Wearily upward

A couple of days ago, my family and I took a walk around our new neighbourhood. It being in England AND during winter, this meant doing it as quickly as we could between rain showers. At one point a beautiful rainbow appeared in the sky in front of us (pictured) and it got me thinking... Growing up in a fairly dry part of South Africa, a rainbow always gave me a sense of excitement, because it meant that it was raining somewhere nearby. Rain was always needed, and therefore always welcomed. Living in the UK (where it rains A LOT more frequently than in South Africa) a rainbow also gives me a sense of excitement, but for a different reason: it shows that the sun is breaking through the clouds somewhere nearby. Rainbows happen in the same way in South Africa as in the UK. It's the same physics: water drops reflect, refract and disperse rays from the sun creating a rainbow. And yet, in different contexts, the same phenomenon means different things to me. In one context it remind...

I had a bit of a sad moment recently. I was dropping off my daughter at school and we were late, so I had to check her in at the front office, rather than leave her at her classroom door. After she was checked in, she turned to me and said (very maturely for a 4 year-old) that she'll be okay, because she knows the way to her class from there. And it struck me, watching her walk down the corridor, that we've dropped her off late enough times to make her feel comfortable with it. It's almost like being late for school has become the norm for her... And that makes me incredibly sad. There are mitigating circumstances however: we've recently moved house, so we're still figuring out how long it takes to get to school (in good and bad traffic), what to do when we miss one bus and the next one is only in 15 minutes, dealing with a 2 year-old son/brother who loves to wrestle rather than get dressed and let others get dressed, etc. All of this got me thinking about what ...

I was setting up our church's stage for a Carol Service recently and came across an interesting sight: a big stuffed toy in the shape of a shark was lying on top of the crate with electrical extension cables we store in the pulpit. "There is a shark in the pulpit," I thought. That's a phrase you don't hear very often... And so it got me thinking about pulpits and how different people value them. How important are they really? Some may argue that they are very important and that they should be treated with far more respect and reverence than to let them become a storage space for stuffed animals and extension cables. I can understand that. The pulpit is, historically, where the good news of hope and salvation in Christ was preached from. Now, for those reading this that do not know what a pulpit is, a pulpit is a raised, enclosed platform from which sermons are (were in our case) preached (like the one in the picture, which is not ours). Most pulpits I've c...