Thankful

Posted on October 1, 2013 by Kath

It’s Tuesday and yes, you guessed it, it’s another post with reference to ‘Tuesday Group’. Today we were thinking about being thankful. It’s the season of harvest,  autumn beginning, the nights drawing in, and gloomy mornings. Today we shared things we were thankful for and thanked God for them, aware of how easy it is to forget to do this. Being me I obviously had a bit of an existential crisis about being thankful and wrote a long over-analytical piece about being thankful. Being a reader of this blog means you are lucky enough to get to see it.

Why is it so hard to shout out loud what I am thankful for? What makes me stop and falter as I think about things? I know the list is there. I know there are many many many things I am thankful for. So why do I stop and why am I so hesitant to write them down?

I fear thankfulness because it doesn’t come with caveats. With buts or with if onlys. Thankfulness is present and joyful. I fear this means thankfulness is just an illusion, my glass half empty personality worries that I’ll be an annoying happy person if I go around shouting my thanks. I fear people will be undone by what I’m thankful for because they don’t have it or can’t see it. I think too much.

I struggle to believe that thankfulness doesn’t mean I’m hiding the pain in life, it doesn’t mean I can’t cry out in hurt and ask for help.

The hardest part of being thankful is the letting go. Thankfulness calls me to leave my self pitying corner of the room and come and dance.

Thankfulness leaves no room for complaint or bitterness.

Thankfulness leaves no room for hardness of heart, for my demand for everything to be fair.

Thankfulness leaves no room for moaning or grumbling.

Thankfulness shuts the door to the room of I want more, I deserve more, I need more.

Thankfulness is tricky in its ways.

Thankfulness can lead me to contentment, to joy, to hope and to a wide eyed wonder in the now.

Thankfulness can help me get up each morning after sleepless nights and do it all over again.

Thankfulness can help me in the hard times to hope in the good that might be there.

Thankfulness teaches me that not everything in the world is hopeless and a reason for despair.

Thankfulness can teach me gratitude.

Thankfulness can set me free.

Most of all thankfulness leads me to the one I am thankful to.

If I would only let it.

So here goes. Here is my wonderfully incomplete list. Life can be hard, brilliant or mostly in between but here is some of what I am thankful for in the midst of that.

I am thankful for

Day following night.
The warm body that wraps around mine when I come back from night feeds and whispers ‘well done’ in my ears.
Crazy small boy giggles.
Friends to sigh with, drink tea with, share this life with.
A small head that nuzzles into my shoulder.
Being loved in my moody fickle weirdness by my Father, Friend and Lord.
Cups of tea.
Crisp cold sunny mornings.
Duvets and cosy beds.
Mist kissing the tops of mountains.
Those who’ve known and loved me through the worst.
Forgiveness, new starts and clean slates.
A God who delights to do me good and stands with me in the watches of the night.
A husband who seeks my best, loves me well, makes me laugh and keeps on wiping away my tears.
The soft palms that stroke/hit my face as my boy feeds from me.
My family and the love poured out on me from them.
Lives that have shown me grace.
Music that soothes my soul.
Coming home.
The many gifts that enabled us to live where we do with the stuff we have.
Big fat crashing waves.
Big glasses of red wine and crackling fires.
Hands to hold in the darkness.
A light that goes deeper than the darkness.
Mercies that are new each morning.
Someone to be thankful to.

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A lesson I need to learn again and again…

Posted on September 24, 2013 by Kath

gazeOne thing matters. One thing I need to get straight in the day. One thing that slots everything else in its place. One thing which means everything else starts to make sense.

One thing.

Gaze on the beauty of The Lord

Other things attract my gaze, other things drive me to despair, other things make me compete and compare. Other things rock my little boat on this sea. Other things leave me sinking.

Gaze on the beauty of The Lord.

Then the adoration of others dims, the need to compare to position myself in this world grows faint, the worries about whether I am fulfilling my potential drift away, the fears about being left behind get blurry.

Gaze on the beauty of The Lord.

His beauty is everywhere, in the giggle of my silly son, in the big clouds, in music that soothes my soul, in friends and family, in the words he has written of his story of never failing love for stupid people like you and me.

