a blog by howard jameson @ gatheringgrace.org

Nearly there...

One of my Churches has an electric radiator in the sanctuary area which emits a 50 Hz buzz almost constantly. Perhaps its only me that can hear it, but it certainly isn't one of those really high pitched whistle that I had to spend the morning tracing round an open plan office before it drove me totally round the bend.

Well I feel so tired that I have an almost permanent buzz in my head which is starting to drown out almost any attempt at thought or quiet.

I have one more working day this week, a busy Sunday, then a month before my next "up front" time, although I am taking teenagers to Soul Survivor (looking forward to that - although its work) and am going to Greenbelt (that's work too, although in a good way). Other than that I am just trying to plan anything that needs planning before I go away and sleep.

The Cloud: a sigh of relief

When we did the seminar at the Clergy Conference one of the developments in the world of computing that seemed to create most interest was "the cloud" (that is the storage of data on somebody else's hard drives, so things like having your email and documents at Google, or in my case also having other files at Apple).

The last couple of days my iMac hasn't wanted to boot up in the morning, although eventually it would. Monday, however, no such luck. Initially I breathed a sigh of relief as I am about to have a good chunk of time off, but then it dawned on me that so much information is on my computer that if it at the repairers for a week I may well be up the swanny.

Thanks to "the cloud", however, my calendars and contact information is all stored at Apple and therefore is replicated on my iPhone, so that's two significant areas covered, and I can get by using my phone for email and my to do lists.

One Apple feature I also rely on (but didn't realise how much until this week) is Time Machine which backs up my files whenever they change. This is on a separate hard drive, so is independent of my main computer. So I have been able to set up an old Mac Mini to do any bits and pieces I need to do - I can pull files as and when I need them off the hard drive and then save them to "the cloud" so that when the iMac is back I can access them as easily from there.

Operating as an independent and isolated worker as far as IT is concerned can be quite nerve racking, but using "the cloud" seems to give some degree of reassurance. It is not without its problems (various reports at the moment of hacking into Twitter because people use the same passwords for all their stuff, for example) but every little helps.

Baptisms: fits and starts

I assume I am not alone in wrestling with the best way of fitting Baptisms into the normal pattern of services. I find they tend to come in a flurry (as at the moment) and then periods with none on the horizon.

Where I was before we did late morning Baptisms after the main Sunday service on one set day each month, and maybe had up to four families in Church. This suited to majority of the congregation, but felt like a production line after-thought.

Here we try our best to shoe-horn everybody in on a main Sunday morning, but Church has priorities of its own (Harvests, Remembrance day and so forth when we are already trying to do something else really important) or has a pattern that is less "friendly" than we might have hoped (you know an un-Churched family is going to ask for a Sunday when we do Book of Common Prayer).

I don't have enough regular Baptisms to block them together for joint preparation, and yet I have too many to easily fit them in on Sundays that only suit "us". I don't mind doing the occasional Baptism out of hours when the family does not have a direct connection with us geographically, but I don't want local families to be messed about when they are precisely the people we are investing as much time as we possibly can in.

Bored of complicated things. Want simple answers.

Bang goes my French

Ok, I haven't done French properly for a long time, but pride myself on being able to get by - ordering a medium rare steak and a beer, for example. We have our French exchange student staying, so we are trying to improve our own French when we talk to him (not all the time, of course).

Somebody rang to speak to F this morning...

"Elle marches avec le chien", I replied (feeling very proud of myself (I think this is entirely acceptable Franglais).

"She's climbing a mountain?", they queried with some astonishment in their voice.

I give up.

My own worst enemy?

Yesterday...

...a day off but as tired as I've been in ages. I did all the right things - in particular a decent run just over 4 miles - but no matter how I tried my brian was whizzing so that I couldn't doze during the day. However at 8pm I was ready for bed but by that time had a stack of things to do, so didn't get to sleep for another three hours plus.

Today...

...a work day and even with a mountain of things to get finished I can hardly focus.

To sleep, perchance to stop thinking for a bit

One of the downsides of an overactive imagination is the repeated and ongoing threat to good, healthy deep sleep. Somehow at 2 am the part of the brain which filters rubbish out switches off, leaving the field clear for stupid worries and ill thought schemes to run amok.

Added to this a week of coughs and splutters and I don't feel I've properly visited and spent quality time in the land of nod for a while...

...yesterday I was able to run again and I slept deeply - so deeply in fact that being awake feels rather surreal just for the moment.

So I need to run again today on a day off and then aim for a deep, deep sleep again tonight.

The joy of being well planned...

I posted on twitter about the relief for once of being planned for today well in advance - putting Sunday up the priority list so that it is the other "in between" jobs which get put to one side, and get away from the soul destroying routine of planning for Sunday on a Saturday evening...

...and then on Saturday evening I got an answerphone message that this morning's baptism was off due to family illness. (This wasn't just flu - it was M & S flu...) So I was left with a choice - spend Saturday evening planning for Sunday again...or giving a go with expanding the bit of material I had about families into the main bit of a Family Service.

We thought about things people do in families (great to play charades in Church), and then we drew up a list of all the things we long for in our families...

...and...

...which is a mighty fine list. Of course, not all families are anywhere near like this - but I think that's the point. Because we are designed to need families to give us these things then when it doesn't work properly then we feel it all the more sharply.

But is it a coincidence that this list could also be used to describe what an ideal Church might be like as well? Could anybody give me a single reason why we shouldn't expect our God-families to be like this?

We read Romans 8:15-17 and thought briefly about being in God's family...

...so what stops this happening.

We thought about the enormous step between being a couple and being parents, and the demands of a newborn child which shake us out of our comfortable complacency into people who are responsible and care for this new little one...isn't that what we need the Holy Spirit to be doing in each one of us in our God-family, the Church.

We finished by reading Ephesians 4:1-6.

It was fun to have readings read by people who just volunteered, and fun too to have the charades played out by the adults and teenagers for the children.

Now the teenagers are in Church rehearsing for our Evening Service, and then I'm cooking the biggest pot of popcorn you've ever seen and they're all coming round to watch Top Gear.

Does life get better than this? 

This is ground control to Major Tom...

Very sweet this morning doing a really small Collective Worship with a Key Stage 1 Class and they were telling me in quite some detail about 40 years ago this morning Apollo 11 lifting off for the moon.

It felt strange to be telling them that I was their age exactly when I watched it live (just under two weeks short of my sixth birthday). One little chap knew a huge amount of detail (including the name of the third astronaut who remained in the Command Module) and was really excited by it all.

Bless...

A grateful heart?

I can't remember whether I have linked directly to this before, but I have a posterous site running; the idea of which is for me to upload snaps I take - mostly from my phone as I go along.

The theme of the photos is simply an attempt to express gratitude for whatever it is I am snapping at that moment.

Thank you.

New Typepad beta

Got to say that I think the new Typepad interface is neat, neat, neat. (Do you think they'll waive my annual bill if I say that?)

Not too sure about the new design I've selected, simpler layout but the other stuff looks a bit busy on my eye at least.