Several weeks...

As the blog by my friend Pop reaches its one-year anniversary (congratulations Pop, by the way... no-one doubted you'd make it... and you have, provoking much thinking on the way... thank you!) ... in a torturous 'tedious link' I think I have to comment that a year is 52 weeks...

Pipe smoking, ex PM Harold Wilson famously suggested once that "A week is a long time in politics".

The Barenaked ladies too, took time to point out that a week can be a long time...

The former was a political heavyweight... the latter ended up singing about Sushi and Chinese Chickens... but they've both got a point.

A week is a good chunk of time, in which a good number of things can happen...

Multiply that by several, and you have the period in which I haven't posted anything to this blog... (see, I told you it was tedious)

... you'd expect then some significant changes to report... and indeed, that's the case.

On a very positive note, God has been mightily good to us as a family... I appear to have bucked the current financial trend, and secured a permanent contract at work... We all appear to have exorcised the "we've got a new child in the house" demon of the common cold which had dogged us since October... Most amazingly, we appear to have some kept Moo alive to the grand old age of one and, although that doesn't stop her from waking at 1.30 in the morning screaming as her jaws shove a set of more or less blunt rocks very slowly through her gums, she now wakes with a certain world-weary panache that suggests she's seen it all before and would like some morphine please... 

Of course, the appearance of teeth means that we now have to conquer daily brushing... a chore made more necessary by her grandpa's attempt to feed her her own bodyweight in icing at her birthday party. What a heavyweight sugar rush feels like in an 20lb body, I can only imagine.


I do have to report though that some things are not all rosy in the world of Môme. Sadly... particularly in light of this blog's focus on 'home', and my pursuit of it through the body of Christ - The last few weeks have finally seen me reach some kind of tipping point in my relationship with the kind of Sunday church experience that has (if I'm honest) made up most of my engagement with Christianity ever since the year dot.

... all that is, except for a period of a few years living and working in community... but that's something that I'll come back to in a future discussion.

So, what's changed?

Well, circumstantially, a few things... but I don't think they are particularly relevant... 

Internally though, a lot has changed.

Until about a month ago, if I'd had to pick a word that described my feelings about our church, it would have been 'passion'. Like Moo pounding on her shape sorter because the round block won't go through the square hole, it didn't matter that what I brought didn't quite fit... it was enough that I was there, that we were all there, that God was there... and it was exciting to explore how my vision for what Church could be might fit with what was in place.

Now, I feel less like a round peg able to challenge the sufficiency of a square hole... I feel more like an olive in a fruit salad; theoretically also a fruit, but one that has been left behind by what all the other fruit appear to be happy doing and becoming that the only choice left is to give up on trying to redefine  the salad by its contents and simply accept that perhaps I fit better with other non-fruit fruits like tomatoes, cucumbers, walnuts and Mozarella.

OK... Mozarella's not a fruit... but it's too tasty to miss out and goes well with olives.

The interesting thing is, when you start to look more closely, you find that the fruit salad of church is far from uniformly fruit-type fruit... it's full of weird ingredients... all fighting similar internal fights. The church we attend, in particular, is dotted with those on 'Church sabbatical' or those setting up alternative activities to try and do something, anything, to make the distance between Sunday church and 'Church' smaller. 

Similarly, what I'm not talking about, I hasten to add, a withdrawal from 'Church'. Far from it... the close friendship that The Wife and myself enjoy with our Homegroup and a few others is invaluable to me, and the more disillusioned I become with what I see on a Sunday by Sunday, the more I value the way that they truly form the network that I call 'home'. 


 As I said somewhere near the top (quite a long way away now... sorry), even a week is a long time, and too many weeks have passed for me to begin to drop all of this into a single post in one go... so I'm going to try and cut this up in smaller 'bits' and write about them over the next few weeks or months...

And, I know my views are not shared by everyone. Close friends, even members of the same homegroup are happier now with Sunday mornings than they've been for 18 months... and that's OK, it's even very good... so I might be writing about that too...

And I guess that's the other thing that appears to have changed in the last few weeks... having reached the point back in February where I was posting sporadically, and largely negatively... Having reached something of a point-of-no-return spiritually, I now almost feel that I've disconnected from the situation that was dragging me down before...

Strangely, although I could say that I now 'care less' than before, that feeling of disconnect from the situation means that I feel freer than I did to actually do something about the situation... not in a reactive, reactionary way... that only causes damage... but in a constructive, building - I could even say prophetic - way. So I might also be writing about what happens there...


Basically, I now want to let fruit be fruit if they are happy with that... and simply go off and be a olive... and let God sort out the rest.

... I'll tell you how I get on :)