News from the Caribbean...

Little time to wax lyrical I'm afraid but our first 4 days in Haiti have been hot, busy, chotic and challenging.  As well as preaching at 1st Baptist Church, Cap Haitian (membership 6,000) I've had chance to attend a local funeral (and get stuck in a river en route home), participate in an HIV/AIDS conference and  pray with a small group of street boys, held in a local prison (40 men in a 10m x 10m cell). Our group have also been able to get on with much practical work around the clinic/hospital/children's home ... more to come no doubt.
This country is beautiful and desperate, dark and light, a builder of faith and a challenger of courage.

Haiti.....

Am off to Haiti tomorrow for the best part of 3 weeks, so things will be quiet here.   If you don't know about Haiti - you ought to!
Check it all out here...

Without Children...

Last weekend I found myself, on a couple of separate occasions, in the odd position of being without a child, when circumstances demanded otherwise. I hadn’t been careless or negligent, just things had conspired against me. On Saturday I was travelling down to Bristol on the train, having purchased my usual 2 tickets with our family railcard. I was however on my own, Joe, my son, having decided, at the last minute, to travel down earlier in the week. I spent a restless few minutes deciding how much of this story it would be appropriate to tell the ticket inspector, it all seemed an unnecessarily complicated but I wondered if I could get away with suggesting he was away at the buffet car. As it turned out no inspector appeared, so my dilemma was never tested.


The previous day, I was at Bluewater shopping centre, at 10am with a few hours to kill, before I was required to provide lifts home. A film seemed the only reasonable option, but there was only one screen open. So I found myself queuing, trying not to look conspicuous, amidst dozens of impatient children, for the first showing of the morning of ‘Up’.

As the film began though I found myself wondering what the children were making of it. This was an old man’s story. More than that, in the opening 20 minutes, as the life of Carl Frederickson unfolded before our eyes, we had brief animated scenes in a special baby unit and a crematorium as he lost first his child then his wife. Hardly the traditional stuff of Disney/Pixar.

Beyond that though a beautiful story was told of hopes and dreams, how it’s never too late to realise them, but all to easy to miss them as they are fulfilled around us. My friends at Damaris have done a good job at reflecting upon it. I’m glad I got to go, and I didn’t even have to share my popcorn!

Halloween Story…

Evil is surprisingly commonplace. A family friend of James Rennie, convicted this week of running one of Scotland’s largest paedophile rings, said she had no qualms about using him as a baby-sitter because, ‘he seemed just like a regular guy’. Similarly, singer Kathryn Jenkins recounted in an interview her experience of being attacked as a student. The most memorable, and chilling, thing, she said, was that she was able to look straight at her attacker and her overriding thought was that ‘he looked just like anyone else’.

John Eldredge, in his little booklet ‘Epic’, speaks about how surprising it is that so many people live the story of their lives as if we have no enemies, while all the evidence around us suggests the world is a difficult and dangerous place:
“I am staggered by the level of naïveté that most people live with regarding evil. They don’t take it seriously. They don’t live as though the Story has a Villain. Not the devil prancing around in red tights, carrying a pitchfork, but the incarnation of the very worst of every enemy you’ve ever met in every other story. Dear God – the Holocaust, child prostitution, terrorist bombings, genocidal governments. What is it going to take for us to take evil seriously? Life is very confusing if you do not take into account that there is a Villain…”

He says this not to make us paranoid or anxious, but to enable us to resist the temptation to think that evil is invariably ‘other’, special and distinct, easily and obviously recognisable from the norm. It’s not, it’s everywhere, even in the heart of each one of us. It just rarely wears silly hats.