At that time the disciples came to Jesus and asked, “Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?” He called a child, whom he put among them, and said, “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.  Whoever becomes humble like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me

This week I have one of the hardest things that we as clergy have to do.  I am conducting the funeral of a young baby, a child who never really got to experience the beauty of life, and whose parents only got the shortest of times with their child.

What do you say?  What can you say? “I understand how you feel” is no use, because I don’t, and I pray to God I never will. “It will get easier as time goes by” is rubbish too, for these people it will never get any easier, they will always have questions and anger at the world who took their child away.

No, all you can do is listen, help them say goodbye in their own way, and try to point them towards people who can help.  For those of you with a professional or personal interest, there is the Child Death Helpline on 0800 282 986.  This service is run out of Great Ormond Street and Alder Hey Hospitals, and is staffed by volunteers who have themselves lost children in the past.  These are the people who DO know how you feel, and can sympathize as no other can.

Their website is at http://www.childdeathhelpline.org.uk and if you can spare them a though when you are looking to suppot a charity, I and many others will be eternally grateful.

My apologies for having been absent so long, unfortunately the holiday seasn for clergy seems to have started, and so I am doing 4 funerals a week at the minute.  For the non clergy amongst you that may not sound to bad, its only 4 hours work a week, right?

Not exactly, you see what people don’t see is what goes on behind the scenes, the fly on the wall documentary stuff. Lets take a typical funeral for Joe Bloggs.  The Funeral Director (FD) rings you up on Tuesday to see if you can conduct a service the following Tuesday, its rare to get over a weeks notice except at certain times of the year. So you contact the family and arrange to visit them to gather information for the service, but more importantly to give comfort and support.  The smallest amount of time for a visit is normally an hour, up to maybe two hours at most.  There are exceptions to this, but they are a good average. Then you need to prepare a eulogy, maybe half an hour, a sermon that has some relevance to Joe Bloggs life, and make sure that everything comes together between yourself, the FD and the chapel. Now a sermon has to be an interesting story that ties into both Scripture and a persons life.  You try doing that in under 4 or 5 hours, and yes I do normally try to use a new sermon at each service rather than having a “standard” sermon I use all the time.

Yes, I know the organising is the FD’s work, but its amazing how often families tell part of the details to different people, so when you arrive on the day you discover there is something happening you didn’t know about.

So for each funeral you have an hour for the visit, half an hour for the eulogy, 5 hours for the sermon, an hour for the service, and there you have an 8 hour working day for each service. And then you have all your normal work to do as well.  So yes, being a Minister is a great job because I get to spend time with my family and work from home quite a bit, but sometimes we work overtime to. 

Oh an one of the services this week is partly in German, and I last spoke german 20 years ago at school.

Sometimes, we take ourselves too seriously.  We are all guilty of it, but recently I found this site which satirizes excellently some of the views we as Christians hold. In cases like this, we need to laugh at ourselves, and be able to recognise the silliness that we are trying to defend.

So please, have a look, with an open mind, and see how many of the cartoons sort of apply to you, I know I found a few which made me think

As has been pointed out by my reader (thanks Annette) I didn’t include the link.  I have given myself a stern talking to, and now here it is

http://asbojesus.wordpress.com/

I am a great believer that many problems in this world are caused by lack of understanding, and that if we spoke to each other we might actually learn to get along.  It is a great honour for me then to have been asked by one of the local Mosques to go along and give a talk on the Christian faith to a number of their members.  I am hoping that I can portray us as being very similar (ie we don’t really understand each other, but we aren’t all that different in reality).  Both sides get bad press from the more militant sections of the others faith, and both sides share a common heritage.  If you ever take the opportunity to read the Qu’ran you’ll see what I mean.

However for me the most important part of the whole thing is that they want to understand our faith and get rid of the misconceptions, which I think is brilliant.  I would love someone to post here and tell me about a Church inviting an Imam to explain Islam to them, but somehow I doubt I will.

Please, prove me wrong.

Well, although I’ve been back online for a while, the blog has suffered owing to a large workload, lack of sleep (my son has discovered the joys of 3am in the morning after 8 months of life) and so blogging is taking a back seat.  However, things are calming down s bit, so let blogging resume

After almost a month of computer hell, My switch from Tiscali to O2 has gone through, and finally I have broadband again.  More to come later, right now fot to dash to a service

Well, off to a good start.  Mybroadband has been down for 5 days, and will be at least another 9 before its working again, so I’m using a dial up connection for essentials.

