Wearily upward

My family and I moved house recently. It was a gradual move, i.e. we got the keys to the new flat on a Monday and finished moving the following Sunday. This meant we filled and emptied our little Toyota Yaris (Car Of The Year in 2000, no less!) around twenty times that week to move the contents of cupboards, drawers, shelves, etc. to the new flat. I thought that would be a less stressful way to move house. And it was... to some extent. The stressful part was going down metal stairs outside our old flat, at night (when the kids were asleep), carrying two or three Ikea bags full of clothes, pots and a random set of Tintin DVDs I bought in 2012. However, I never slipped once during the whole move, no matter what I was carrying. By the grace of God! I have slipped on those stairs before, though. Twice, in fact. The first time was on a bright, sunny day, on my way to work, laptop bag on my back. The second was on a cold and wet day, on my way to work, laptop bag on my back. Rememberi...

Everything that has a start, also has a end. It's the way things tend to work: mobile phone battery, Christmas ribbons, the chorus-bridge loop in worship songs (thank goodness), a warm cup of tea, spending time with loved ones, long-winded blog posts... and even life itself. For the most part we tend to want the difficult, bad, challenging things to end quicker. We also want the nice, fun, good things to go on forever. There is, however, an art and a necessity to putting a full stop in the right place; after the good and the bad. As a musician and aspiring creative I often find it hard to know when to stop. Adding another verse to a song doesn't always make the song better (Charles Wesley may disagree...). Using too many words when trying to explain something can often lead to more confusion than clarity. Adding more objects to a picture than is necessary can create so much noise that the message gets lost. I can go on, but I'll stop there... for now... We find the pe...

If I were to ask you to think of a perfect person, who would you think of? Do you know anyone who is perfect? Some may have said, yes, I know The Perfect Person (Jesus Christ). Others may have said, yes, I know this one guy/girl who is perfect. Still others may have said, no, the perfect person doesn't exist. Whatever your answer was to the question above, you would have used some sort of evaluation matrix or mental checklist, a benchmark of perfection to measure or discern whether someone is perfect. This may vary from person to person. We don't all evaluate things (or people) in the same way. Something I would describe as perfect might not even come close to being perfect in your eyes. Like the perfect poem, or the perfect sunrise. The perfect wedding, or the perfect rugby game at a World Cup Final which the Springboks won against England, 32-12... Perfection can be very subjective. But Jesus, in Matthew 5:48, tells the crowds He is teaching to 'Be perfect, theref...