I think there is application for anyone trying to follow Jesus.

The other seminar I attended this week addressed the issue of teacher professionalism (led by someone called Linda Evans of the University of Leeds, whose ideas I’m about to paraphrase). To summarise, current government standards for teachers (which most teachers don’t care about, or even know) have a strong behavioural focus (teachers should do this and that, not do this and that, etc). They don’t have anywhere near as much emphasis on the attitudes or intellect required by a teacher. This leads to most teachers feeling that a certain type of professionalism is ‘demanded’ from them, which will never match the professionalism that they act out every day. It was argued that attitude is the key to professional development, not behaviour, which I totally agreed with (as an aside, several more ‘senior’ colleagues took exception to the idea that in order to change, a professional must take the approach that what they do can always be done better. I wondered if they consider themselves to be learners, like the children they teach).

I think that this idea, that of committed change arising from a right attitude, links back to the idea of a model of reflective practice that is cyclical, constantly striving for upward improvement. As soon as our attitude becomes one of, ‘I have cracked it; there is no better way for me to do this’, then we stop the upwards cycle of reflection; at best, we will be stuck in a cyclic model in which we always reach the same conclusions about the living out of our faith. As followers of Jesus, we should constantly be seeking to ask ourselves whether or not we’re living as we should be, or engaging with God or those around us as we should be. It’s not about saying that we’re rubbish, like the people in the seminar thought (I’m guessing they don’t enjoy reflecting on their practice, and probably hate performance management). It’s about acknowledging, and tapping into a collective wisdom and way of living that is based upon the wisdom of the One we know to be an authority, knowing that if we are truly engaged with this community of people learning together, then we know that our self-reflection will lead us upwards, not downwards – or, possibly worse, back to the same starting point over and over again. I believe that’s known as the comfort zone…..

As with any forum for inviting ‘comment’, the bulk of people who will actually do so are the ones who disagree with the person organising the debate. I know this to be true from school; whenever feedback forms are sent out, asking for parents’ comments on various aspects of the school, the people with the grudges are the ones who get theirs back in first. There are so many haters on the above site, some of whom comment so aggressively that you almost feel bad for existing. Reading the discussion arising from a couple of articles, I’d say maybe every fourth or fifth comment came from someone defending the idea of God – yet most of these were people whose argument could be summarised as, ‘Well, they’re not doing any harm, so I don’t see the problem’. A few comments came in from Christians defending God, sometimes equally as aggressively as the atheists and agnostics. It made me wonder if God really needs defending.

There was not a hint of God’s light, truth, love, mercy or peace anywhere to be found (I hope there is amongst some of the articles I didn’t read). It really served to highlight the battles we are facing as followers of Jesus today – and there are two clear ones. Firstly, there’s the obvious battle against intellectualism, against the ‘proof’ that God doesn’t exist, religion is responsible for all hate, etc (oh, wait….). Secondly, and perhaps more urgently, is the battle against the culture of accepting a private spirituality; the idea of ‘I keep my faith to myself. It helps me find strength, so why shouldn’t I think this or that?’ Actually, I’ve changed my mind; there are three battles. There’s also the battle against the need to defend ourselves, against the creation of ‘us and them’ camps, against the mentality of, ‘we’re right, they’re wrong’. All of these attitudes exist in abundance on these pages, and presumably right across our nation.

As with our world, the power of the Gospel is clearly being missed; why do we need to bog ourselves down with debating what Cee-Lo Green’s intentions were when he changed the lyrics of Imagine during a recent performance, singing, and all religions are true instead of, and no religion, too? (This article generated hundreds of responses). No one ever seems to interject with real testimony – even in response to the article about a texting prayer chain (Taking a chance on prayer via text – the writer’s view on this was that this was obviously providing some comfort for people, so it’s ok, and also that intercessory prayer carries the same chances of success as, um, chance….). There were 198 comments in response to this article last time I looked – surely there are at least that many readers who can testify to prayer working? The problem is that there is a lack of understanding about faith, about Jesus, about what it means to be in relationship with Him – to the intelligent non-believer reading those pages, it seems that knowing Jesus is impossible, and the idea of it is choked by the thorns of religion, of the idea that following God means beating ourselves up about failures and trying to keep a billion pointless rules.

