A Pause in Lent 2014 - better late than never!

It was a lovely weekend, full of gardening, plant-buying, archery and fish and chips (an unusual find in France...) and I never got round to writing my Pause in Lent - sorry! But here is a really truthful picture for you, from the Facebook page of someone I'm very happy to have found over the last week or two:

Kim Verrier is a Speaker and Encourager (a very worthwhile occupation!) who is the friend of a friend. I followed my friend's link to Kim's Facebook page and found her words very helpful - and in the case of the picture above, very relevant! Do pop over and visit her if you are on Facebook.

A First Pause in Advent 2013 - Refinding Faith

My sidebar is full of pictures of my old Advent Wreath! That's a funny feeling... I took the photo years ago! Welcome to all the Pause in Advent bloggers, old and new. It's great to have so many of you (see the sidebar for details) and I hope to come and visit your posts over the course of my busy week. My apologies to new and occasional readers that this post, below, is pretty heavy and personal. I promise you something light, pretty and festive next week!

This old wreath is still in our Advent box, but rather battered, especially after one or two candles were allowed to burn down too low over the years.

To my surprise, my theme for Advent this year sounds rather like last year's. I wouldn't have expected that - I certainly don't feel 'in the same place' as last year. Last year I was thinking about the Essence of Christmas. This year, I've been feeling rather unsure about the whole thing. My faith took a battering earlier in the year, something which has never happened before. Over the past decade we've made a difficult (though ultimately delightful) move to a new country, had problems in a church, my mum has died, my dad has remarried, and through all this my faith remained real and certain. This year nothing to shock you happened at all, and yet, perhaps due to cumulative effects and one little trigger in May, it feels like the foundations of my faith have been shaken.

Over the difficult months I held on to one thing only - forgiveness. This is because my friends without particular faith live good, kind, meaningful lives, really not so different to the Christians I know and the Christian I have been. However (and you can disagree with me) it seems just about impossible, without Jesus,  to offer true forgiveness. I'm not even sure if forgiveness is a particularly high priority to my non-Christian friends. After decades of living with forgiveness as both something received and given, this forgiveness-free (or forgiveness-reduced) life was the one thing that didn't seem at all attractive.

My faith was dented, shaken, and at times apparantly gone. It's still a very tentative thing - maybe it's going to grow back in strength or maybe it will always be a bit weak now, who can say? I realise that this period of doubt may help me to be more understanding and respectful of other people who question and doubt. I've seen both sides, now.

There's lots more to say and maybe some of you want to hear it. Maybe some feel that my faith or lack of it is a matter for me alone. I'm sure others are really concerned to hear what I've been through. For some it would be possible to assume that I never really had a true, saving faith in Jesus, because how otherwise could it just disappear? This article has been a lot of help to me on this subject and others - please read it if you have any questions about the whole theme of refinding faith.

But for now, the theme of my Advent pauses has been decided by some very powerful words I heard in church this morning:

'Discern the essential. Discern real life'.

I can't tell you the impact those words had on me during our communion service. I need to send an appreciative email (in French, drat...) to our pastor and the guy who was preaching this morning, as their emphasis on the Essential and on Real Life had a real turn-around effect on me. I hope that in some way the emphasis on discernment, on the essential, and on the real, gives you pause for thought in whatever you'll be doing in this first week of Advent. See you next week!

The Pilgrim Way to Santiago

In 2011 I found myself by accident on the pilgrim route to Santiago. I snapped this photo of a pilgrim's scallop shell in the little shrine on the back road, which is actually only about 20 minutes' drive from our house.

Just over two years later, we headed quite deliberately to the end of the pilgrimage - Santiago de Compostela itself. You can see my photos of the Baroque frontage of the cathedral in my previous post.

Ben and I paid to go up into the museums which take up some of the rooms around the cathedral, and I snapped this photo of pilgrims and tourists together in the square. You can spot the pilgrims because most of them are lying down! They have had to walk at least 100 kilometers to get there, or cycle 200, and most of them had probably done more. You can see a huge pile of rucsacs in the middle of my photo, with a few pilgrims watching them as their fellows head off - maybe into the cathedral, or maybe into the well-stocked city pharmacies, which advertise a great range of foot-care products!

The sense of arrival must be wonderful. The Catholic pilgrims go to confession and mass, and everyone mills around in the cathedral, which has quite a sense of bustle and awe, probably as it has done for the last thousand years. This photo shows you what you can see there:

But this photo gives you a much better feel of the place!

Whisper, crackle, shuffle, bustle, shhhh, shuffle, bustle... it's a fascinating place.

But when you think that you have come to the end of the pilgrim route, it turns out you are wrong. THIS is the end of the road - the end of the world - Finisterre!

Pilgrims traditionally continued walking until they got to the true end of the road, on the blustery cape of Fisterra, or Finisterre.

There they burnt their pilgrim clothes - Son 2 is investigating the site of a very recent fire, composed mostly of boots, he informed us.

Nowadays, as well as pilgrims and tourists, there is a lighthouse and a radio mast.

The sign says 'Do not leave clothes on this radio mast' in many pilgrim languages...



The town of Fisterra is just tucked into a bay behind the cape. Here the pilgrims stopped in medieval times to pick up the scallop shell which would show the world that they had completed their holy travels. And here Son 2 dived in the cold, cold waters of the Atlantic and found...

