Oh dear

It is amazing where stress points come when you get busy. Ours are often around meal times. Breakfast turns into a misery of someone has got down too late and is in a rush. This morning was certainly a smashing time. And then everyone gets to work stretched thin and miserable. Does Jesus have anything to teach us? I'm not sure but I've been teaching the Gethsemane story recently and I guess that is certainly a time of stress. So what does he do? Well, he anticipates it, praying and conquering in advance. Then when it comes to it, he seems to stay calm whatever is thrown at him, and however badly everyone, friend or foe, behaves. There may just be a lesson there...

Nearly there...

I've been doing my own Bible in a Year. It's been great fun, surprisingly. I used the simple system of reading a double page each day. This way I've needed no schemes and cannot get behind - ideal for me (unlike blogging!). Today I got to the end of Hebrews and suddenly it struck me - I'm nearly there. Only a few mini-letters and Revelations to go. What have I learnt? Apart from the serendipity of passage meeting situation, which has been surprisingly rare, I've got a real feel for the huge differences in writing style, and the surprising similarities in content. It encouraged me to do an essay on Paul's letters, which showed (to me at least) that the earliest and the latest had so close a theme as to be inseparable. As I always comment of the critics of the authenticity of the Bible: "Clearly they haven't actually read it". Get reading folks!

Time or tide

Just been on an 'initiation' weekend. It sounded like something out of the masons but was really just about baptism. I had one sparky thought, which I'll have to follow up. As it is true that Jesus' death and resurrection 2,000 years ago may be appropriated to me today by faith, is it not just as reasonable that my baptism 46 years ago may be appropriated to me by faith. Or, to put it differently, why do we get so tied up about temporal order with baptism when we don't seem to about other aspects of following Jesus? It seems to me that the CofE is right on this one - the order does not matter provided there is both baptism and faith (and I might add the baptism of the Spirit, also, which I am not convinced is tied down to a particular event in time be it baptism, confirmation or conversion). A thought, probably with many errors, but it seemed a good one...