It’s clear that our response, as people who are trying to get to know Jesus better, is to lovingly engage with the people who are seeking, hurt by past experiences of church, or are simply confident in how they’ve argued away the idea of God. I watched To Kill a Mockingbird last night; I love the character of Atticus Finch. If you’ve read the book or seen the film you might recall his line about not knowing someone until you’ve got inside their skin and walked around in it. That’s exactly what we need to do when faced with the unbelief of the world. It’s not enough to ignore what people are saying, writing them off as lost causes. It’s not enough to angrily defend the Christianity we grew up with, and bemoan its demise as the reason the world is like it is. It’s not even enough to water Jesus down in an attempt to engage in the debate in a ‘cool’ or ‘relevant’ way. People are looking for relationships; if we’re not going to try and engage with them, then we’re failing them.

We looked at Isaiah chapter 58 in church this morning. I wondered, as I listened, are we doing verses 9 and 10? (If you do away with the yoke of oppression, with the pointing finger and malicious talk, and if you spend yourselves on behalf of the hungry and satisfy the needs of the oppressed…..) Are there followers of Jesus doing that on the Guardian pages? I was challenged when I saw what followed theses verses: then your light will rise in the darkness, and your night will become like the noonday. The Lord will guide you always; he will satisfy your needs in a sun-scorched land, and will strengthen your frame. We sometimes focus on wanting God to take care of our needs, to just ‘sort us out’, but we neglect verses 9 and 10. God calls us to live with right hearts and attitudes, then he will bless us. And not just with the stuff we need – verse 12 tells us that if we live in this way, we will rebuild the ancient ruins – we’ll start to heal the hurts and misunderstandings in peoples’ lives.

I felt so burdened after reading through most of the things that were being said on the Guardian pages; I felt ill-equipped to respond, unsure of my identity in God, even guilty and questioning of what I supposedly knew and believed. But God gave me these three words: It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter what other people think, or if people question what you know to be true – you know me, and I’ve shown myself to you before. I am all that is left for the world, and I am the Way, the Truth and the Life. And equally, it doesn’t matter if you don’t want to bother people by talking about God – I’ve called you to do it, so get on with it. It doesn’t matter if people think you’re strange, and simply tolerate you. It doesn’t matter if you don’t like certain aspects of my church, because you’re part of it, and that is the tool I’m going to use. Deal with it (in the most loving way possible…..).

Yet it is probably also the time of year in which there is the greatest prevalence of fear. On Christmas Eve I saw a news article about how faith-based debt counselling charities (including Christians Against Poverty, who I mentioned a couple of blogs back) are gearing themselves up for their busiest time of year – and they are expecting this January to be busier than ever. It would be easy at this point to start lamenting the materialism of the world in which we live, which I’m not going to do, as we all are guilty of perpetuating it at least to some degree. Allow me a brief digression. Only yesterday I found myself outside John Lewis (a very middle-class place to be, and steeped in the intoxicating liquor of material excess) politely refusing the Big Issue seller’s plea to ‘help the homeless’, and then once inside discussing the relative merits of several different knife blocks with £100-plus price tags. The sense of shame at my hypocrisy was intense. I did go back out and buy a copy, and I felt like I owed him an apology of sorts. Although I did laugh when he answered his mobile phone as I walked away. The Daily Mail headline writer in me had a field day.

So there are these two competing emotions at Christmas time. It’s interesting how they are both so dependent upon a future, a future which we can never predict with 100% certainty (although if you’ve ever rifled through your parents’ wardrobe on the 23rd December and discovered a pair of football boots or a Thundercats figure, you might argue otherwise. Personally, I’ve never done that….). I started thinking about how I feel about what God has got in store for me over this coming year and beyond. I think these two emotions are both equally essential for us as we seek to become more like Jesus by living out what we think are His plans for our lives.