A final Pause in Lent, 2013

Well, even though it's been bitty and I've not had all that much blogging time, I've appreciated our Pause in Lent this year - thank you for your contributions and comments! My thought this week has been about how easy it is to define ourselves negatively ('well, at least I'm not...') rather than positively. I want to avoid the comparison definitions of myself, and go for the positive ones, the ones which say what I am, not what I'm NOT!

This led on, strangely but logically, to Jesus's story:

“Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee stood by himself and prayed: ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other people—robbers, evildoers, adulterers—or even like this tax collector.  I fast twice a week and give a tenth of all I get.’
“But the tax collector stood at a distance. He would not even look up to heaven, but beat his breast and said, ‘God, have mercy on me, a sinner.’

“I tell you that this man, rather than the other, went home justified before God."

The story is in the book of Luke, and you can find the full version here. The logical connection is that the Pharisee was all about what he was NOT, but the tax collector looked at what he WAS. The strange aspect is that what he sees about himself is negative, and not all the positive cheery stuff I was aiming for! So does that mean that either the tax collector or I have got it wrong?

I think not. The tax collector doesn't compare himself to the Pharisee, only to God, and to what he feels he should be in God's eyes. That's not wrong, and Jesus promises that it got him justified by God. I can look at myself and see what I have done wrong, and what I lack in terms of character. I can go to God about it and seek his mercy, without comparing myself to other people. I can also look at myself in the shining light of Jesus' love and forgiveness, and see some wonderful, wonderful things about myself, made in the image of God and redeemed by his grace. I think that this is where the positive definitions come in. As Mother Theresa said: 'For you see, in the end, it is between you and God. It was never between you and them anyway'.

Have a special Holy Week, if you're commemorating it. And see you for Easter Joy!

A Pause in Lent - on Sunday for once!

I like what Ang said about this carving of Jesus - it's as if he's holding up his hand and saying, 'Hang on, stop and think about what really matters'! Betty also had some interesting information about the carving, when I posted about it last week - you can scroll down and find the post and comments easily, if you're interested.

So, here I am to hang on and think about what really matters! It's been quite a week - the family are fine but outside the home things have been quite difficult for friends and for Ben too. A week when I realised that God had drawn me towards last week's Pause in Lent quote for a reason. A week when I found myself repeating the words of a Methodist communion service: 'We are not worthy... but it is your nature always to have mercy, and on that we depend'. It's easier not to judge when you realise what a second ...(third/fourth...) chance you have been given yourself.

I also re-read my Simple Abundance book, and found a challenge that I hadn't really taken up before on the previous reads. It was to list ten things you like about yourself. The first list of ten was for your physical appearance. I'm quite vain so that wasn't too hard! But I was staggered to realise how hard it was to list ten things I like about my personality. I'm not a deeply unpleasant person, so there must be at least ten likable things about me, but blow me down, they were hard for me to think of! I'm not fishing for compliments here - instead, I issue you the challenge - write down ten things you like about yourself! I concluded that I spend a good amount of time thinking of how I'd like to improve/confessing, so it's valuable to get a balance and to also remember that God created us in his own image and saw that we were good!

A Pause in Lent

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  Fast from judging others; Feast on the Christ dwelling within them.

Well, the above quote isn't an attempt to stop you from complaining about my untimely Lent posts and lack of sidebar links for the rest of you - honest! (But sorry, all the same, as normal service has yet to be resumed...)

It's just that the quote from the optional Lent poem caught my eye - it's so easy to say, and so hard to actually do, don't you think? I remember taking little baby Son 1 on the Newcastle Metro with a new Christian friend, and making some ratty comment about an obvious fare-dodger. When this young woman asked me, very innocently: 'Didn't Jesus say that he we can leave the judging to him?', she really brought me up short. I wouldn't have thought that I judged people, but here was evidence that I was doing just that.

There are sayings all around the world about not judging someone you don't understand - "you have to walk a mile in someone else's shoes" comes to mind, but there are lots of other good ones. This poem takes it even further, if you follow Christ - not only do you need to attempt to understand, but you need to recognise that Jesus is in that person! If I truly understood this, I'm sure I would behave differently, when a driver behind me honks angrily, or when teenagers in my sons' schools smoke and drink... Jesus is there, with those people, loving them. What am I doing?

A Pause in Lent

It's not a very spiritual Pause, but I've had an enforced pause today, which is probably quite a good thing!

It snowed hard (by southern French standards) today, and my morning and lunch time lessons were cancelled. After a weekend getting sorted after the operation etc, it was odd and not entirely welcome to have next to nothing to do! The boys are on holiday but Son 2 has gone to play in the snow with his friends (and is now staying over night) and Son 1 is quite independent around the house except when he needs a pain killer! I tried adding a Pause in Lent Bloggers list to my sidebar (I really do want your contributions shared and recognised, folks) but Blogger isn't playing. So, hmm... pause..!

I did visit some Pause in Lent bloggers and Fiona, who has her own busy life at the moment, suggested praying. Yes - I'm tired, I'm drifting, I felt tearful when I saw Son 1's operation wounds when the nurse dressed them tonight - prayer it is. Thank you, Fiona. Thank you, Pause in Lent. Thank you, Jesus!

