Vicar's Blog

CREATING COMMUNITIES OF WHOLENESS WITH CHRIST AT THE CENTRE

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Sunday 11 May: 10.07pm

After an age of waiting and then a week or so of revelling in the rare sound of the cuckoo in the early, early morning, I now don't seem to move outside the front door without hearing the birds. It's such a sign of spring and I guess that that has also suddenly exploded into life.

All of the children have been on, and off, their bikes all weekend, but its been particularly great seeing Alice, who's really mastered the knack of riding without stabilisers. I'd been telling her for months that I'd take them off on her 5th birthday and she was ready. Today she was also up and down the hill.

Saturday 3 May: 6.35pm

Things can sometimes just happen. On, I think, Wednesday evening I received over 300 [I lost count] spam emails within the course of 30 minutes - and not one of them was advertising Viagra. It was just a case of letting them clog my inbox and then deleting them all. Apple was becoming more attractive by the second!

And then there are things over which we have complete control - or at least apparently so. I've been in meetings before when the whole tone of the place has changed in one second with one remark. But it's never been my comment that has changed the tone, as happened in a meeting last week. To speak, or not to speak...? Curiously, on this occasion, it was all of the others who noticed the change of tone, I was blind to it.

And as is so often the way, there is a third option; the situations that we can influence and direct, but which ultimately are the call of others. It was my call to take Alice's stabilisers off her bike [she's known that it'll happen on her 5th Birthday for months]. But it was Alice who decided to try cycling on her own. It was up to me to encourage her to get up off the ground and try again, and again, and again... but it was only Alice who could actually do it. And now she's not only able to start and stop, she can do hills, up and down, and corners and was even today cycling one handed - before she fell off!

Between the cycling we also planted some sunflowers today - a minor miracle in that we usually don't get round to planting them until mid June [which in case you are even less of a gardener than me is far too late]. Another minor gardening miracle is that the geraniums on our kitchen windowsill are still alive, and not only that but they are flowering, and they date from last year!

Mike Haslam
Vicar of North Swindon

BLOGGERS NOTE
You'll notice in this blog that I use clauses and sub clauses and square brackets and lots of other grammatical aberrations! Also that I can't spell. Jane sometimes compares my sentence structure to St Paul, going on and on and on... I'm afraid that you're going to have to live with it. I try to edit it all out when I'm writing for print, but I'm going to indulge myself here.