I remember when I was 17 or 18 – people at my church started to tell me that God had great plans for me and my ‘musical gifts’. I interpreted this as follows: God would make me a rock star (for His glory, of course). As you can imagine, this produced in me feelings of great excitement – I was going to spend my life playing guitar and singing for people who loved me, and I would never have to get a proper job! There was not one iota of fear about that ‘call’ on my life (I was oblivious to the potential negatives – massive debt to a record company, months on the road away from home, people thinking that what I did was rubbish, etc).

I now see that fear, and its associated feelings of insecurity and doubt, are all part of the package when it comes to God’s call on our lives. It’s great when we get excited about something God’s leading us to – excitement about a certain ministry can in itself be a manifestation of God’s call to that particular area of service – and we should thank Him for that gift of joyous anticipation of what is to come (I think of the Christmas story, and Mary’s song of thanksgiving when she hears that she is to give birth to Jesus). But you only need to look at the rest of the Bible to see many examples of people who were less than enthused about God’s plan for them (Moses thought he was a crap public speaker, Jonah just couldn’t be arsed to do what God said, etc).

If there is no element of challenge to something, then it will be easy for us. We won’t need to rely on God’s strength to carry out such an act of service, which in itself is something that He calls us to do. We also run the risk of whatever it is we’re doing becoming stale and mundane. God won’t call us to anything we see as beyond us without resourcing us – if we ask Him. He wants to push us into new territories of service – not because He is a ruthless taskmaster, but because this is His abundant life. When we are engaged in His will for our lives then we find our true purpose, and this leads to our fulfilment. We can’t envisage the extent to which He can use us if we are willing to let Him kit us out for the challenge.

This idea of needing both excitement and fear links to our everyday existence, too – if life feels at all times like it is either comfortable or difficult, then are we truly experiencing His life? It’s a cliché to say that as Christians, we aren’t called to a trouble-free existence – but it’s true. Similarly, we’re not called to a life of being downtrodden, exploited, imprisoned, etc. Not in this country, at least (hello, North Korea and Saudi Arabia)….

As we start a New Year, let’s not settle simply for a rubbish resolution. Let’s really analyse where we’re at with God. Are you simply comfortable being ‘a Christian’? Have you been involved in the same ministry for ages, with no change in the way you do it or the outcomes you see? Let’s not settle for comfort. What do we see as the biggest challenges in our faith or the area of service we’re involved in? Are there any (challenges or area of service)? I have been challenged, amongst other things, over how I will use the writing opportunities I have to glorify God. If you think I’m not doing that, then tell me – leave a comment at the bottom of whatever I write. But let’s not settle for a year that is the same as the one that is about to come to an end. That’s not to say that God didn’t do anything in 2011, but I sense that He is calling us to challenges that are beyond what we can imagine in 2012. Let’s engage with the excitement and fear of following Him….

The article finished by quoting Hitchens: “The main source of hatred in the world is religion and organised religion”. I presume that Kelner intended that this quote support his argument that David Cameron was/is wrong about our need for Christian values. Yet I for one agree with Hitchens on this, and I almost feel like it’s too obvious a point to make; it’s plain that organised religion is to blame for a lot of the hatred in the world. Jesus despised organised religion, favouring the attitude of the sinner who longed for God’s mercy over the pious Pharisee who prayed publicly to gain adulation, to give but one example.

What David Cameron means by ‘Christian values’ is, I dare say, a lot different to what I think that phrase means. He seems to want a return to a Ten Commandments-style ‘Christianity’, where we don’t kill, steal or covet, ‘respect’ everyone and generally keep ourselves to ourselves. Yet I wonder what value he would put on the two commandments that Jesus said are the most important – love God, and love your neighbour as yourself? Jesus removed the need for the structured religion of the Ten Commandments by showing that loving God and those around us whole-heartedly is the correct way to live. If we are doing those two things, then that is how a society changes – not by standing in distant judgment, observing that ‘at least we’re doing the right thing’.