A very merry Christmas, and a belated Pause in Advent

Oh, life takes over again..! But only in a good way:

The last part of my Essence of Christmas is, of course, Jesus. Can you spot him there, in among our Sunday School children and teachers? We had a 'global' themed nativity this year...

If you're a Christian, having Jesus as the main 'ingredient' of Christmas is a bit obvious. If you're not a Christian, I hope that you didn't stop reading straight away - I'm rather conscious myself of the alienating nature of faith blogging. I personally feel more at home in a very mixed blogging world, where we share our differences as much as our similarities. Rather like our church, don't you think? Happy Christmas to all of you. It's been a lovely year.

A Pause in Advent - Essence - Others

Welcome to the second Pause in Advent! The posts from last week were diverse and fascinating, but also had some kind of unity amongst them - we often find that we are dwelling on the same ideas as we prepare for Christmas. Thanks for all your posts and to all who took time to read and comment on others' posts, which is so encouraging and interesting.

This year, as I've said, I'm thinking about the essence of Christmas - not the commercialised/generally accepted form of the festival ('flavouring'), but what it really boils down to ('essence'). This is very necessary, as I've taken on a lot more work, and also because no one now has the money to spend on Christmas that many took for granted a decade ago.

My first ingredient of the true 'essence' of Christmas was tradition. My second is 'other people'. It's generally suggested that the more you care about other people, the happier you feel. Focussing on addressing your own (and your family's) immediated needs, exclusively, is a self-defeating strategy - people who take time to help others are happier and feel more satisfied. There've been times when I've been pretty active on 'saving the world', but these last few years have been more about the family and me - I really don't want to get so insular that I forget there are others out there with far greater needs than our own. Dormouse has some great examples of how people are helping out around the world on her recent post here. Ben spends some time each year collecting food for the French Restos du Coeur (Restaurants of the Heart) - he was at a local supermarket charming old ladies (I don't doubt) today, for the big collection before Christmas.

A group of people in a town near us has got involved in the Sakado project (there is a great French pun there if you know where to find it...). Sakado is a national organisation which organises the collection of packed rucksacks (sacs à dos) for homeless people. The idea is that you use new or good quality second hand material to provide warm clothes/blankets, hygiene products, communications aids (like a phone card or envelopes with stamps on) and Christmas goodies, and pack these into a rucksack along with your own personal message of encouragement. The rucksacks are then given to homeless people in the area - Toulouse in our case.

I've picked up two adequate rucksacks and a few warm clothes from our budget sports store - for some reason, the charity shops aren't stocking rucksacks at the moment, which I think is missing a trick. I've been to the charity shop for gloves, hats, socks, blankets etc so now it's over to the boys - I'm going to give them the list of hygiene products and Christmas goodies and a budget, and send them off to Intermarché to choose whatever they think would be best for a homeless man. Son 2 is already intrigued, and wonders if he will ever see a man in Toulouse carrying HIS rucksack!

This is quite a costly exercise. Stocking up for it has already made me realise how absolutely impossible it would be to get properly kitted-out for outdoor life without an income. I hope that when the boys go shopping for the supermarket products they will also face some realities about how homeless people have to live. By getting involved, in this practical way, I pray that we are going to bless someone else this Christmas but will also count our own blessings more accurately. Maybe the essence of Christmas is that Jesus came to a difficult place, at a difficult time, among difficult people - for Others.

Community

Hello friends! My Red and White Rentrée Giveaway is in the post below, and I'm really enjoying reading your comments and resolutions - please keep them coming!

One of my Rentrée Resolutions this year is to make more time for other people, getting actively and consistently involved with friends, groups and wider family , and I wanted to think this one through a bit more in a separate post. Ben and I have historically been fairly sociable – actively involved in every church we attended, making friends and sharing meals at our house, at church and in their homes. We also like to get to know our neighbours (as much as they would like to be known), and have friends and family to visit whenever we can.

Over the last few years I’ve really cut down on social activities and I know why – it was for a good reason. The little ‘falling apart’ that I mentioned here came at a point when I realised I was living largely to convince other people that everything was right in my life, and not so that things could actually BE right. This crept up on me slowly – everyone gets things wrong, everyone tries to put on a good front so that things look OK, but due to problems with the church we went to and the general stress of moving to another country I was going way overboard on trying to present a shallow yet acceptable image.

I needed to take time out for God to rearrange my priorities, and to get me to love my family for who they were, not try to force them into something they weren’t. God did this most gently and most marvellously, and the blogging world also helped me more than I can say – blogs, recommended books and blogging friends were all used as God shone a gentle light on my life and helped me to know myself better.

In the few years since this has been happening, I have drawn in and focused on my family alone. It’s been a valuable focus and one I don’t want to loose, but I knew that this year I would be ready for God to show me something  new, something wider, something to replace the all-consuming passion for spirituality and world justice which I felt I’d lost as I looked inwards. I suppose I rather hoped that this new thing would be quiet, inward-looking and something I could do alone. However, he’s making it clear to me that this isn’t the case – it’s all about other people.

