Boscombe Looking BACK

This week’s Five Minute Friday prompt https://fiveminutefriday.com/2019/08/29/fmf-writing-prompt-link-up-back/ reminded me of a poem I wrote about one our favourite places. It’s only an hour and a half’s drive away and great to escape to for a weekend, a day, or just an evening’s walk along the prom in any season.  So this week I’m sharing that poem with you:

The low late light is too dazzling to look at directly,
Obscuring all into silhouettes at most.
But look the other way
And see what golden beauty the blush glow casts
On large and small:
Myriad minion suns burst
From the gorse covered cliffs;
Skyblue sea silver broidered with waves;
Rain clouds lined with hopeful edges;
And my beloved’s face reflects
The outer and the inner light.

 

Stop Before You Need To (PACE Five Minute Friday)

I’ve been running another of our regular fatigue management courses at work recently.

It’s the most common symptom our palliative patients get and sadly we can’t magic them back to the levels of energy they had in their youth. But we can help them make choices about how to budget the energy they have now.

One of the strategies we teach is the 5Ps. And one of the Ps is Pacing.

It may translate as something really simple like stopping halfway up the stairs to catch your breath rather than trying to rush to the top in one go. Or it may mean a change in routine like sitting down for a coffee break during a morning of housework. Or even some complex planning ahead, like arranging a taxi and carers to take a wheelchair bound patient home for a rest in between a wedding service and reception.

But the real trick with pacing is this: Stop Before You Need To.

Many of us keep going until a task is finished, even to the point of exhaustion. We feel if we stop, we won’t be able to get going again and complete it. But if we stop before our muscles, lungs, minds, or emotions get over burdened, after a break, we can often keep going for longer so that we actually end up doing and achieving more.

It’s a lesson I need to apply to my own life too.

Too easily I fall into the trap of not taking lunch breaks and working late to get something finished. Too frequently I have let that become routine. Too often it leaves me too tired to do other things in the evenings or at weekends that are important to me.

It’s so easy to forget that God calls us to pace ourselves, to take breaks, to stop before we need to:

‘Six days you shall labour and do all your work, but the seventh day is a sabbath to the LORD your God. On it you shall not do any work.’

‘Be still and know that I am God.’

Not only do we see Jesus doing the same:

‘After He had dismissed them, He went up on a mountainside by Himself to pray.’

But actually, God set this example from the very beginning:

‘Then God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it He rested from all the work of creating that He had done.’

God might have finished the work of creation at that point but there was going to be plenty more for Him to do as time went by. But He took a break. He paced Himself. He stopped before He needed to.

Who are we not to follow His example?

ENTERTAINING ANGELS (Five Minute Friday: HOSPITALITY)

My parents were the masters of hospitality.

From my teenage years, our house always seemed to have extras in it. From the fellowship groups they hosted to the lone souls who came to Sunday dinner. The ex con newly out of a Young Offenders Unit, the German visitor in London on holiday, any new member to the church.

And then there were those who stayed for more than dinner – Win, Reg, Renee and all the others who spent Christmas with us; Albert, the homeless man, who sometimes slept on our sofa until Dad could find him a hostel; William, the Chinese student, who had to vacate his halls of residence at Christmas and Easter so stayed with us and became an honorary uncle; or the six holiday friends my brother and I turned up with one midnight, who had missed their connections home, so bedded down in sleeping bags after an enormous fry up.

We didn’t have a lot of money – or rooms! But my parents, especially my mum, were always generous with what they had.

And I think that’s the key to hospitality: generosity and thoughtfulness.
My parents were generous with their supplies (Mum was great at stretching a meal with extra vegetables for unplanned for guests), their space, and their time. To their last days, even in their nursing homes, they always had time to listen, usually over a cup of tea. Their welcoming smiles drew friends, family, care staff to them like shivering people to the warmth of a fire.

And the foundation to it all: my parents’ thoughtfulness and kindness which put the receiver first. What did they need? How could they be served and loved?

That’s what makes great hospitality – not an elegant house or elaborate cooking but a lavish willingness to share what we have. I was frequently embarrassed by the untidiness of our house but was forced to reconsider when a school friend pointed out that she had never noticed it because of how my parents made her feel so at home.