I agree with Kelner when he says that ‘[Christianity] informs the values of tolerance, fairness and respect….. But these are universal issues, not ones on which Christianity has an exclusive call.’ The difference is that without Jesus, these important values are in danger of becoming simply tools for us to get along; with Jesus (and operating under the umbrella of his love), they become the tools by which we change the world and allow God’s intended plan for mankind to be acted out. I also think Jesus would’ve taken exception to ‘tolerance’ being described as a key virtue of one of his followers. Not because he hated anyone, but because Jesus would never sit back and allow something that wasn’t God’s will to continue happening when he could do something about it. I understand that we’re using tolerance here in the sense of allowing freedom of expression (religious or otherwise), but that doesn’t mean that as followers of Jesus we shouldn’t challenge the things we see that aren’t life giving. We are still called to love those around us, showing them God’s way whilst acknowledging that we’re always choosing the wrong way, too.

In another paragraph, Kelner questions ‘whether religion is the right implement with which to tackle society’s ills’ (no, it isn’t, as previously stated). He then goes on to supplement this point by asking, ‘….is it really an absence of faith that has led [the bankers] to gather unprecedented riches at such a huge and terrible cost to others?’ Well, yes, it is – or rather, and absence of faith in the God I know. Kelner has made the mistake of homogenising religion and faith. Religion brings about idolatry, cultish behaviour, intolerance, and ultimately a sense of one’s own failings brought about by impossibly high and unattainable standards. Faith – true faith in the God who sent Jesus – brings about the kind of virtues that David Cameron should really be longing for, and that will completely remove the desire (and, more pertinently, the need) for looting, stealing, suicide bombing….

The title of the article is entirely correct, but not for the reason that the writer intended. If we read it to mean that the act of blaming society’s ills on Godlessness is without sense, is ignoring the real issue, is not going to help us as followers of Jesus to reveal the true wisdom of God, then the head of the nail is well and truly hit…..

I believe that I will be sent 20 copies of the book when it’s printed, which should be enough to give one to all of my devoted fans, and have about 19 left over. It made me laugh and then panic when they suggested that I could use them for ‘promotional purposes at poetry readings’….. Anyone know where I might do such a thing?

Also in the news this week…. A while ago we were at my brother-in-law’s church, St James’ in Clitheroe (I tried to put in a hyperlink to their website, but was informed that there was ‘a bad gateway’ when I tried to visit their home page), and heard a talk by someone from Christians Against Poverty. At the time I thought that this would be a good organisation to support, as it ticked the ‘makes me feel like I’m helping the poor’ box. Anyhow, we finally got round to setting up the necessaries on Wednesday. I felt a slight saintly glow afterwards, until I started re-reading Shane Claiborne’s Irresistible Revolution (a book I have vowed to re-read every year around New Year). I quote from chapter 5:

We (The Simple Way, the community of which Claiborne is a part) wrestle to free ourselves from….distant acts of charity that serve to legitimise apathetic lifestyles of good intentions but rob us of the gift of community.

And again:

Once we are actually friends with folks in struggle, we start to ask why people are poor, which is never as popular as giving to charity.

Needless to say, my saintly glow rapidly dulled into a kind of soiled, tarnished crust of shame….

Yet it was interesting that today I got the chance to talk further about the issue of creating (or removing….) a comfort zone in our faith with the Jehovah’s Witness family that I know reasonably well. I invited them in when they called this morning (yes, really), and we had a good chat in which I like to think I  both impressed them with my scripture-finding skills and appalled them with just how defaced  pretty much every page in my New Testament was with various scribbled notes and good old selective highlighting.