"Without friendships no one would choose to live, even if they had all the other good things in life."
Aristotle
Hmmm…

"Community is the place where the person you least want to live with always lives."
Henri Nouwen
Sigh…

"If you don’t go to somebody’s funeral, they won’t go to yours."
Yogi Berra
Snort…

Those quotations are from a Christian book called ‘Everybody’s Normal Till You Get to Know Them’ by John Ortberg, which has been sitting on my shelves for so long that I honestly have no idea how or when it got there. See how God has been preparing this shift back into community living for me?

So through picking up that book at a time when I’m emotionally prepared for it, and through other things – noting that the boys need practice in greeting new people politely and spending time with new adults, for example – I’m ready to follow where God leads and push out again into a wider circle of people. I am going to try going to a house group at church – this is going to be frustrating in French, as, with the best will in the world, people tend to assume that one’s ability to speak equals one’s level of Christian understanding and faith, and can ‘talk down’ to one quite accidentally (consider this if you have immigrants in any of your churches, please). I’m going to respond more enthusiastically to Ben’s suggestions that we invite people over for meals, and will try to be brave enough to rekindle some friendships that kind of died in my quiet years. Please pray for me.

Linking to Spiritual Sundays... for logical reasons! The flower photos are bouquets the boys gave me on Mother's Day - I've been waiting for a chance to share them since May...

G is for the Grace of God

Happy Easter! I think you guessed that my acrostic word was AMAZING, and that this stemmed from Ang's comment about the Amazing Grace she experiences in her life - the Grace of God. I felt that I wanted to write something about that too, but what on earth could I say that hadn't already been said by the Bible, by hymn writers, by Philip Yancey..? Well, I thought, I could look at God's grace in MY life, because no one else can write about that...

So there we go, I've had a really rather indulgent week of telling my story, and you have been most kind to indulge me in the telling, with your generous and encouraging comments. But the theme behind the telling was meant to be the amazing grace of God, which means his unconditional love for each one of us. Although I gave away my copy of Philip Yancey's book about Grace, the words in the blurb on the back are indelibly etched into my memory: 'There is nothing I can do to make God love me more. There is nothing I can do to make God love me less'. I remember sitting on a London to Leeds train, discussing those words with a fellow teacher, as she worried about some aspects in her life which she felt were letting God down. It is perfectly possible to let God down - I know my anger and irritability do that frequently - but those things don't stop his love for me or you, not one little bit.

I know my life story is a rather cheery, easy one. Nothing terrible ever happened to me, so of course it is easy for me to say, as I did a week ago, 'Life is fun and God is good'. But I could have told my life story from the shadowy side, too. In every good thing that I recall, there is an element of God's grace making it work, and highlighting the light instead of the shadow. I can see God's grace in taking an isolated, slightly arrogant girl and teaching her gently what she wasn't prepared to learn from church or Christian friends. I can see God's grace in leading me into teaching when I thought I was preparing for museum work. I can see God's loving hand guiding me and Ben again and again as we needed to change home and church. I can see God's grace in allowing me to break open so that a softer, deeper, more receptive layer of my character was ready to learn about living with him, living with my family. Those could have been, in fact were, some of the dark sides of my story. But seen in God's light - seen in the light of Jesus and his Easter Resurrection, my story is just a little part of God's story, full of grace and hope.

N is for the Net

Thanks for staying with me in this little acrostic history of my life so far! Your comments have been really interesting and encouraging, and I'm particularly enjoying seeing what catches your interest in any given post - from colleges to gardens to churches, so far! We've found that we had things in common we never knew about before - I trained as a teacher at the same college as Penny from Violet White, and Ang of Tracing Rainbows and I may well have worshipped together on one Sunday in August 1997, which is quite remarkable.

At the end of yesterday's post we were heading off to France in a somewhat unprepared manner - contract uncertain and furniture and boxes stuck in a lorry somewhere over Christmas and the New Year. To top it all, I had a really nasty bout of illness while we stayed with Ben's parents and then with friends before heading over to France. Everyone was very supportive, but I could see that Ben was wondering how he was going to cope with everything on his own, and a wife so physically and emotionally fragile that she was refusing to speak her (very limited) French.I told some of that story back in January, on the seventh anniversary of our move. I think it took me that long to develop a bit of an understanding of what had happened, and to learn a language with which to describe it, too.

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We hit the ground running (even me, on the whole) and actually loved our first year in our spacious rental house in the French countryside. The boys were welcomed into a little village school and set off on the bus each morning from the track at the bottom of our hamlet, where I got chatting with other mums. I braved the roads to begin driving on the right, and it wasn't too bad. Ben came home exhausted each evening from a day speaking French, but the work was enjoyable and he was ready for the challenge. It was a good year.

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Once it was clear that Ben's contract was going to become permanent and that we were happy to stay, we started looking for a house to buy. My French developed in very specific areas of vocabulary - house buying, the gym, choirs and shopping, to be precise! We couldn't afford to buy in the area we'd started in, and looked at many, many houses before I had a quick glance around the one in which we are now so happy. I discounted it because it was run-down and slightly above budget, and less rural than we'd hoped for (we are on the edge of a market town, with fields in some directions but houses, flats and a supermarket in others). Some months later, though, I found my mind was still going back to this house, and I mentioned it again to Ben. My description this time must have been more enthusiastic than the original one, because he was keen to see it and the rest is history! And how glad we are that we chose a house within walking/cycling distance of all the schools in the area, and many of the boys' friends and clubs. Children and teenagers are better served by a populated area than they are by the deep countryside, we now see.