Gaze on the beauty of The Lord.

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50 years of cassettes…

Posted on September 23, 2013 by Kath

cassetteApparently it’s 50 years since the cassette tape came out, apart from that making me feel hideously old it’s sent me spiralling on a nostalgia trip from my misguided youth. I’ve written about this before, a few years ago, but it feels like time to dust down the thoughts and ponder on the significance of the humble cassette tape.

Cassettes changed how we experienced music, suddenly it was portable and plugged into our ears we could have a real life soundtrack to our day to day comings and goings. Obviously the iPod owes lots to its battered and ancient cousin the Walkman. Thinking about it they also probably contributed to the privatisation of our selves but that’s one poncy blog post too far…

Cassettes provided the opportunity to curate our own listening experience, they ensured we could pick out all tracks we liked from albums and put them together in another space. The mixtape was born, a beautiful invention.

The mixtape was how I communicated to my friends in my teenage years, I’d make them tapes to confirm friendships, music saying many things that are hard to express in mere words. I can clearly remember my old tape to tape recorder, the skill of not getting clunks between tracks, getting the right amount of pause between songs, the joy of compiling just the right sequence of songs, making sure there was progression from loud to soft and back again, maintaining a theme and finding the perfect end song for each side.  Nick Hornby in High Fidelity lists the rules better than I could:

“is a very subtle art: many dos and don’ts. First of all, you’re using someone else’s poetry to express how you feel; this is a delicate thing. …It takes ages longer than it might seem. You gotta kick it off with a killer, to grab attention. Then you gotta take it up a notch. But you don’t want to blow your wad. So then you gotta cool it off a notch. There are a lot of rules.” (well John Cusack’s words in the film)

The creation of a perfect mixtape is a fine, somewhat lost, art restricted to a certain generation. My iPhone cover is in the shape of a cassette tape and children give it bemused looks. The cassette tape belongs to just a few of us and for that I love it. 

It was obviously flawed. My car regularly ate tapes, the sound wasn’t great, none of the smoothness of CDs or the raw feeling of LPs. It was more for what cassette could do for you that made them significant and a thing of great joy.

Making a CD for my friends and family each year at Christmas of all the music that’s been significant throughout the year is the closest I get to the mixtape now. It’s not quite as time consuming (a good tape was a work of a whole afternoon rather than the 20 min or so that it takes to drag, drop and burn) but its still very satisfying. I thank the time of the cassette for pioneering the way to making music portable and flexible. Well done you brown weird tape stuff so easily broken.

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An ordinary life?

Posted on September 20, 2013 by Kath

H_finalRecently I took the test to work out once and for all just which house I’d be in if I was in Harry Potter, would I have the daring and bravery for Griffindor? Would I have the intellect for Ravenclaw? The cunning for Sytherin. Well no, I was well and truly in Hufflepuff. The name of which says it all. Hufflepuff, not known for being very outstanding in much but loyalty, patience and ordinary living. There was a time when that would have irked me more than it did. I still felt the twinge of being labelled as not very outstanding but I think I’m more at ease with being ordinary now.

There is an article doing the rounds as to the problem with my generation. You can read the whole thing here, the summery point seems to be we expect too much from life. We expect that we can have the fulfilling career, that we are all special and outstanding and can achieve greatness in a relatively short period of time. The maths doesn’t add up, we clearly can’t all be outstanding because, well think about it, we’d all be the same and there would have to be another level for the really outstanding.  We’re conditioned by the air we breathe in this world to crave fame, fortune and the accolade of lots of people knowing who we are. I clearly remember thinking about 15 years ago that I could change the world, that my life could be extraordinary and that we should aim for such things. Ordinary living just wasn’t an option.