We talked about why they do what they do, and I talked about why I think meeting the basic needs around us is more important than seeking to ‘convert’ (Jesus did it, faith without works is meaningless, etc). We (well, they) talked about how ‘the end times’ started in 1914, and that they will end when the Witnesses have finished witnessing to every person on Earth (presumably Jesus is sitting there wishing they’d hurry up). We talked about persecution (they had initially asked if I was aware that the Bible has been a controversial book throughout history…..), and we gave various examples of where we’d encountered it, which for them was pretty much every weekend, at pretty much every door they knocked on. We got onto the subject of miracles, and I asked them if they’d ever seen one, or if they believed they existed. I guess the answer they gave would be typical of a lot of us; it’s a nice theory, and we can attribute certain promptings of the spirit as ‘miraculous’ (by which we mean conveniently coincidental), but they don’t happen nowadays. I told them about how Jonah was healed miraculously, and I hope that it had some kind of impact on them. As they left, I took great care to wish them ‘a happy holiday’ (they don’t celebrate Christmas).

I also wanted mention the fantastic men’s curry night we had in the church hall last night. £10 each, bring your own beers, loads of food, and a great testimony from Kinder (I don’t know if he spells his name like the Derbyshire hill or the chocolate egg, but I don’t want to make an embarrassing attempt as it probably contains assorted J’s and H’s), a convert from Sikhism who now works for the Church Army. He spoke really clearly about the difficulties he has had with some of his family not accepting his faith, and then he taught us some smooth bhangra moves such as ‘the shopping trolley’ and ‘changing the light bulb’. There should clearly be more Indian dancing in church…..

Only it wasn’t in my bag. I’d left it at home in the morning, despite having deliberately put it on the side when I came downstairs so that I didn’t forget it.

I tried just sitting still and relaxing. This lasted for about 23 seconds – I couldn’t do it. I knew I had my Bible and notebook, and so I started trying to read a bit of Romans, but I felt distracted and lacked focus, so I gave up. Re-writing the lyrics of Adele’s Someone like You to perform as a comedy numbers at a colleague’s leaving assembly was a non-starter once I realised that I only knew the first two lines of the chorus. It was at this point that my attention passed to the man sitting a couple of tables away.

I’ve seen this man knocking about in Hillsborough a few times. Never have I seen someone use hair product to the extent he does; he must get through a tub of brillcreem a week. His afro hair is slicked back into a bunched-up little pony tail, in the manner of Didier Drogba, and is the only person I’ve ever seen make the Chelsea forward’s crazy undercut look vaguely sensible (honourable mentions to Bacary Sagna and Gervinho). Great blobs of white grease cling to his ears and matt his hair together, giving it the appearance of a blubbery Weddell seal coated with frost. Aside from this, I suppose you could say he is of average appearance…..

There was something about his presence that was making me decidedly uncomfortable. He was moving impatiently around the place every couple of minutes; into the toilets, up to the bank of computers, scrawling in a little notebook (who would do that?)…. There was no-one else in the cafe now, besides the two owners, who were clearly not perturbed by his behaviour, or were at least good at hiding it if they were.

I should explain that in Hillsborough, I understand that there is a small but significant population of adults with learning difficulties or other mental health issues, who live in a sheltered accommodation complex. I have often wondered whether this man is one of them, using the tried-and-tested method of judging by appearances. If I’m ever out and about during a weekday – in the school holidays, usually – I often enter into an informal game (in my head) of ‘mental or sane’ when I see certain people (fortunately, there are no mirror shops in Hillsborough….). Sometimes it’s easy, as sudden outbursts of shouting at no-one in particular are fairly good indicators that all isn’t as it should be ‘upstairs’. But there’s always the security of numbers; there are lots of other ‘normal’ folk around (or at least, normal by Hillsborough standards).

Being the only customer besides him in the coffee shop was removing that security. What if he spoke to me and I didn’t understand what he meant? What if he became aggressive? What if he did something ‘mental’? I began to feel almost angry at his presence; it was making it very difficult for me to relax (as was the fact that the owners appeared to be clearing up an hour before closing, but that’s by the by…..)

