I've just been out in the garden this morning doing a bit of tidying up. I know that God created all things so I guess the weeds and wild things growing in my garden are God's plants. But really, does he have to contribute so much!?
It seems that the wild grass is everywhere. It always pops up where I have dug over to put my plants. The thing is that you can pull it up from the top thinking that you've dealt with it but it just seems to grow back the very next day. Of course when you really dig down, you discover that the roots are quite deep and travel along underground to pop up again somewhere else. It took me quite some time to get to the grass roots and get them out. I guess that's life. There are some things that you have to go quite deep in order to deal with the real problem or it just keeps emerging at a later date and we have the same problem all over again.
One little plant caught my eye though. So I got my camera out and took a picture to share it. It is so small I barely noticed it. It was growing between two big stone slabs in our patio area. It struck me that there was this little flower, all on its own, in full bloom doing what it was created to do - blossom even against the odds. It wasn't in some carefully maintained soil, fed and watered by the gardener. It just found a small space and did it's thing, in all its glory. Even if no-one had noticed it, it would still have blossomed and do what it was created to do.
Ah! How often we do things well so that we are liked or appreciated. If no-one is looking then maybe we think, 'what's the point?'. That was one little weed that I didn't pull up and discard into the bin of garden waste. I left it to remind me that I should do what I'm here to do, regardless of whether I'm noticed or appreciated. As the sports logo says, 'Just do it!'. It's what we used to call Integrity.
This week has seen the return of a TV programme that I really enjoy watching - 'Who Do You Think You Are? For those who don't know, it traces the ancestry of celebrities and uncovers some very interesting and sometimes unusual and hitherto unknown facts. There are always surprises and often tears as the stories unfold about their forbears. Sometimes the celebrities begin to understand just why they are, feel and do as they do as they clarify some mystery from the past. A couple of years ago I decided to trace my ancestors on both sides of the family, right back to the 1700s. I remember as a child that two of my uncles had a shoe repair shop in our local town and I used to love to go and watch them mend the shoes and breathe in the smell of fresh leather. I was told that the shop originally belonged to my paternal grandfather but looking further into the family history I discovered that there had been bootmakers in the family since the early 1800s, the business having been handed down from father to son over several generations. The roots of the shoemaking business lay way back in the roots of our family history.
When I am weeding in the garden, I prefer to dig the weeds up by the roots in order to get rid of them instead of spraying them with chemicals all the time. Occasionally though that is not so easy, on the paths and the front drive where you can't really dig them up. The alternative is to get some weedkiller and spray them and let the chemicals do their work. The best ones of course are the ones that you spray on the leaves of the weed and the chemicals go to work reaching right down to the roots underneath the ground. Otherwise the weed seems to die but then comes back again as the roots go on feeding the plant. To be effective, you have to get to the roots.
A close relative of mine has recently been in hospital and undergone quite a big operation. She had been in a great deal of pain for a long time, months becoming years. She has taken pain relief to relieve the symptoms until eventually the pain was becoming so bad she was sent to see a specialist at the hospital. Various tests and scans were done in order to look deeper and ascertain the real cause of the problem. Eventually the day came and she went to the hospital, a bit nervous but really having reached the point of just wanting the pain to go away. After a time of recuperation she is now well on the mend but more importantly is without the constant pain that she had to put up with for so long before. Once the specialist was able to get to the root of her problem, then the situation could be dealt with effectively.
The trouble I find in life is that too often we concentrate all our efforts on the symptoms that a problem produces. A few decades ago, people weren't so eager to visit a psychiatrist or counselor to talk through problems in case they were thought by others to be a little deranged. In fact such professionals were sometimes considered a bit suspect and often referred to in a rather derisory way as 'shrinks'. Nowadays we understand that they saw the importance of going back in order to dig deep and find the root cause of a problem. This often turned out to be not a physical problem at all but some hurt, fear or sense of inadequacy or exclusion or maybe loneliness, things that are hidden so deeply inside that others are not aware of itheir existence. We think that we are sorting out a problem when the real problem is something quite different, hidden and not obvious until we delve deeper.