To be honest I liked my brief flirting with fame albeit on the smallest scale possible. For a while there I was known in a small corner of the Christian world (I stress the small), I stood on a stage and talked of the One who made me and I liked it when people knew my name, when people recognised my face. The beast inside which craves attention grew and grew and I felt good. Of course I was doing it to glorify the One who made me but I loved basking in the sun myself for a bit. Something had to be done and, since stepping away from that life, I’ve been on this crazy journey of figuring out how to live the ordinary unseen life. (well clearly I haven’t done that very well, this blog still exists for a start…)

Anyway, glaring inconsistencies aside, I hope I’m wiser now, I’m certainly older and I’m slowly coming around to the idea that maybe being a Hufflepuff isn’t such a bad thing after all. It is after all in the ordinary everyday life that our Maker steps into and transforms, not maybe into an all singing all dancing life but he injects meaning into the encounters we have with others in our day, he gives us the opportunity each day to live a life of love, he helps us as we live in the mundane, he brings the reality of his presence to bear on the situations we find ourselves in and most of all, he sees. He sees the sacrifices we make, the joys and sorrows, he sees the unseen.

1 Thessalonians tells us to make it our ambition to lead a quiet life. I’ve not heard that preached from many pulpits or seen that kind of life made attractive by those who have the loudest voice in our world. We want the adulation, the applause, to be living out our passion. The reality is we might not get to do that, we might not get to have the most fulfilling glorious life, but we do get to have a life lived with the works God has planned out for us each day.  That might just be a better life to aim for. We do get to live with the knowledge that we have worth and value whatever outwardly we spend our time doing each day. We do get to know that we are deeply special to our Maker and that we have a better audience for our coming and going than each other. One who is not fickle, who doesn’t favour others over us, who doesn’t forget about us and who has good works for us to be getting on with.

What do you think? I think there is still place for ambition in this life, for looking to do the things we are gifted in. To be honest, deep down is still the desire to change the world. Maybe though I need to ask God to get on with that job and proffer up my small loaves and fishes along the way? Maybe I’m just trying to find a way to make the ordinary extraordinary?

Your Correspondent, once more finding herself with more questions than answers…

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A new metaphor…

Posted on September 17, 2013 by Kath

meRecently something strange has happened, I’ve felt a discernible shift in temperament, a change in the clouds above, a glimpse of sunlight pouring through the trees and a stirring of hope. The summer holidays were brilliant for rest and restoration of my body and, as these things so often follow each other, my soul. More sleep, less aching led to space in my head and a strange kind of feeling of normality. Extreme exhaustion seems to be on the way out for now.

My metaphor for living (clearly something that everyone needs, if you don’t have a metaphor for life how can you really know or explain anything?) has turned from a forest glade (see here) into something more. No longer caught in one place, surrounded by trees, I find myself beginning to explore this new world that I’ve found myself in. I still can’t see any massive views or mountain tops but here the sunlight is streaming through the gaps in the trees. There are paths to meander down and explore, woodland streams to gaze at and deep clear pools to paddle and swim in.

poolsThis new world is now one of movement and exploration, the horizon remains pretty limited still but the paths are being explored, new territory is opening up and I can see that life here is good for living.

My mind is opening up, I can sit and listen to people now, I can converse and I can rejoice.  This morning I sat with some other lovely ladies at the aptly named ‘Tuesday Group’ I go to on a Tuesday morning. Sonface was playing happily in the creche and I sat with new and old friends and listened to someone’s story. She told her tale of art and maths and how God has weaved her story through the pieces of work she showed us. I was reminded again of the value of lives, of how God takes each one of us and weaves our story into his. I delighted again in the many various ways he is reflected in how we live out our tales in this world.  In short I felt human again, like me again. 

Next week I start a course in Spiritual Direction with our local diocese, for one day a month I shall sit with others and contemplate what it means to listen to people on their journey with God and hopefully see more of his work in others lives and my own. I hopefully with have my brain blown again with his work throughout history and in so many various ways with so many different types of people.

For weeks I’ve been almost in denial that this course will happen, wondering where on earth I would find the energy to even get there, let alone be able to participate in what is going on. Now I can imagine being there, thinking thoughts, listening to the One who made us and has a big beautiful world for us to participate in.

Thankfully it seems like once again the Spirit has been on the move, that God knows better and is at work preparing me for what will come in the months ahead. It’s good to be out of the glade and walking through life again.

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