Obviously (I hope), I’m saying all this stuff in the full knowledge of the fact that I was being an intolerant, judgmental ass. I looked at the unopened Bible in front of me. I thought clichéd thoughts about Jesus loving everyone and wanting to heal our illnesses, and some frankly condescending thoughts about demons and herds of pigs (see Matthew 8 v28-34). I knew that tolerance was the bare minimum expected of me – and even that, on the basis of actually knowing the truth about the man…..

Some moderately exciting news – one of my poems that has previously appeared on this blog, Sky (From the Library), is to be featured in a new anthology called The Mind’s Eye, which I think is to be published in March/April time by United Press. As a result of entering one of their online competitions, I’ve also been asked to submit more poems for possible inclusion in another book entitled Ten of the Best, which will showcase new poets. I’m still awaiting news on that front; they may possibly have been put off by my citing Eddie Vedder as my favourite ‘poet’…..

My Love
My love, you see the saddest colours only;
Your self-made image steeped in winter’s grey.
This palette, almost monochrome, whilst pleasing
To my eye, does not recall you symphony
Of rainbows; this refracted light is glory
And the blending of your hues is happiness.
Until the myriad beams that dance and shimmer
Are aligned, no-one can truly see your face.

My love, how strange that blue is melancholy
When the heaven of your eyes is painted thus;
I wonder if I am illusion’s captive
Once deceived, now colour-blind and envious
Of those for whom no borders cause encumbrance
And for whom a single shade is revelry.
For I fear that, though these jewels are mine to worship
In my heart, I hide the guilt of ennui.

Windy Day
Assault again my bitter ear
You poltergeist, so cumbersome
With rage, as forged in yesteryear,
Where warmth holds no dominion.

Now animate the battered limbs
Of summer’s leafy sentinels;
Your one-voice choir shrieks winter’s hymns
In praise of dark confessionals.

Assault again my weathered face
Dried up, save for the tears of cold.
Pierce not my pulled-tight carapace;
Touch not my thoughts of summer’s gold.

A Soporific Effect
If, at night,
I’m kept awake, impatient,
I like to dream of camping trips;
The cosiness of
Being cocooned within
A blue space, and sleeping-bagged.

It doesn’t have
To be a tent, though; it
Could be a car, with seat reclined
(This reminds
Me of the glacial nights
I spent with droning traffic, and
Other noise).
Or sometimes, I reflect
On Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley, and
The mobile home
He had designed, and where
I’d take my own if it were built.

But back to canvas;
Sheltering inches from
The elements awakens some
Archaic need,
And now the bone-deep chill
Seems isolated; neutralised.
This brings peace,
And, joined with cotton’s touch,
The joy of sleep is tangible,
If only for
A few disjointed moments;
Sun’s warmth in early spring.

Obviously I can’t compare the conviction I feel in church with the conviction I feel in, say, my professional life when I go on a course that’s enjoyable, or a tutorial that’s inspiring and interesting. There are clear differences in the positive feelings that are associated with each; on one hand we have positivity that I’m loathed to term as a ‘feeling’ at all; we’re warned in the Bible (probably) about confusing our feelings with the conviction of the Holy Spirit. On the other we have a positivity that is always tinged with negatives – extra work, an uncomfortably high level of pressure or expectation, another drain on my time…..

Yet the feel-good factor associated with my life’s many facets can still be a misleading one – I always manage to justify adding another dimension to my life, when I’m being called to centre it around just one. At the moment, whilst I’m not feeling worried or stressed about anything in particular (apart from Christmas, perhaps), I’m recognising that I’m being pulled in several opposing directions by several different sets of demanding circumstances. It’s like that method of execution they had in the past (somewhere, at some time……) – tying the four limbs to four horses, then whipping them so they ran in four opposing directions, tearing the victim apart…. I feel like I’m holding the horses in check at the moment, because the strength I am gaining from the way God is blessing my life at the moment is sufficient. But what will happen when I hit the trough again?