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Somewhere along the line, the good things began to be subsumed by the pressures we felt from having moved to another country. It's hard to put a finger on it but we felt continually on show, and as people who've always been brought up to care about how we affect others, we were very conscious of not being like the French, and not being like the Americans at our church, either. We felt very judged, and I suppose, occasionally, we were! But most of the time it was about how we felt, not about anything anyone else really thought. French children are quiet and (oppressively) well-behaved when adults are around. American Christians also can have very strong ideas about child-rearing. Our children are not quiet, and they do not sit still. If they are told not to do something they make a point of doing it, to see what happens - not out of evil intent, but out of a certain (inherited) stubborness. In fact, they also have (shared generously between them) dyspraxia and a leaning towards the mild ends of autism and ADHD, none of those things being much stonger than character traits, but certainly making them stand out in a bunch of quiet, well-mannered kids! We did not cope with those differences well in those years.

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Oh, the relief of being able to look back on that time, rather than feeling stuck, blind, in the middle of it! One of the things that has helped me to move beyond the mire has been blogging - hence, N is for the Net! I had various connections with internet groups before I started blogging, but in many ways they did not help me because I still felt I had to show a coherent front, and to hide the imperfections that I would not allow myself or my family. Then three years ago I started blogging, to create a new way of communicating with my mum who had become too ill for phonecalls and emails. I was also keen to enter the world of blogging and hoped very much for comments from other bloggers. I had no idea that the connections I was going to make through blogging were going to become God's way of leading me through the slough. This is something I've talked a bit more about in other posts, but the blogger Josie Crafter (Homemade and Happy) put me onto the book Simple Abundance, which, along with other things, taught me how to reflect on my circumstances and feelings, rather than bundle through life as though they were irrelevant. I have found that unconsidered emotions do not become meaningless, but that instead they take over and have a power they could never have if you spend a little time recognising and dealing with them. (See Jane Austen for more on self-awareness!)

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I felt somewhat selfish and unholy taking time to think about myself, but found, instead, that God used everything I learnt to make my life a blessing to others, especially to my family. Gretchen Rubin, in her really helpful Happiness Project, quotes the saying: 'If momma ain't happy, ain't nobody happy!' and I've realised the relief but also the responsibility in that little gem of wisdom.

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It is inaccurate to think that I have 'arrived' anywhere, but God has got me to a point where I feel I know how to trust him, to open up to him and to others, and to grow and learn through new situations rather than shutting down and entrenching. Life has continued to present its challenges, especially my mother's death in 2010, but I am full of hope and conscious of forgiveness. That is a good place to be and I'm really grateful to you, my blogging friends, who have been with me on my journey to get this far.

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PS If you have been wondering about the vocabulary I've used to describe my faith experiences, there's a little post below for you!

A quick note on Christian words

As I've been writing the story of my life, much of which is linked to my experiences of faith in God, some of you may have been wondering about the Christian words I use, or choose not to use. For those who've struggled through the Christian bits but are more interested in the rest - thank you for sticking with me! I've tried not to use Christian jargon but to tell things how they are, using everyday language. I hope it worked.
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For those who (like me) have been trained to look out for certain key words and phrases, here's an explanation of why I've tried to avoid them: I believe very deeply in sin and salvation, in Jesus' death for me and in my acceptance him as personal Lord and Saviour. I find phrases like 'washed in the blood of the Lamb' are so important and so powerful that I feel uncomfortable in bandying them around just to prove to myself or to someone else that I'm saved. I hope that, by using non-jargon words to describe my conversion and walk with God, that I've been able to convey the truth of this in my life rather than cloaking it in what must seem to many to be off-putting, mysterious language. Again, I hope it worked...

I is for Immigration

Yes, Juanita knew it was going to be 'I'!

Yesterday I left our story when our boys were 1 and nearly 3, and Ben had just got a job in Harrogate. Leaving a tiny flat wasn't hard, but leaving North Tyneside was. We found ourselved a good-sized ex-council house to rent in Harrogate, and I spontaneously thanked God every time I walked into our kitchen - imagine having a proper kitchen again, and a table where all four of us could eat at the same time!

So Harrogate is the England that the boys remember - the fish and chip shop at the bottom of the road where we later bought a house, the easy walk to The Stray, where wonderful fairs and circuses would come and set up, and the mysterious dual nature of a town which is both Yorkshire and refined Spa Town. We had friends there who represented both sides of the divide, but our church was firmly in the 'nice' part, the majority (although not all) of the people living in whopping great houses and earning tons of money to keep up with the expectations of their neighbours. Apologies to my good friends from Harrogate who read this blog - you will realise that you are either proper Yorkshire or charming exception, and that's why I like you! Refined Harrogate was not my scene...

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I guess it was a difficult time. Working (even if it's not every day) with young children isn't easy, and Ben would usually drop the boys off at childminder's or school on the mornings I worked, and I would pick them up from their childminder on my way back from the train station at around 6pm - I was commuting to York for the last few years of our time there. Looking back, admitting that it was hard would have been a good idea. I would have looked for ways to offset the hard stuff, instead of ploughing on as if it was all perfectly feasible and nothing to fuss about. I think it would probably have been possible to do my job and look after the family, but that adding in the things I did in church as well, I never gave myself a break and, instead, used to find myself mysteriously ill for weeks at a time - well, that was a clue, wasn't it? I resented not having any time and ended up subconsciously snatching it back with days in bed and never having any energy to do the housework. Not a good balance.

