resilience

Manchester airport and waiting for my flight to London and then on to Yemen, returning on 13th if that's a Saturday. I have been encouraged to take a big question with me... To kind of pursue at all costs.
For Yemen it is going to be: "what place does religion play in building a resilient community?"
I think, but don't know yet that this is one of the main contributions that faith groups can make is the ability to keep communities of people going when things get difficult. That is certainly their role in Yemen as far as I can see.
But maybe it's like in the Simpsons movie, when disaster hits the people in church run to the pub and the people in the bar run to church!

On Talking to nobody

Discovered today that I have misspelt my blogger, so nobody is able to access my blog. Does it matter? Probably not but I will try with another name later.
Today I went to IKEA in preparation for my trip to Sweden on Friday, still no nearer to discovering anything useful.

Cleaning Up - What a difference Two Hours Make

Spent the morning at the hall, for an hour avoiding an amazing wrk party who were cleaning things up while a smaller group spent an hour cleaning their "souls" as part of a Lent study group. We learnt about the desert experience, getting it away from it all, as the other group tackld it all and cleaned it up. So much stuff got thrown out, including a fridge and so much bar emphemera that it looked like the tail end of a great party.
In the end we could stay in the desrt no longer and all joined together as we transformed an unusable and unloved room into something which had... possibilities.
People and buildings need regeneration, sometimes by stepping back: we see what needs to be done, some by stepping forward, by getting on with it, we clear enough stuff to see what might be...

Down to earth with a bump, up to heaven with a whoosh

Church today and the numbers have recovered! Down to earth with a bump as a queue of people want to see after the service with a number of heartbreaking problems. It's easy to forget that communities contain or maybe consist of a huge number of individual problems that cry out to be solved. Each one of them is important to each one of them, not all of them can be solved, a cloud of issues, the context in which we regenerate.