During church I found myself envisaging one of those gigantic Victorian looms, noisily churning out cloth whilst occasionally lopping the hand off a six-year-old. The grinding, chugging beast sits in the gloom, the fibres it works being stretched, spun, twisted, and distorted into a glorious end product. Yet then something goes wrong; the pattern on the finished cloth is distorted, and there are gaps where the fibres have thinned out. The six-year-old crawls under, and finds that one of the, um, spinning bits has broken, and isn’t functioning properly. This is putting unnecessary strain on the two adjacent spinny bits, and they are starting to wobble. You see the point of the analogy, even though the Victorian Society would probably frown in a Dickensian fashion at my lack of knowledge.

I want to make sure that I maintain the right focus. Last night I felt real pressure, entirely self-inflicted, to do some form of writing – either this, an essay on mentoring I’m supposed to be planning, or some poetry – to get through at least two documentaries on iPlayer (one on John Steinbeck, one on To Kill a Mockingbird), and to read at least a couple of chapters of Roughing It by Mark Twain. Mrs C’s expectations were that I would help her guillotine some stuff for church and then fold about a billion leaflets, yet in my frustration at being unable to make a decision about what I should be doing, I overlooked the fact that I could do the church admin whilst watching the documentaries. Needless to say, I didn’t articulate that very well (or at all), and I ended up watching them both on my own, feeling annoyed, while Mrs C did the work in the dining room (they were both very interesting, for the record).

That’s a silly example, but it does demonstrate that I need to constantly maintain God as the focus of my day; if He had been, I wouldn’t have been worrying about why I didn’t have any ideas about what to blog about, or worrying about the ideas for poems that I’d had, but hadn’t got round to acting on yet. There’s this constant thing in my head of, ‘You haven’t written anything on your blog for over a week’, or, ‘You’ll need to do a lot more reading before you start that essay’, or, ‘Was that last poem you wrote ‘flowery’ enough?’, or, ‘You haven’t written a song in a while’, or ‘Richard’s blatantly doing more work than you on the allotment’.

I don’t feel like I need to offload any of these things, but what I do need to do is centre each busy day around God. Even as I prayed in church this morning that I’d be able to do that each day, it made sense to me. I experienced His peace about every situation, and I knew that the stuff I’m passionate about will take care of itself, because everything I do is God-inspired anyway. In my busyness I forget this, and think that it’s me-inspired. There’s an element of me having to choose to do a certain thing, and I’m always going to be influenced by my past experiences and by who I am, but even those things are of God, part of what He had planned for me before I was born.

When I feel like a dried-up pen, devoid of true life, and burdened by being me, I need the Light of Life.  I need to become a sponge that soaks in His presence only, squeezing out the things of myself to make space in every tiny pore for the Light to flood in.

I’m always keen to initiate debate, so I was delighted when my Friday-night Facetube status caused (relative) mass hysteria in cyberspace. Never before has anything I’ve written prompted such enthusiastic dialogue as these few simple words: I got my first Christmas card today (yes – the date was the 11th of November)….

I understand that it’s exciting. I remember trying to hibernate under my bed from 22nd December until Christmas morning with nothing but a selection box for sustenance (on reflection, I’m not sure why I had the selection box at that point; perhaps it was to shut me up until the big day….). But back in the 80’s, no-one even thought about Christmas until mid-December (did they? Tell me they didn’t….); we knew that the season was upon us when my parents took us to the garden centre to choose the tree, and this was never more than two weeks in advance of the 25th). And I bet this degree of forward-planning would be frowned upon by anyone over the age of 70. If I’d have asked my mum for some Christmas cards between, say, the 1st and 10th of December, I would’ve been laughed out of the kitchen and told to go and play with Castle Greyskull…..

