a blog by howard jameson @ gatheringgrace.org

The big freeze

According to the news reports this coming week is going to be colder here in the normally tropical UK than it will be in normally cold places. Yikes.

When I had a proper job my heart would sink at the news. A 30 mile drive up a snow covered motorway with plonkers doing 70mph in the outside lane because their 4x4s somehow made them immune to the effects of the cold and the snow. I am still surprised that I never died on one of those days. All we have to worry about here is whether the Church heating will remain on.

I often wonder if there are rules laid down anywhere which establish grounds upon which a Church meeting or service might be cancelled. I am around the lanes on Sunday morning, so I hope we're ok - note to self "don't forget your mobile like you did last Sunday".

I also want to update on my Sleeping Patterns post of Thursday morning.

Thursday evening I was so tired and therefore I went to play football with the Dads - a great improvement and slept like a log until, that is, that unspeakable thing we call the Dog decided at about 6am to wake us up to tell us that something had been in the garden.

Last night I woke in the middle of the night again, only to discover it was actually two minutes before the alarm was due to go off.

I think there should be a place somewhere so that if you are lying awake in the middle of the night you can go there and everybody else lying awake in the middle of the night can go there too and have a warm drink and play pool or listen to some chilled out relaxing music. I wonder how many people even in a small place like this are actually lying awake in the night? One in three in a typical year suffer insomnia in the UK, apparently, but that's not quite what I meant.

Dog tired...

...so a bit of footie with the Dads.

Sleeping patterns

I seem to have settled into a fairly steady pattern of sleeping.

Saturday night: awake at 5am with two sermons going through my head. They were in my head already, but for some reason the brain thought another couple of run throughs were required, which struck me as the best possible way of not having them in my head 5 hours later.

Sunday night: slept fine.

Monday night: awake for a while - but it was so important I can't remember why now.

Tuesday night: slept fine (had been for a run).

Wednesday night: awake at 3am with a pile of crud being processed in my head which I was unable to deal with during a 14 hour working day.

So tonight should be a good one...

Update!

Contrary to the rate of Post production on this site I am still here.

Post-Christmas is pretty hectic in the "if only I'd got this sorted before Christmas" sort of way, but in the last couple of days of last week I finally got my head above water and, though busy, was able to keep afloat and (relatively) unstressed. I have got a post in writing about our meeting covering the incoming Clergy Review process - the post might not see the light of day unless I can really find time to get my head round what I want to say.

I've also had a bit of a spurt on Facebook, and even had a bit of humorous banter on Twitter

I've also caught up a bit on reading my RSS feeds and planning, which is great.

I cooked curries for (what eventually turned out to be) 18 last night and we had a good fun. No sign of food poisoning chez nous this morning, so fingers crossed. I did have a flash of horror - me wiping out a good proportion of the male membership of our local Church and getting compared to Jonestown in the Church Times (me standing at the Pearly Gates: "it wasn't some cult hysteria induced suicide pact, I just didn't cook the chicken through properly - ok!").

I am planning to rehearse a possible low key presentation for the Clergy Conference by recording a video - which I will try to do sometime soon if I can get my head round it, but also with the abundance of computers like mine with a little camera there are so many videos out in the wild where the presenter looks like one of those hostage videos - bad lighting making them look haggard and filmed with a very domestic setting in the background. I can't do much about the wall of books behind me, and at 3am this morning was half asleep trying to think in my head how I could reorganise the desk so that I had a plain background, but it is impossible in here.

A little concerned in that I invited the teenagers to work on a service that I will then front and I think I said something like "ridiculing the Vicar is acceptable". What I didn't anticipate was the boys sniggering, but refusing to tell me what they have up their sleeve.

Analysis of the recession so far...

So I believe we are now officially and statistically in recession. Robert Peston's blog seems to always find something else downbeat to publish, so I am trying not to think about it. Obviously I am now in a position of relative protection from the effects of the downturn - I don't think a Clergyperson has ever been made redundant, and my annual bonus should remain the same as last year's, although there would be signs that there is scary news around the corner when the Clergy Pension Fund is revalued and more money is needed to bolster the outlay. Obviously the fact that we are paid a pittance helps, but that's another story.

I have been keeping my eyes and ears open around the place as I meet and chat. According to the data from the 2001 Census this area has a much higher than national average self-employed/working from home types and of this category that I know most are in some form of service and support work which, I guess, might the first expenditure that a shrinking company might consider not outsourcing.

However I am suspicious about the degree of bravado when people are talking in public, although I hope I am wrong. Lots seem to have full order books, or a big project that will carry them through the next quarter or two, although nothing like that would help if many more of my local contacts have significant customers going bust before paying. One or two quiet conversations paint a different picture. Employers deeply anxious about their businesses, but primarily expressed in terms of the responsibility they feel for their staff.

I got the sense on our post-Christmas shopping expedition that there was almost a frenzy - people HAD to buy something in the sales as a sign of them tightening their belts without going without, as if that option was anathema. I listened to the radio the other morning and talks of a second "bail out" for the banks and renewed efforts to bolster the car-making industry. It seems that those who have been most profligate are getting support. Perhaps the idea of reaping what you sow doesn't apply to them, only to the rest of us who invested so much of our identities and security into their care.

Dawn of a new age?

Er...no.

He's not the Messiah, he's just a very naughty boy.

Whilst wishing him well, ultimately Obama is heading for a fall because (as we have seen with Blair and others many times over) a human leader cannot initiate and sustain the degree of change that the much talked about sense of hope requires.

Nicola (comment below) is right not to overlook the significance and importance of this moment on many levels, my concern is that the weight of expectation can create an unrealistic list of positive outcomes. This is all the more reason to pray for him, rather than to be cynical.

It was wonderful to hear reference to, for example, the need to seriously tackle poverty, and not with the naive neo-con idea that somehow wealth would trickle down - very difficult if those at the top are unwilling to share it.

I'm glad I didn't say that...

Quite a bit of hoo ha about Bishop Gene Robinson saying prayers for the new President, but irrespective of that its good to see the top brass making the sort of gaff to which I am ususally accustomed.

With all the force of history making parallels with JFK I would have been careful about using the phrase about only having one shot at something in the penultimate paragraph.

Oh dear

Thought I would have a go at making a quick loaf for supper.

Sadly the yeast must have gone off as it has totally not risen. We now have a loaf of bread that is so dense I think it is starting to bend the light travelling past it. Not so much a crust as an event horizon.

Design

Still fiddling with colours to try to make this blog simple and readable.

Worship Resources

I normally struggle with pre-prepared orders of services from books and magazines. But this Sunday I felt really uninspired so turned (I have to say initially almost at random) to...

"Uncommon Worship - 25 Innovative Services" (Nick Fawcett)

(don't know why there's no picture on Amazon so here's a link somewhere else who has it)

We did something about music in worship and I found not just the material pretty helpful, but also using somebody else's ideas as a template to remind myself of a different way of doing a particular type of service.