HT to Steven

Last night my better half, Avril, was invited to speak at the AGM of the Murrayfield Club, a dementia project which Murrayfield Churches Together have been running for 20 years in Edinburgh.

She was invited to speak about her unfolding journey with her father who was recently diagnosed with vascular dementia.  Avril has been blogging (that word doesn’t seem to do justice to how good the writing is) about their experience and their discoveries.

If you haven’t already had a look then I’d encourage you to visit At Eighty-One and discover a touching account of a woman getting to know her father.

Avril spoke passionately about her experience and read from her blog last night and it was great to sit and listen to her giving a voice to her writing.

And it was nice to be introduced as Avril’s husband.

Sir Ken Robinson’s latest TED talk about educational reform.  Get a coffee and spend 17 minutes being inspired.

And if ‘education’ isn’t your thing… substitute it with ‘church’.

I’ve just watched David Miliband’s speech launching his bid to be Labour leader.  He seems like a good guy.  He said all the right things.  Hope, justice, equality…  But I wasn’t inspired.

Sometimes inspiration is as much how you say it as what you say.

I’m sitting thinking about a sermon for Sunday.  It’s Pentecost, one of those Sundays which is hugely important to the church.  It’s also one of those festivals which comes around every year and has had every angle of it preached on over the years.

I want to say the right things… but I also want people to be inspired.

So, in my usual Monday practice I went looking for inspiration in my usual places.

I found it on Roddy Hamilton’s site:

When those who trust love no longer wait for someone else to fix the problem of the church,

when faith is too important to hand it over to leaders to sort out,

when justice leaves behind those who think she is but a subset of the church’s work rather than the whole thing,

when followers give up on those who procrastinate about inclusion,

when diversity becomes an invite to a table of bread broken safely among people wearing their hidden truths across their foreheads,

when communion is a feast served by non-ordained women, children and men who know heaven won’t implode in doing so,

when the doctrine makers use marker pens to write ‘sorry’ over half their words,

when creeds are written in questions rather than in statements,

when dandelions become the plant of choice breaking out just where the ground has been cleansed against it,

then it is Pentecost.

Hope, justice, equality… but sometimes how you say it is just as important.

Thanks for inspiring me Roddy.

We now have a coalition government.  To achieve this both parties had to compromise.

Compromise is one of those interesting words that can be both positive and negative, mostly depending on the person viewing or making the compromise’s opinion.  It can be a noun and a verb.

Compromise means:

a settlement of differences by mutual concessions; an agreement reached by adjustment of conflicting or opposing claims, principles

something intermediate between different things

an endangering

In some ways those definitions are a little odd.  The word comes from the joining of ‘com’, which means together, and ‘promise’.

A joint promise.

When I first heard that the Liberal Democrats had made a deal with the Tories I was angry.  When I heard that the Lib Dems had given up on some of their key policies I was even more angry.  What I didn’t see was that the Conservatives made the same moves.  They gave up some of their key policies too.

It would be easy to be cynical while watching David Cameron and Nick Clegg during their joint press conference today.  There were jokes about it looking like a wedding.  Cameron was asked about something harsh he had said about Clegg.  Clegg had to defend his party’s very involvement.  And all the time they stood together talking about hope, about change, about realising that working together means putting other people first.

I sneered.

But what if they are serious?

What if they really mean it?

What if they really do want to put the country before party politics?  What if they really will find a middle way?

Isn’t that at least worth giving a chance?

But then that would mean I’d have to compromise…