I can also see the sense and economy in planning ahead when it comes to the purchasing of gifts. My own parents were (and probably still are) so organised that they’d buy stuff in March, forget they’d bought it by December, and then give it to me the following September as a birthday present (it’s the 29th, if you’re thinking of getting me a shower-gel gift set). And we don’t want to miss the dreaded deadline for postal deliveries; a well-known chain of shops, whose catalogue I happened to be idly perusing the other day, informed that it was ‘now time to begin the first of [my] Christmas jobs – writing [my] cards’, adding that it would be made all the less stressful by buying one of their charity-benefitting multipacks. But why is it like this? Surely we’d never send someone birthday greetings seven weeks ahead of schedule? I’m not sure I’m even organised enough to send them seven weeks behind schedule. What do we fill the time between card-sending and Christmas Day with?

We let the excitement build to a level that leads to intense disappointment when the day actually arrives. Who enjoys Christmas Day? No-one does. The person who sent me that card, through no real fault of their own, is going to be bored and depressed by 11 o’clock on the 25th of December. It’s easy to bang on about ‘the reason for the season’ and get all Christian and huffy about it, but we’re sucked into it just as much as the woman in the Home Bargains queue stockpiling miniature heroes, God forbid that her family should run out by Boxing Day….

I’m picturing a large room with a few high windows, crammed full of people. It’s like there’s a great commotion happening outside, somewhere. Some people can’t see enough to make it out. It might be exciting; the people nearer the windows are certainly acting that way. They think that what’s taking place in the half-light looks as though it could be fun – or at least better than what’s happening in here. So they whisper to the person behind them that something amazing is coming, and it’ll make you happy. And from the back it looks as if those people who are outside, and maybe even those nearer the window, have made a few adjustments to better help them appreciate what’s going on – we’d better do that, too they think. They pass the buzz around; no-one’s quite sure what the buzz is about any more, but the fact that it’s there is its own buzz, and that’s enough to sustain those who are furthest from the window.

But in the room there are a few people who aren’t feeling the buzz. They know (or at least say they know) what’s happening out there, because they’ve looked out of the window before. And they’re claiming possession of that knowledge; they resent this false enjoyment that’s arising because of the idea of what this might be about. They know that it’s simply a case of doing X and saying Y, and not really much else. They kill the buzz temporarily amongst people nearby, until they move away to rediscover what they think is the reason for the buzz. They leave the miseries to talk ‘expertly’ about what’s happening outside. The large majority, who are still happy to enjoy the buzz, set up their own ways of celebrating it. Gradually, the miserable few in the corner become more and more isolated, as does their interpretation of what’s going on outside.

There’s also a small door into the room. Most people don’t even know it’s there, because a third group of people, only a few in number, are huddled around it. The reason that they’re huddled around it is that they keep hearing someone on the other side. Whoever it is keeps pushing messages under the door on bits of paper, explaining what’s really going on outside, and the small group around the door read them enthusiastically (a long time ago, they even passed one to the group of miseries in the corner, who read it with interest but then stuffed it in the bin). These explanations answer all the questions that the small group has about what’s going on out there, and they’re really excited. They’re so excited, in fact, that every time a new message comes under the door, they don’t see the little ‘PTO’ symbol at the bottom. If they did turn one of the messages over, they’d see that the person sending the messages was asking them to pass it around the room.

The message on the back says this: The building you are in will collapse any time soon; I’ve seen what’s holding it up. You people near the door will be OK; you’ll be able to nip out before the roof caves in. But you need to let the others know. Can you do that for me?

In the book of Acts, Peter manages to escape from prison thanks to the timely intervention of an angel (the story goes). He runs to the house of his friends, and hammers on the door, shouting. A girl inside goes to answer it, and hears Peter’s voice. She’s so excited that she runs around like a headless chicken, telling everyone else that Peter’s outside. She neglects the small matter of actually letting him in, so he has to stand there banging and shouting some more. Let’s make sure we’re not headless chickens this year, becoming wild with seasonal animation while voices of desperation, loneliness, need – and the voice of the solution to these – are sounding in our ears.