 More posts when broadband is fixed.

For in that he himself hath suffered being tempted, he is able to succour them that are tempted.

Well for Lent I made my normal sacrifices, chocolate, tea & coffee, fast food and swearing.  Now as my wife will tell you, it can sound as though we have the dictionary of Anglo Saxon curses on CD in the car when I’m driving, and I must say I knew this one would be the hardest to keep. However, even in my worst nightmares Ithought I would last more than three days.  I suffer from something called Mortens Metatarsalgia, which basically means my feet hurt, a lot from time to time.  With tablets and a bit of TLC they are ok again, until the next flare up.

 Now imagine my darling 2 year old dropping a can of spaghetti on my foot.

 I’m claiming provocation, ok?  At least I’m doing ok on the others so far though.

Ok, having listened to the radio, driven past McDonalds, and talked to a few people today, I though it was an idea to offer a religious and a secular definition of certain Christian holidays

Christmas Day - A day to praise God for the gift of his son, Jesus Christ to the world

X-mas Day - Sponsored by major retailers, a day to try to bankrupt yourself and outdo all your relatives on who can buy the biggest, most expensive, tackiest presents.

Shrove Tuesday - The day before Ash Wednesday, a day when we traditionally would feast before 40 days of fasting for Lent

Pancake Day - A day to squeeze loads of lemons, pour sugar all over pancakes, and make idiots of ourselves trying to toss them in the air, and scrape them off the Kitchen ceiling

Ash Wednesday - The start of Lent

Huh, When?

Good Friday - The day Christ was crucified for our sins

Hot cross bun day - Starts in january, and normally stops in December

Easter Sunday - The day when Jesus’s disciples saw him after he had risen from the dead.

Easter - a day to stuff yourself stupid on chocolate eggs, rabbits and anything else you can think of.  Sales start as soon as the Christmas sales end, and finish just in time for the summer holidays sales.

I would like suggestions for other holidays, especially if you can think of secular equivalents.

 There is a time for everything,
and a season for every activity under heaven: 
 a time to be born and a time to die,
a time to plant and a time to uproot,  a time to kill and a time to heal,
a time to tear down and a time to build,
 a time to weep and a time to laugh,
a time to mourn and a time to dance,
 a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them,
a time to embrace and a time to refrain,
 a time to search and a time to give up,
a time to keep and a time to throw away,
 a time to tear and a time to mend,
a time to be silent and a time to speak,
 a time to love and a time to hate,
a time for war and a time for peace

Imagine you had a bank that at the stroke of midnight paid £86,400 into your account, to do with as you wish, but at the stroke of midnight that money would be deleted and another £86,400 would be paid in.  No overdraft, no balance carried forward, no borrowing against the next days money. What would you do?  Me, I’d spend every penny of it!!

Well, you do have an account like that, its called time.Every day you get 86,400 seconds to use as you will for the day, but any of them that aren’t used at the end of the day are gone. We can live life to the full, or we can waste our lives and God’s gift of life to us.

Today is Shrove Tuesday, a day when we eat pancakes to mark the older tradition of using up goods in the house to prepare for Lent.  Tomorrow is Ash Wednesday, the start of the 40 days of Lent, and most people give something up for it.  Chocolate, alcohol, sweets are all firm favourites.  We go without them for 40 days and think how good we are, and then stuff ourselves on chocolate on Easter Sunday.

This year I’d like to suggest something different. I’d like you to take something up.  I want you all in Blog land to think of ways of living life to the full, doing the things you would regret if you died tomorrow. Maybe its telling Aunty Mabel you love her, even though you only see her twice a year.  Maybe its spending more time with your family, rather than working yourself to exhaustion.  Maybe its visiting your local church, giving spirituality a chance.  If you live in the Black Country, you may even see me in the church.  God would like us to let him in on our lives, before its too late.

Everything has a time, as the bible verse says, the problem is we don’t know when its our time to die.  Lets make sure we do the things that will make our lives fulfilled so that on the final day, when we stand before God, we don’t think “I wish I’d done that, or said this”