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One part of Harrogate that the whole family loved was Harlow Carr Gardens, which happened to be near where Ben worked. My mum took to giving Ben family membership of the Royal Horticultural Society for each birthday, which meant that we could all get in, free, whenever we wanted. The boys had birthday parties there, and we walked there in snow, in rain, in wind and in frequent sunshine - I remember the hides where you could watch woodland birds feeding and the stream with wonderful flowers all around it. For all that my last paragraph talks about how hard I made things on myself, what happy memories I have of that place!

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Spiritually, I got back into Jesus. You may think this is a most strange thing to say, but the time that I'd spent living and breathing Jubilee 2000 had given me a really good understanding of the Old Testament (Jubilee as freedom and release from debts is a Jewish idea, of course) and I knew God as the Just yet Forgiving Father really well through those years. But when I prayed I realised that I wasn't living with a fully balanced attention to God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. I read Tom Wright's excellent 'Fresh Looks' on the Gospels, and my Jesus, the Jesus who died to save me, really came back into focus in my faith. I also remembered that I couldn't do it all on my own, and that God promises the Holy Sprit as strength, guide and counsellor to all who ask, and at least partially learned again to open up to his leading, instead of imagining I could do it all myself.

*

It was in Harlow Carr Gardens, where Ben and I took to meeting up every Friday lunchtime, that we discussed our next, and biggest, move. Ben's job was safe but changing, so that the things he loved were no longer part of his work. He pointed out that the boys were 5 and 6, the perfect age to make a successful move to another country - if we left it much longer, they would never adapt to education in another language. Ben had been studying French in evening classes for years, to supliment his hard-earned O-Level (his parents used to send him to vaguely-known French farming contacts each summer, so that he would have to speak French and would learn enough to pass a language O-level, which was in those days necessary to get into university). Ben loved the food, wine and culture of France, and had gently got me used to the idea of a move to France over the years. When his job was going downhill, and he met the boss of a small French company at a conference in London, Ben put out feelers and discovered that this company would be interested in taking on a first language English speaker!

*

We talked and prayed about this through packed lunches and meandering walks around the beautiful gardens. Ben went out for an informal interview, and also applied for a few jobs in the UK. When one job in England nearly came up trumps, he phoned the French company hastily to see if they still wanted him. Of course they did! No, there wasn't anything in writing just yet, but they definitely wanted him... Gulp. So on this basis, which did get put onto paper in a rather vague way a little later, we moved out to Toulouse in January 2005.

Z is for Zipping Around!

Well, I'm sure that by now most of you, like Seranata and Ang, realised that the next letter was going to be Z. I imagine you wondered what word I was going to choose, too - I had to think about it! But 'zipping around' seems to fit the next few years of my life pretty well. If you've been reading my little acrostic story of my life, you'll know that yesterday I left you with our prospective move from the folksy wilds of north Cumbria to the busy metropolis around Newcastle.

In what some might call bad timing, Ben and I decided that the year he started back full time as a PhD student would be a good year to have our first child. I was 26, which was the age my mum had been when I was born, and I was starting to make friends with women who had babies (all those young mums I mentioned) and there's no doubt about it - babies are catching.

In fact it took a while before Son 1 came along (just after my 28th birthday), and we moved from an eighteenth century cottage (full of unrealised 'potential') in Cumbria to a rented Tyneside flat (that's one quarter of a semi-detatched house) in North Tyneside when I was about three months pregnant. You can see the downsides of this move but there were huge 'upsides' too - whereas before we were relatively isolated and could only get places by car, now we had a huge network of bus and Metro transport to get us anywhere our own feet or bicycles couldn't take us.

*

Until Son 1 was born I did quite a bit of work back in Cumbria, continuing part-time teaching while borrowing a friends' house in Brampton for a few nights a week. When I was approximately the size of a blue whale I landed a job in Meadow Well, the depressed council estate (yes, the one where there were riots) about 20 minutes walk from our flat. This was my first permanent contract as a Special Needs teacher and was a great experience, despite some quite specific problems at the school (cockroaches the least of them). I started work there when Son 1 was ten weeks old, working every morning and cycling home to collect him from his childminder every lunchtime.
*

The pattern of work continued when Son 2 came along seventeen and a half months later, and I got incredibly fit pushing the boys everywhere in their double buggy, and carrying them, one at a time, upstairs to our flat. The Tynesiders were open and welcoming, and full of love for babies and children - it was a fantastic place to bring up sons. People used to open up their tiny hands in the supermarket to push a pound coin in (checking first with me so that I knew not to let them swallow it!). It was a good luck thing for the locals but it was a mark of how much they adored children, too. Despite being blondes, our boys were very dark and colourful compared to Geordie babies, who were the whitest little people I'd ever seen. Viking blood is strong there!

