Fearing The Loss

I came across a beautiful post today, on Rachel Held Evans' blog but written by Lisa McCay.

Entitled 'Peace Like A River', the post is about the feelings of fear that came after she gave birth to their first baby. In her final paragraph she includes the following wise words:

I used to feel like a failure that I couldn’t banish that fear altogether – that I never felt “perfectly” peaceful – but I don’t feel that way any more. I’m learning to greet that sort of fear respectfully without bowing before it. I’m learning to use it as a reminder to turn toward gratitude rather than worry.

If you fear losing something let that be a reminder to focus on gratitude for what you have, not on worries about the possibility of one day not having it.

I'm good at imagining things that might go wrong - I guess you could say it's a gift. I have a wife who hardly ever gets home when she says she will - I would definitely say she is a gift. Put the two together and the potential for worry is enormous. I carefully put such fears aside: they are just too crippling if allowed to get a foothold.

But McCay's approach is much more wholesome: when I am worried about losing something (or, especially, someone) I need to remember to be thankful for the good things I have. It is so easy to allow fear of future loss to get in the way of enjoying our present.

God is good; if some of his gifts do turn out to have a time limit, surely that is all the more reason to appreciate them to the full while they are still with us.

The Gardeners' Arms Ongoing Saga

I'm surprised to see that I've never posted about the Gardeners' Arms on this blog. It's the nearest pub to where I live, by some distance, but in the three and a half years I've lived here it has gone through a long saga of closures and changes of management.

Three years ago, not long after I moved here, I arranged to meet a friend there one Friday night, walked over and all the lights were out and the door locked. The manager had just up and left. The next manager did really good food and beer for a short while, but wasn't getting enough customers to keep them going, so both declined badly. The following year they closed again. The daft thing is that there are loads of houses around the pub - it is off the main road, but right in the middle of a residential area. But somehow people didn't want to go out to their local pub.

Summer 2010 heralded another reopening under another new management - an experienced management team this time. They kept the pub ticking over nicely for a year, with a limited range of very well-kept real ale and excellent pizzas, along with a decent choice of other pub fare. But there were still not that many people coming, so when Greene King demanded a greater share of the profits, the management team decided that was an offer they could all too easily refuse and left.

So the Gardeners' Arms closed again and reopened again, then it closed for refurbishment. No signs outside, or on the website, to tell people what was happening, how long it was for, or anything. There wasn't even a useful indicator saying something like "nearest pub 5 minutes walk that way", which they could have done since that is also a Greene King pub.

Then they reopened. The main effect of the refurbishment seemed to be TV screens on every available wall, showing either Sky Sports or some sort of naff in-house music channel. The beer was very cheap and tasted awful, the food likewise, and the management weren't particularly friendly. I went back a couple of times (although not for food), as anyone can have initial teething problems, but it remained as bad. Although numbers there were probably as high as under the previous management's far better quality, but more expensive, regime. Which is a little sad, in its way.

That brings us to the latest change of management. At the time of the Six Nations rugby this year, I was walking past the Gardeners' and I saw they were doing a special price on Guinness during the matches. Expecting England to be tonked I thought I'd pop over and get depressed in company, only to find that the pub had just reopened under new management again.

The Guinness was a decent pint (for English Guinness), the new management were very friendly, there was live music on later that evening ... even England played a lot better than expected. The band doing the live music at the pub's special 'opening evening' were very good - if only I could persuade Facebook to list my 'likes' I would tell you their name - but pretty much drowned out by the large crowd of people drinking and enjoying themselves.

A couple of months, and several visits, down the line, the pub remains busy. The beer is fairly cheap - around £2.50 a pint for St Edmunds and Speckled Hen - but well looked after, and seems to be turning over fast enough to allow them to stock four different real ales. The food is also fairly cheap: standard chain pub fare, but decent quality and well-prepared. We particularly enjoyed their Thursday evening curries.

So, it looks like they may have found the secret of surviving in this part of Emmer Green. Keeping prices down whilst maintaining a decent quality, for the price, does seem to be paying off for them. Friendly and hard-working management helps a lot, of course. Long may they prosper.

Bloggie Ramblings

I'm really rather unsure what to do with this blog.

When I started blogging, more than six years ago, I was editor of a church website and wanted a blog which focussed on real-world issues rather than just the religious, insider stuff. I resigned from that editorship when the then pastor decided to censor me for not being sufficiently pro-Israel, but I carried on the focus in my own blog, and again when I moved to a blog on the blogging community Blog City.

A few years ago, blogging started to die - in part due to the shallow inanities of Facebook, I reckon - and its broad communities with it. Blog City closed its gates and I moved over here. Looking back at my 2010 posts I can see that I initially kept the broad focus for a while. Nevertheless, when I look down at my tag cloud here, I can see that 'Religion' is far and away the most used tag, followed by 'Jesus', 'church' and 'Bible'. And too many posts are far too long. And the most active blogs in my sidebar are nearly all religious. As I said earlier, blogging has started to die: instead of broad blogs of interest it is mostly religious bloggers writing for the converted.

That's not my interest and it's not where I want to be. In many ways all the religious posts have been close to being placeholders: keeping the blog ticking over until I rediscover my enthusiasm. I am interested in religious matters, and I often study and consider them, so having a place to set down and work through my thoughts can be helpful. But it's not really how I want to blog.

There are various factors which might have contributed to my loss of blogging momentum. A house move a few years ago exacerbated my CFS, which has never really bounced back; attending a church which is ever more determined to just be a religious club damages the creative link between faith and life; and - possibly most of all - the ending of Blog City led to the loss of the broader community aspects of blogging.

There is a big wide fascinating world out there, with enormous amounts going on. The exchange of ideas and insights which citizen blogging promised all those years ago still seems wonderfully attractive. If only I could find it.

A Question Of Following Jesus?

I reckon that roughly 1,500 people go to church in Caversham (including Emmer Green and CPV) on a normal Sunday, whilst around 30,000 do something else. Yet I know that some, possibly many, of those 30,000 non-churchgoers do still seek to follow Jesus (just as not everyone who does go to church is, in any meaningful sense, one of Jesus' followers). The puzzle I have is that it seems to me that following Jesus is something that is best done together with others: helping one another along the road. So how is this done?

Caversham church services all seem to follow the same basic pattern, whatever the denominational label: a mix of singing songs, talking at God and being lectured by a preacher. The songs sung never seem to have any point of reference to everyday culture: either they are songs from long ago, or they are songs which come from a purely religious subculture. These activities are doubtless great for those who like such things, but somewhat off-putting for anyone else. So, again, how do those "anyone else"s come together for Jesus?

I cannot be the first to ask these questions. The problems of institutionalised religion are obvious and rapidly becoming worse as the 21st Century proceeds; whilst the limitations of a purely individual spirituality, in a world where it is only by working together that we can make a difference, are steadily becoming clearer. So, someone out there must either have an answer, or at least have a piece of the jigsaw, which can be added to other pieces to give the first step of an answer.

There has to be more to following Jesus than isolating ourselves into a religious backwater; there certainly must be more than dogmatic doctrines and rigid intolerance; just as there has to be more than blandness and shallow platitudes. Somehow there must be a way of coming together, learning from one another, supporting one another on the journey, and working together to make Caversham (and beyond) a better place.

What do you think?