The writer of the Book of Hebrews encourages us ‘to show hospitality to strangers, for by so doing some people have shown hospitality to angels without knowing it.’ I don’t know if any of our guests were really angels but perhaps the practice of generous and thoughtful hospitality makes us more angelic. Or if we consider the Biblical idea of Heavenly Banquet, maybe it’s more accurate to say that it can make us more divine. I know I got a glimpse of God’s character in my parents’ hospitality.

Once AGAIN (Five Minute Friday)

Those Matt Redman lyrics keep circling in my head, with hints of the rest of the tune:

‘I’m in that place once again, I’m in that place once again.’

And I wonder what place I am in again?

Sometimes it’s a geographical place, or a longing for one, Cornwall in particular. The sound of seagulls, the salty smell of the sea, the reassuring rhythm of the tide as the river rises and falls in the harbour, that sense of a more peaceful pace in the wild beauty of the landscape.

Sometimes it’s the repetition of an emotional place – grieving the loss of my parents again, a monthly mood drop for no other reason than hormones, or the familiar fight to loosen anxiety’s tentacles that come back as reliably as bindweed.

Sometimes it’s social: the routine of a family get together, the joy of having my kids back together with us, the familiar strength of my husband’s arms around me.

But the song is about something, somewhere different. It’s about being back in a place of awe for all that Jesus has done for us, for me. It’s about remembering His ultimate sacrifice. It’s about never taking Him for granted.

And, like anyone else we love or who loves us, it’s far too easy to do just that, to forget the enormity of it all, to step out of our daily routine to express our gratitude.

And that’s the place I need to be in again most of all.

Here’s the full song and lyrics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FkK4YHy-wNg

(Joining the weekly five minute free write with the fabulous Five Minute Friday community. You can find more on the prompt word AGAIN here: https://fiveminutefriday.com/2019/08/08/fmf-writing-prompt-link-up-again-guest-post-by-niki-hardy/ )

Happy Birthday FIVE Minute Friday!

I owe a real debt of gratitude to the Five Minute Friday website and community https://fiveminutefriday.com/2019/08/01/fmf-writing-prompt-link-up-five/ because this is what got me blogging and writing on a regular basis rather than just ad hoc or as the muse hit. Even if it turns out more to be Six Minute Saturday, Seven Minute Sunday, or even Twenty Minute Tuesday some weeks!

It was recommended to me by someone in the Association of Christian Writers https://christianwriters.org.uk/ (another big influence in my writing life) and since my first post (almost exactly three years ago), this will be my 241st post! I’ve gained 5,621 views, 472 comments, 127 followers to the blog itself plus 267 on Facebook and 74 on Twitter, and been read in over 64 different countries (hard to be exact as WordPress classifies the European Union as a country!).

I know there are many more popular blogs than mine, that these statistics are a mere particle in a drop in the ocean of the world wide web. But each of these figures is a source of wonder to me, that anyone would actually be interested in what I have to say, and also an added confirmation that writing is what I should be doing.

However, these figures are also a measure of vanity! Real success, the success that actually matters I think, are the other things that I have gained from joining the Five Minute Friday community:

It has taught me discipline – to write whether I feel like it or not, to start writing when all I have is a microscopic sliver of an idea and see where it takes me. It has boosted my confidence and sparked other ideas – completing Write 31 Days (I never thought when I began that I could post something readable every day for a whole month!), which led me to do my own Jesse Tree and Blessings Jar series of blog posts.

It has encouraged me to move forward with my writing and reach out to other writers – to join my local group of the Association of Christian Writers, to become a monthly contributor to the morethanwriters blog https://morethanwriters.blogspot.com/, and (successfully) submit a piece for an anthology.

I have also started to learn more about the technical side of literature, becoming involved in other authors’ book launches, penning reviews for blog tours, learning to ‘find an angle’ that is uniquely mine. And in all this, making unseen online friends along the way.

Most of all, it has taught me that sharing the depth and breadth of the detail my life – the pain of my father’s decline into Alzheimer’s, the joy of common family songs on a car journey, the stubborn strength of God’s love that keeps me going through all of it – that this resonates with others. Words and stories help us feel less alone and I hope the offering of the faith I have found to be so fundamental, holds out a lifeline to pull others into shore when the waves of life become too choppy, a small light to remind that the darkness never wins.

So thank you Kate and the Five Minute Friday community – with your help, thestufflifeismadeof (and me) are growing into something I never thought possible when I wrote that first FMF post ‘Ducks!’.  https://thestufflifeismadeofblog.wordpress.com/2016/08/07/ducks-five-minute-friday-happy/