*

We went to church a bit along the coast - when we moved there from Brampton people would say to us: 'So you'll go to Cullercoats, then?' We quickly learned that Cullercoats is a really big, lively church - if Methodists had cathedrals, it might be one of them. It really was a pleasant church, and I did all the usual things (for me) like joining the choir, volunteering for holiday clubs and helping Ben with some youth work. The church was so huge that it didn't seem to need us very much, which was great for people with a young family. Instead, I found myself very powerfully drawn by something I'd never been interested in before - issues of Justice and Peace.

*

A friend had given me a leaflet when I was newly pregnant - it was about Jubilee 2000 and the call to cancel Third World Debt. I'll be honest that my evangelical background told me to steer clear of campaigning and stick to salvation, but God was leading (pushing/shoving/dragging) me towards Jubilee 2000, so after a teeny crisis of confidence that's the way I went.

*

This was about the time that I stopped being 'faintly hippy', as I put it yesterday. North Cumbria was all about folk music (from our friend Donald the builder with his accordion to Maddy Prior in the fells to our north), floaty clothes and hand-made shoes (I got mine in Totnes - where else?). North Tyneside was NOT about these things. When a SEN pupil of mine asked: 'Mrs H, WHAT have you got on your feet?' I felt that it was time to move on from Conker Shoes (crafted to fit my feet) to blue suede trainers from the retail outlet in North Tyneside. I enjoyed being faintly trendy and slightly sleek for a while - after all, when I wasn't pregnant I was slim from all that carrying and pushing, and it was worth taking advantage of it! It was also probably quite appropriate as I became the media spokesperson for Jubilee 2000 North East, and had to look vaguely credible when interviewed by the media about Third World Debt issues.

*

We were a completely voluntary team of activists, many from local churches and charities, and 1997, '98, '99 and the year 2000 were really dramatic and powerful years of action on behalf of the world's poorest. You probably know that a significant chunk of debt was dropped by the G8 that year, and I hope you also know that the money the poorer countries stopped paying to us HAS been used for health care, education and other essential services in many, many cases.

*
So there I was, zipping around northern England with two babies and a serious case of Saving the World, and there Ben was, finishing his marathon PhD, which he dedicated to me and the boys. I get the book out every now and then (more often than he does, I think) and have a little snivel it at that wonderful dedication.

*
When he'd finished, he got a job (it's not so hard with a PhD) and we moved from cheery North Tyneside to Harrogate. 'You'll love it,' said a northern friend, 'It's like a little piece of the Home Counties moved up to Yorkshire'. Oh dear, I thought.

A is for Ambleside

I'm writing the third of my acrostic posts today - A is for Ambleside! While Ben and I were studying for our finals (I'd never worked so hard in my life) and preparing the details of our wedding, we also needed to think about our next move in terms of both work and location. Ben decided not to take a second degree in Veterinary Medicine, even though his grades were good enough - he opted to stay a biologist. I wanted to look into teaching, mainly because the Museum Education team at Exeter's Royal Albert Museum had been so helpful to me and influential in my late childhood and teens. I wondered if I could go into museum education, and so I prepared by going into schools and getting ready for a Post Graduate Certificate of Education.Ben didn't have any job lined up, so our choice of first home was mostly influenced by my choice of Teacher Training College. We scanned the map of colleges and spotted Charlotte Mason College of Education, in Ambleside, a market town in the English Lake District. 'What a good place to be unemployed!' said Ben...I got the place at the College, which really impressed me with its ethos (Charlotte Mason was an early education reformer with ideas in common with Montessori, who also influenced a lot of the early home-schooling movement). We found a flat, which the council was letting out to students - it was in Windermere Library, and had once belonged to the caretaker, and prior to that had been servants' quarters for the big gothic house. Quite a start! Following our wedding, we had our honeymoon (in the Lake District - booked before I got my place at college) then stayed with our parents until term started, and set up home in the Library Flat, Windermere, Cumbria. We shared the flat with Ben's elderly gerbil, whom I liked because he made companionable noises when it got quiet and spooky at night.

*

Ben was often out quite late at night, because he'd got a job with the College kitchens! He had to go in before lunch, I think, and serve, clean up, and then help get everything ready for the big evening meal. He learned a lot about how students can be arrogant and condescending to people who serve them, which was a salutory lesson to someone who'd only just stopped being a student himself. He got really good with a mop and also brought home loads of leftovers, and sometimes managed to provide extra food to any of the PGCE students who'd come in with me to eat in the canteen.

*

We were visited early on in our stay by a young nanny, who was part of the Methodist church in Windermere. Along with the students there were plenty of other young people in temporary jobs in the hotels and tourist trade, and we made up a group of young adults who met at the Methodist minister's home on a Sunday evening. We're still friends with that young nanny, who is now a Methodist minister herself!

*

Teaching turned out to be hard (I was too 'nice' to easily control a classroom) and rewarding (sharing enthusiasm is something I love)! Ben found a 'proper' job in the north of Cumbria (he was researching safe alternatives to sheep dip, which was a huge concern at the time) and did a weekly commute from Windermere Station until I managed to get my final teaching practice in the wilds of the north Cumbria fells, and could move up to join him near Brampton.