I feel that so many problems in the world, on both an individual and group level, whether that be family, friends, tribes or nations, could be solved if only we really addressed the root of the problem. We waste so much time and effort treating and reacting to the symptoms when the real problem is still there often festering underneath so that the problem we think we have dealt with crops up again and again. So often we ask the wrong questions! There is no point in doctoring and treating the hurt and pain if we don't deal with the root cause of that pain and hurt. Jesus knew that very well when he told the crippled man that his sins were forgiven. He then told him to get and walk. He knew that the man was concerned that his physical limitations were because of some sin. He needed to know that God had dealt with that problem. People are hurting and in pain and we waste time on superficial symptoms instead of really dealing with their root point of need and giving them the help they're silently crying out for. Let's not waste time looking at the outside, the symptoms, the appearance of a situation but go to the roots and see where the help is really needed.
I've been thinking these past few days about our roots and community. Some friends have been visiting my neck of the woods - the northeast of England, where I was born and lived until my early twenties. They have been visiting all the touristy places - well why else do you go on holiday? They went one day to the living open air museum at Beamish. The man was explaining about the mines and how the coal was retrieved and bagged etc. Because of the broad Geordie accent particularly of miners (known locally as Pitmatic), there was a misunderstanding in what he said - it made me laugh. It took my mind back to my childhood as my father was a miner for years until ill health caused through coal dust on the lungs and a serious stroke forced him to retire early. He died at only 69 years of age. I remember visiting friends who worked with him down the mine in the small mining village of Backworth and how everyone knew everyone else and the whole community was there for each other. Those days are long gone - the mines are no longer producing coal and such village life is not so usual any more.
This was reinforced this week as we remembered those who had died in the terrible accidents in the mines of Wales and there were photos of the whole village being out, helping each other in their time of need. Such community spirit of those by-gone days! How many of us (and I include myself) know the names of those who live in our street or even a few doors away from us? What do we know of their struggles or problems? Sadly these days there seems to be an unwritten code of 'keep yourself to yourself'. I know that life has changed and we no longer live the way we used to. Many are very private and don't wish to share things with others. But it seems a shame that we have lost something of that community spirit in the interests of 'progress'.
We hear of community work and think of projects where people go into communities and carry out activities for the children or elderly in order to give them something to do to occupy them. I'm not saying this is wrong - it is commendable there are those who are concerned enough to actually do something about it. But it isn't really being in the community - it's more like visiting the community with our plans to 'do some good' and then going back to our, often more privileged world. Sadly it's more likely to get a reaction about being do-gooders who haven't really got any idea how the other half live.
Many groups of Christians are known as Community churches, possibly because they consider themselves to be in and part of the community where they live. However, many of them go each Sunday and 'commune' together and then go home. I ask, does meeting together in small groups during the week really make us a community? When the early Christians met together it was out of a real sense of need for each other's encouragement in difficult times. That's why Paul says that we shouldn't stop meeting together - we need each other's support, being a real community. Community is living alongside each other, knowing what the other is going through because we have also experienced it. It's not always about coming out with the appropriate verse of scripture or repeating what we feel we ought to say but it's more about just being there, crying together if that is what is needed. The Lord's Supper shouldn't be about a small wafer or mouthful of bread and a sip of wine but sharing a meal and chatting together, really getting to know each other and being friends, regardless of sexual orientation, religious views, education or social standing.
I remember many years ago in Buenos Aires being at a meeting with the then Assemblies of God minister Juan Carlos Ortiz and he was telling us that a lady in his church group had gone two consecutive evenings to hear him preach. He asked her why she had come again and she said that she loved to hear him preach to which he replied, 'You shouldn't be here every night. If you were here yesterday, today you should be at home inviting your neighbour round for a barbeque. I don't want to see you at every meeting. You hear me preach one night and then you go home and live what you've heard.' Or to put it another way, from a blog I read this week - 'being the church and choosing community is more than small groups on Wednesday nights: community is doing life with the people living next door to you.' And another quote from the same blog - 'come out of cocoons and commune.' (Taken from Ann Voscamp's blog A Holy Experience)
It's good to remember our roots - it helps us to understand so much more about ourselves. We may have moved on from those days but it would be a great shame if we lose the real sense of community in the pursuit of progress and modern living.
