Vintage

Vintage Fisher Price boy, baseball cap sideways, red freckles scattered over a grumpy face, found lurking under a living room chair. That – and the sheets and towels hanging up drying – remind us of a weekend of laughter and fun as most of the family gathered. Four wee cousins together for the first time: precious. Priceless moments to be savoured.

Blessing upon blessing. By coincidence (!), our reading this morning was Isaiah 61:1-3. Verse 3 was God’s promise last year, a promise graciously fulfilled: during this year we have watched and experienced God’s loving hand on our lives, comforting all who mourn, bestowing a crown of beauty instead of ashes, anointing with the oil of gladness instead of mourning, and bedecking us all in a garment of praise as wee Eliott joins cousins Callan, Felicity and Gregor. 

God is good. As peace settles back on this rather empty home, our memories pop with moments relived, of laughter and joy, love and conversation, fun and an unspoken communion between us all. 

Happy Monday.

In the beginning...

In the beginning.

Sunday night. The beginning of a new week. I like to look at the shape of the week to come, of my week to come. Being a writer who needs loose time, time to fidget and dally and finally settle into writing mode, I welcome a week whose landscape includes some empty terrain. Rarely am I looking at such a landscape, but with a little planning I can usually squeeze pockets of it in, now and then.

Worst of all weeks are those pockmarked by meetings: it depends what meetings, I confess, because some meetings are great: creative and prayerful, and include spending time with people I know and enjoy. But not all are.  Not so keen on appointments, either, because those invariably involve valuable time spent in waiting rooms. Good idea to remember to take a book to redeem the time: note to self for tomorrow morning.

Great weeks are those dimpled with time spent with loved ones, and I am blessed with many loved ones within driving distance. It may not always be so, and not all of my loved ones are in driving distance, so I make the most of the moments. To spend time with wee ones, watching personalities develop and creativity spark is a blessing, pure joy. To spend time with grown ones who will always be my wee ones, is inspiring and, in the true sense of the word, awesome.

Great weeks include those where the appointments are with God and special praying friends. Soaring together in the Spirit. Yes.

Great weeks are also those celebrating love and life. Celebrating and remembering forty-two years spent with my soul-mate: enjoying memories of the ups, usually laughing at memories of the downs, and being full of gratitude for them all.

Yes, a great week coming up. Thanks and praise to God for those everlasting arms which have always held us safe.

Cairns

On a day out with good friends, we hiked part of the Cairn walk, which is a jumble of spaghetti trails on the Balmoral estate leading to the eleven cairns Queen Victoria had erected to commemorate weddings of her children. They sit astride hills of varying heights but each gives panoramic views of the surrounding hills. Although our walk coincided with the annual Balmoral runs, which attract hundreds if not thousands of competitors, most of the time we were alone in the wilderness forests above Balmoral. 

The cairns are dry-stane creations, it seems, rough and unhewn stones without mortar to hold them together. It is a skilled job to construct a pyramid of such symmetry, and not end up with just a jumble of rocks. Above the rest, the ‘daddy’ of all the cairns is that which Victoria had raised to the memory of her dear husband Albert, who died young and left Victoria alone and bereft for decades. His cairn was fashioned from dressed stones, fitting snugly together as do the pyramids of Egypt, requiring even more skill from the artisans. 

As each cairn crowns a wooded summit, we thought of the craftsmen who had to find and choose the stones and then get them up the slopes.  No mean feat: I hope that Queen Victoria appreciated the task she set them.

 

The Israelites often used stones to commemorate miracles of God – the crossing of the Red Sea, for instance, or the Lord’s appearance to Jacob at Bethel. God instructed his people to remember events through ritual or construction – the annual Passover meal is a prime example when the older generation rehearsed again the detail of their forbears’ flight from slavery, using word and carefully-chosen food to remind them of the event. 

Jesus took the ordinariness of bread and wine and lifted them to the level of a memorial of the most incredible gift the world has ever received. Believers still use bread and wine to remember this divine sacrifice for our sakes.

I’ve been thinking about cairns in my own particular past, markers of significant events that dot through my life. Meeting and marrying Don: that beautiful cairn is built of a box containing 8 months of letters and a photo album of the wedding. The births of our children: albums of pictures. The deaths of my sister and dad: tear-stained and intangible, that cairn is. The marriages of our sons: more pictures. The births, and the death, of our grandchildren: pictures cemented with tears.

The daddy of my cairns, though, has to be the moment I first met Jesus through the power of his Holy Spirit. My eyes were opened to see that Jesus invited me to have a living relationship with him. That he died for me, so that I might live with him. That cairn, built of no less than the body and blood of our Saviour, still excites a thrill of gratitude and love, having eternal significance and towering right through time.

So I’ll say it again. Happy Easter.

Gifts

Some people excel at gift-giving; they seem to have a knack for choosing just the right thing. Some cultures encourage generous giving to the point of self-denial. If you express admiration for someone’s tie or scarf, they immediately take it off and insist on giving it to you.

It can be challenging to know how to respond. Indebted? Embarrassed? Most gift-givers, though, are content to see the joy the gift brings the recipient. More blessed to give than to receive, Jesus said.

God is just such a gift-giver. He excels at tailoring the gift to the recipient. 

It can be challenging to know how to respond. We can feel inadequate. We can sense that the gift comes with responsibilities we can’t or don’t want to shoulder. We can feel we don’t deserve it.

But I think that God gives gifts like he gives his love – unconditionally. He enjoys watching our delight and joy as we receive from him.

God’s gifts are perfect. They inspire gratitude and joy. These are four of the best gifts I have ever been given. God excelled himself when he entrusted these four into our care.

They all inspire gratitude and joy, not just in us, but in others, too. God is so good.

The Gloaming

The gloaming. It’s so beautiful, and it lasts so long at this time of year in Scotland that they had to invent their own word for it. I stood on the rocks at the entrance to Tarbert Harbour a couple of nights ago, listening to the lullaby of the lapping waves and watching the lightshow over the village. 

The end of the day. Time to stand still and reflect on the day’s activities, the day’s successes or failures, and give the package to God. Somehow things can look clearer from an end-of-the-day perspective. Mistakes may be highlighted and can be apologised for. Jesus moments can be perceived and gratitude can rise, filling the heart with joy and peace. 

The beloved dad of dear friends recently reached the end of his long life. His gloaming probably lasted a bit longer than he might have chosen, but it had a beauty about it, too, as loved ones had time to appreciate him and say their adieus. 

He is now in one big Jesus moment, home at the end of his day, and his loved ones can rest assured that they walked him home safely. There is a quiet beauty at the end of a life well-lived.