The dangers of mixing up your potatoes and your turnips...

So today I achieved a first. You can't say that every day, unless you're a few months old. I'm 38 and today achieved a first. Actually today I achieved two firsts.

By way of celebrating the fact that my nephew is about to get married next month we went over to a place near Dundee to do clay pigeon shooting and blind 4x4 driving.

The clay pigeon shooting I took to like a duck to water, if you'll hang in there with me on the bird analogy. Of 18 traps released I 'killed' 10, which may not win me a place on the next Commonwealth Games team, but I was chuffed nonetheless.

The driving was not only a new experience but a new concept. I'd never heard of such a thing. The basic premise is this; the driver is blindfolded while a passenger in the all-terrain vehicle calls instructions to safely navigate round a spectacularly uneven piece of land. When it was my turn to navigate I felt quite unsafe, but strangely when I had the blindfold on, and had to listen attentively to the instruction, I felt extremely safe. I'm sure that little point will be appearing in a sermon round here fairly soon in some shape or form.

Anyway, after a couple of circuits of 'left a bit, right a bit, left a bit more...' etc, the instructor said he would make it more interesting by changing the instruction to potatoes or turnips. It was amazing just how much chaos this simple rule change caused. As navigator, no matter how much I tried I could not remember whether left was turnips or potatoes. The more I got it wrong, of course, the more erratic the journey in the hands of my other nephew got. Which was all part of the fun!

Recommended.

Peace is just a month away...

I don’t know what comes into your mind when you hear the word peace. For me it is 4 days each July, when my wife and the children are down in far away Norfolk enjoying some holiday time with my wife'’s folks. I always take four days off to enjoy watching The Open Championship on tv. I am a bit of an Open golf ‘anorak.’ Isn’t that really sad? In my single days I would try to actually get to the event in person, attending all the practice days from 7am till 9pm, then all the championship days as well, before rushing home to watch the highlights on tv before starting all over again the next day.

Nowadays I content myself with the tv experience and actually you see a lot more although you forego some of the atmosphere and the thrill of actually being there. The preparation starts a couple of days before when the draw is announced. I print off the draw so I can keep all the scores of the players as they complete their rounds. I make sure all the provisions are in by Wednesday teatime. I won’t have time to cook properly for the next four days so great care is given to the selection of food items. If war breaks out in the next four days I am ready. Also necessary is a good golf magazine, but only one who has taken the time to print out a map of the course so I can assess and analyse the play. I am ready.

On the Wednesday evening the BBC have a preview programme to whet the appetite. Great! I could hardly be more excited if I were actually competing. Since there’s no chance of that, I make do with being the best spectator I can be. Thursday morning arrives and play generally gets underway at 7am or thereabouts. But the TV coverage doesn’t start till 9:30. What’s a boy to do? Well in the bad old days I had to content myself with flicking teletext every two minutes for updates, but in the last few years, the internet has rescued me. Every score recorded in real time, some holes on live webcam, combined with commentary from FiveLive just about keeps me sane till Peter Alliss and co. start broadcasting. Then four days of uninterrupted heaven. Sleep is an irritating interruption to the feast, but I just about manage to cram it in. About an hour into the coverage I am transported to a piece of green land somewhere else in the country and there I stay for four lovely, peaceful, at complete-ease-with-the-world days of self-indulgent isolation.

Of course the peace I’m experiencing is more accurately described as rest. A break from the norm. An unwinding. A recharging. Breathing.

But there must be more to peace than that. Real peace ought to be something that we can experience in the middle of life, not just at the peripheral times of holiday or special occasions. Peace for the Christian should be a distinctive of our character, a trait that people recognize in us because it is something that distinguishes us in our handling of situations, relationships and disappointments.

For some that word is just a dream, a notion we’ve heard others speak of, which sounds quite nice, but always seems just outside of our reach. Life in 2006 does not come with peace built in. It’s not part of the package.

But Shalom in the search to find peace. Mine is coming in a month...

Floating on fresh water

I heard a good story this week and I want to remember it so I thought I'd record it here for posterity.

A guy had been sailing and had an accident with his boat and was left clinging onto his upturned vessel, miles from land, for several days. His endurance against the elements was good to begin with but the hardest thing was thirst, especially with all the water around.

After several days, a rescue team found him and he was severely dehydrated. When he recovered he was horrified to discover that the area he had been floating in was actually fresh water and he could have been drinking it all the time.

The spiritual application of this story was for overtired Christians who are feeling spiritually dehydrated, drained from years of service and possibly from being caught in the crossfire once too often.

In this week of Pentecost, it's helpful to be reminded that for the last two thousand years, the church has been floating on fresh water, a ready resource of strengthening, invigorating, refreshing Holy Spirit water. Too often we strain to hear the latest buzzwords, the latest trends, or the conferences that will hit the spot. The best resource is right under our boat all the time.

Happy sailing.

Wise words and catchy tunes

Thought I'd log some of the stuff I've been reading and listening to lately. Maybe in a year's time when I look at this I'll realise it's made a difference in my practices...