A Full Weekend!

Saturday
Jamie was off bright and early to the Men's Breakfast from our church. This one was purely a social event, a good hot English Breakfast, cooked by the Pastor and Elders, and fellowship among the men.

Jack and Grace cleaned their rooms and did some chores. Jack raked leaves, Grace did a mountain of washing up left from a busy day yesterday. I baked with Jack. He loves trying out new cookies. This was a sort of peanut butter, chocolate creation. We washed up and I got started on our Shabbat meal.

A quick lunch and then lots of preparation for tomorrow's service. In our (morning) church, the Worship Leader has a big responsibility for the shape and direction of the service. In fact, the only thing the pastor does is preach and possibly interview someone, or welcome them into membership. So, as Jamie and I were going to be leading, we had to put a lot of thought into how to design the service and what emphasis we wanted. Pastor had not yet told us what he was preaching on, and in the end, I think he changed his mind at the last minute. So, although we prefer to design a service around the Bible text, we couldn't do that this time. We had decided on the theme of Wholehearted Worship.

I needed to practice my singing too! I'd lost my singing voice a few weeks ago with the horrible cold/flu I caught and have been practicing every day for the last week to try to get it back up to scratch. On Saturday, I was still not sounding good, so I was a little concerned. But Grace was also singing and she sounded great, so I could have dropped out, if need be.

Later in the afternoon, we went to a member of the music team's house for a rehearsal. Jack was not involved so he hung out with her teenaged son and played computer games with him. We spent a couple of hours practicing and making final adjustments to the music.

Back home to set the table and get everything ready for Shabbat. (We celebrate it on a Saturday evening. Yes, I know that's not authentic. We're not going for authenticity, just workability!) The table looked lovely, the food was ready. I lit the candles, we prayed...A DEEP BREATH... and we drank wine, ate, talked and calmed right down. We had a delightful evening, catching up with each other and listening to New Irish Hymns by Keith and Kirsten Getty. Jamie and Grace had gone to a workshop led by them at Word Alive in the Spring and we were going to sing a new song of theirs in church on Sunday.

We caught up with a few chapters of Tabitha's Travels, our Advent reading book. We always have fun remembering the interweaving of the stories of 3 books in this series. We've heard there may be a fourth on the horizon next year and wonder if it will be about Ishtar this time. {g} An early night followed.

Sunday
Up very early packing the car with guitars, amp, music stands, music, food for the food bank, Bibles, notes, what else? Don't forget the bottles of water, the gold table covering, the book to lend to a friend, We think that's all. Later, I have to return home as we forgot a set of music sheets! Oh well. We're there on time and open up and start to set out the equipment and plug everything in. The school hall we meet in seems to be more cluttered every week, used as a dumping ground by the school for equipment they have yet to find homes for. They don't seem very happy to be sharing their rooms with us at the weekend. Sometimes, we find notes scrawled by teachers on the classroom white boards, saying things like 'Church, Please DO NOT move the desks and DO NOT mess with my chair!' And that is in a room used as a creche for the babies so the desks always have to be moved out of the room and put back again. It's always so awkward.

The service went well. My voice held up and I didn't embarrass myself. {g} The people liked the Gift of Worship video clip we downloaded from Sermonspice.com and the little skit Jamie and I made up about me being too grumpy to sing today.{g} It's such an awesome responsibility to bring God's people to a place they can worship God freely.

I watched people as they arrived, mostly late, today. From the front, we could see them arriving cold and wet. (This hall is draughty too, so they didn't warm up much physically and most kept their coats on.) They looked harassed and miserable, stressed by the season and by their worldly cares. It was our job to coax them out of that frame of mind into one of abandoned, wholehearted worship. We'd prayed so hard for them before we started. Out in the corridor, before each service, the musicians and the eldership and pastor are supposed to meet to pray for the service. This week, the elders and pastor didn't turn up, but the musicians are a faithful group and a couple of the congregation joined us to pray.

Thanks to God, his people warmed up, relaxed, remembered why they had come and we worshipped with our whole hearts. At then end of the service, a trickle of people came to the front as we unplugged, shifted equipment and wound up cables, to thank us. This doesn't always happen, but it did today. It's such a joy to be able to minister to people this way.

We arrived home late. We were the first to arrive and the last to leave church. No time to cook the Sunday Lunch that most British people enjoy after church on Sundays, but we had plenty of leftovers after last night's feast. Jamie went for a short nap, because he had been on lates at work last week and was still pretty much wiped out from that. I lay down on the sofa with the kids' ASDAN portfolios trying to figure out that they needed to do the following week. I fell asleep though, as the house was unexpectedly silent for an hour or two.

Then we left at 4.00 to go to Oxford. Jamie had been asked to play bass in our (evening) church's service by Phil, the worship leader there. Jamie agreed but needed to be there early for a rehearsal. As we only have one car we had to be there too. We spent a delicious hour in the large Borders bookshop and finished up with hot chocolates from the coffee shop.

Waiting for Jamie to pick us up, Grace, Jack and I stood in the rain outside the Randolph hotel, where 3 years ago, I'd met with Sally Clarkson when she was staying in Oxford. We went out for a coffee and a chat and became immediate friends as she is so easy to talk to. It's funny that as we huddled outside the hotel door in the dark, I was thinking about her and praying for her. That must have been just about the time the gunman attacked her church in Colorado and shot dead 5 people, there and at the local YWAM office. {sigh} We do live in a hostile world.

Back to the church for fabulous worship and a fascinating talk from a christian professor of physiology at Oxford University. His theme was 'Has Science Ruled Out Religion?' and his conclusion was, obviously, not. One thing he said stayed with me, though. It was that among most of his scientific colleagues the main reason for rejecting Christianity was NOT science or logic or anything Dawkins would have us believe, but the age-old Question of Suffering. In this sense, then, brilliant scientists are no different from most ordinary folk. It's their compassion which prevents them from believing in a compassionate God. No answers, just questions. But we are the richer for them, I think.

3 He was despised and rejected by men,
a man of sorrows, and familiar with suffering.
Like one from whom men hide their faces
he was despised, and we esteemed him not.
4 Surely he took up our infirmities
and carried our sorrows,
yet we considered him stricken by God,
smitten by him, and afflicted.
5 But he was pierced for our transgressions,
he was crushed for our iniquities;
the punishment that brought us peace was upon him,
and by his wounds we are healed.
6 We all, like sheep, have gone astray,
each of us has turned to his own way;
and the LORD has laid on him
the iniquity of us all.
7 He was oppressed and afflicted,
yet he did not open his mouth;
he was led like a lamb to the slaughter,
and as a sheep before her shearers is silent,
so he did not open his mouth.
Isaiah 53