This is just a brief placeholder to note that I haven't gone away... much though some would like me to. It's just that life has gotten in the way of creative thought recently...
It all started with trying to get away for that week-end in London... I think any final reserves of physical and mental energy were rung out of me at that point... Then there was the crazy run in to Easter... 16 events to prepare for in one week... but then as so many of my "friends" point out (each one believing themselves to be totally original) it is my "busy time of year". They will encourage me with similar words in the run up to Christmas...
By Easter Monday I was only capable of sitting in a corner and gibbering... But I had a few days off that week which I spent with my family and totally away from computer and phone, and that was good.
But in the background have been physical problems (the joys of getting older but forgetting that fact on the football pitch) and an ongoing issue with the car I bought 2 months ago.
I chose the car (a SEAT Altea XL diesel for anyone remotely interested) partly because of recommendations as to its reliability, but of the 9 weeks I have owned it, the garage that I bought it from have had it for 6 of those weeks. I could fill this blog with reviews of the entire SEAT range now... (don't buy the Ibiza Ecomotive, for example... it may save the environment, but you will suffer from deafness within months because of the lack of soundproofing around the engine in the pursuit of greater economy)... and I cannot praise the persistence of the garage in question enough. They think they have sorted the problem now, but are so aware of the problems caused that they have offered me a "goodwill" deal that I am probably going to take.
Also, today I meet with a health professional who, I hope will be able to deal with my injury and help assess why it keeps happening... So hopefully after today, I might begin to see life getting back to "normal" again, whatever normality is.
But actually, that's part of my problem... I cope with the abnormal... the major crises of life and work... relatatively well... It is the mundane, ongoing, niggly problems that wear me down and send me into a spiral of despair. And I wonder whether that is true for others...
It is Thoreau who is reputed to have said "Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them." He certainly said the first part in "Walden", but I can find no accurate citation of the second part of this much quoted bon mot... Yet it is the second part that perplexes me...
I wonder how many songs, poems and creative urges I have buried throughout my ministry. And I mean physically buried in cold dark earth. People who simply had to get on with the everyday business of living, without a creative thought ever getting the chance to bloom... Living until they died, but never fully knowing the joy of life. This is Christian Aid week, and famously they claim, as the image on this page affirms, to believe in life before death... Do we? Or is existence the best we can offer? Life deferred?
Jesus said that he had come that we should know life, and life to the full... I know, and have taught that when he said that he wasn't promising a life full of ecstatic, "mountaintop" experiences... But the key is finding out what that means in the everyday experience of sitting at a desk 9-5, paying bills, coping with niggling aches and pains...
A life of quiet desperation or life to the full?
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