Royal Agricultural Show (PMB) – through new eyes

I have learned over the years to avoid agricultural shows if I can possibly help it. There are so many dogs jumping through fiery hoops that a person can handle in one year. I always seem to arrive when the police are showcasing their clever hounds. If you blindfold me I am sure I could take you to at least 40% of the stalls that were in the same place last year and without doubt the year before that. Is it just me, but you have to always be careful where you tread as some over eager kid always eats too much and spews the contents over the public pathway.

That is until Howard arrived. I have never been so excited to go to the show before. I have a tendency to give my child a voice when he has not even spoken the hallowed “Dada” yet. I am thinking how my little 17 month old is going to perceive the prize bull with brass ring in its nose, the elegant horse jumping its logs and the shiny tractors with there new chrome radiators and black polished tyres. He just has to enjoy it or is it the flashbacks of my childhood roaming the old “Rand Easter show” that I project through his little eyes?

A child's part in spiritual formation

“Children are our first defense against the deadening and flattening effects of disconnecting God and life.” E. Peterson

This was something to digest, having a one year old in my house seems as if my spiritual formation is at an end! Isaiah said: “And a little child shall lead them” (11:6) and we know Christ’s attitude to children (Matt 18). What children do is they break the divisions between private and public and the temptation to make my prayer life a separate, quite, secluded part of my life. A relationship with a child is all encompassing and everything happens in the moment. Only later do they learn to differentiate and compartmentalize their lives. Children break us out of the secluded routines and help us as the psalmist says: “…walk before God in the light of life.” (Ps. 56:13b) But, I be honest, a child’s screaming tests my ‘harmony’ in a big way – maybe it is helping me live my faith in the raw of the emotional day?

Grandmother logic

The patterns set by parents for their children in the younger years are the habitual center for life. That subconscious guide that prompts us along the road of life is often the voice of our parents, although not their voice now but ours. We often find ourselves returning back to the paths of our younger days or spending as much time as we can away from them, all depending on our experience. The more time we spend nurturing our young children in the church the better chance we have of them returning to its doors later in life. ‘Family time’ could be a key pillar in ensuring the future success of the Church. I wonder if we saw each other as a Grandmother, Father, Brother, Mother, Sister of each other in the church what a difference that would make. The biblical injunction that the Church is our family is an important one. Many of us know that our family life back home is dysfunctional in some way. Work constraints prevent us from spending the amount of time we ought with children and spouse or we are a single parent struggling to be a role model for our kids. If we see ourselves in the Church as family we can often fill the gap for others. It could be that our greatest ministry is finding how and with whom we can be a family member with. Who needs to be mothered, go and mother them? Who needs the wisdom of a grandfather, go and be a grandfather?

Ghost busters

Ghost busters we are. The call to expose the works of darkness is found in Ephesians 5.8-14. Not only are we to illuminate our lives with the loving light of our faith in Christ and watch the bugs scamper into dark corners but we are to bring that light to others. This is a wonderful image to highlight what happens when the children of God take up their call to meditate and pray with their God. The light gets that much brighter, the obvious bugs that fled long ago have now been replaced by stains unnoticed as the lights radiance brightens. At times there needs to be a spring clean of our soul to remove the persistent dark marks that taint our personality from many years of conscious and unconscious sin. The New Year is upon us and time on earth is once again the subject of discussion. Time is like a broken tap running, its water rushes down into the ground unstopped. May we take every opportunity to catch as much life as we can.