The Old and The New

Yesterday, I went, as I do most Fridays, to our local traditional family butcher to buy something for the Sunday roast and meat for next week’s meals.  Unlike supermarkets where the meat is already cut and packaged (usually showing the nice lean bits on the top so you think it’s all like that!) there they have all the meat out on the long cold slabs and they cut off the amount you want.  Some aspects take you back in years as the staff don’t put the prices through a conventional modern checkout type till but they write each item down on a piece of paper and total it up in their heads when you’ve completed your purchase.  They make their own sausages – we particularly like the pork and cranberry ones – and different types of burgers.  They will take the skin off the chicken portions if you ask.  All the staff recognise the regulars when you walk in the shop and they remember what you like and don’t like.  Sounds like how things used to be many years ago.

Haynes Butchers Princes St Yeovil

The interior of Haynes shows it to be one of the most traditional of butchers. The meat hooks are still on the racks on the wall, tiled in white and green many decades ago. There is still a traditional wooden cashier's booth or hut built into the shop. This is the last cashier's booth I know of in any shop, left over from a time when the cashier and the butchery functions were completely separate.

 

 

Before you think I’m just being nostalgic and living in the past and wonder how they are still surviving as a business I must point out that they do sell in pounds or kilos as you wish (by law they have to sell in kilos, of course) and will take payment by credit/debit card.  There are always lots of people in the shop buying their goods.  I think this is partly because you know that you see exactly what you’re buying, the prices are comparable to the supermarkets and you feel that you have received personal attention.  They seem to have got the blend right between the traditional and the new ways – the old and new together.

The Bible often refers to God as God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob; three generations; old and new together.  He is Alpha and Omega; beginning and end; first and last; the Ancient of Days yet new every morning; the same yesterday, today and forever.  So it seems that this unchanging God I worship joins the old and new together across the generations, from the dawn of creation until today and blends them together in perfect harmony.  He embraces all – the traditional and the new-fangled, latest fad, the old and the new ways.  His love has a way of encompassing all who come to him, regardless of age or ways of worshipping.  It also reminds me that although in life I have myself changed many things and maybe do things differently now, I must not disregard what has gone before – it has made me the person I am now.  God loved and accepted me before as He does now. 

I think in life we so often ‘throw out the baby with the bathwater’ as the saying goes.  When new or different ways come along we seem to discount anything that has gone before.  It’s like saying some new way is the only right way and everything else is wrong or out-of date.  God accepts all whether young or old using traditional or most recent ways of worship.  His all-encompassing love is for any who comes with honest and open spirit in humility and true worship.