*

We stayed in Brampton for what felt a long time, and what an influential part it has continued to play in our lives. We made wonderful friends of all ages at the Methodist Church - children, teenagers, a few young adults like us, middle aged and elderly friends. We learned so much - whilst we were firm in an evangelical faith, we met other faithful Christians who, for various reasons, found the word 'evangelical' quite inappropriate to describe their own walk with God. We learned to be very wary of judging other peoples' faith, because the 'liberal' who apparantly doesn't tick all the essential belief boxes turns out to be the only person who visits a lonely old man each week, in a living example of the love of Christ... It was a real, and very diverse, Christian family, and what a debt we owe to them all.

*

I got a job in a tiny, two-teacher village school some way south of Brampton (all this is north of the Lakes, not far from Scotland). The head teacher was new too, and we had a wonderful time re-inventing the idea of a village school for the 1990s. I had a lot to learn, in terms of educational techniqes and also temper - maybe I wasn't so 'nice' after all! But I do remember those children fondly. I taught the 4 - 7 year olds, who are now all adults, of course...

*

My real failing as a class teacher was that I found the unusual individual far more interesting than the class as a whole. Thanks to the headteacher, we got a name as a school which would consider the needs of dyslexic pupils, and some parents moved their children to us. I began to train more and more in Special Educational Needs, and finally gave up the full-time work to train as a Dyslexia specialist. In the meantime I did part-time special needs and class teaching all round the Brampton and Carlisle area, and even did some work for our church, aiming to meet the needs of schools, young mums and young singers in the area.

*

I was so settled in the faintly hippy highlands of north Cumbria that it came as a terrible shock when Ben wanted to move on. He'd taken on a part time PhD at Newcastle University (look on a map - eastern England is really close to western England when you go that far north!) and wanted to study full-time, which would require a move. I could hardly believe it. How could it be part of God's plan for us to leave?

M is for Marriage

Hi friends, and thanks for your comments on the first of my faintly mysterious acrostic stories (posted yesterday, below the Thrill of What You Already Have picture for April). As I said yesterday, something Ang commented has set me off on this little story of my life, based around a key phrase - I'm sure you'll guess it before much longer!Our first installment got me as far as university, where I was completing my much dreamed-of studies in archaeology. As you'll see, this one will get us as far as my marriage, but we'll go there by a winding route!One of the things I loved most about university was actually getting to know and trust new people. I mentioned yesterday that I had a strong identification with my family, and not too many other people (although had, and still have, a few good friends from my school days). But leaving home is a great way to meet different people and try new things and discover that your way is not the only way.

*

I had a great friend who loved to come Charity Shopping with me, but she was button-phobic (yes, I know she's not the only one)! We made a funny pair, with her sitting outside a shop, shuddering, while I knelt on the floor inside, searching through a button tin for the mother of pearl buttons I still have. She was, at that time, a biker girl with a leather jacket and big perm, and I was a floaty, wafty, lacey blonde. Actually, I can see she's come further than I have since those days..!

*

I think it's my nature to need to discover things for myself - I don't like to be told. When I met Ben at university (oops, goodbye, previous boyfriend) it was interesting to me that he had recently become a Christian. His faith seemed, like the rest of him, extremely down-to-earth, and not much of the self-indulgent delusion that I'd suspected that other people could be suffering from. It matched my own practical approach, but there was something more. I read a lot about the idea of 'a leap of faith', and realised there was something in that phrase - I imagined myself standing at the edge of a precipice with God on the other side of it, and tried to push myself to jump.

*

My mind just wouldn't do that! I suspect it's impossible. Instead, I came to one of those tearful evenings that you have when you're in love and something's just gone wrong that seems beyond bearing, and I just poured my heart out to God, including the bit about not feeling what I was 'meant' to be feeling about God. Well, God is so patient and loving with silly teenaged girls! Anyone, including my own mother, would have told me to buck up and sort myself out, but God is more gentle than a parent, and gave me all sorts of ideas, images, things to read, things to see, people to talk to in the next few days. Lo and behold, he was leading me to him, where I couldn't make the 'jump' myself! I got to the point where I realised that Jesus comes to me - he died for this - and it's not about me pushing my way to him, but about me being ready to accept him, just where I am.

*

Well, the tearful moments passed (although more were to come - hey, this is a romance!) and Ben and I got into going to his Anglican church in Reading city centre. It was fun, and sociable, and the hymns (which I'd always loved in my Methodist church at home) finally made sense - what happended to the hymn writers was happening to me!

*

I was nineteen and a half when we got engaged. We wondered vaguely about getting married while we were still at university (my mother disapproved of this idea) and finally settled on a date a few weeks after our graduation, in July 1990. It was a fun business, planning our wedding, although we both suspect that it's even more fun planning one when you're paying for it (and therefore in total control!) We chose some really fantastic hymns, including And Can It Be? which our minister said he'd never heard at a wedding before. But to us it summed things up. Wow - looking back on it, we were young. Ben's cousin (at 23, a year older than him), commented, "Oh, they're so young!" and their granny replied, "Well, you're no Methuselah yourself, dear..." But looking back, we see her point. I'm teaching students older than 21 now, and few of them seem exactly grown up. It must have been hard for our parents to believe we were really old enough to have made this decision. But almost 22 years later, it doesn't seem to have been a mistake!

A is for Archaeology

Hello! Something Ang said in response to my post yesterday has really grabbed my attention, and I'm going to do a little acrostic series this week - I'll leave you to work out the key word, but suffice to say, A is for Archaeology! It's kind of a little story of my life, but the challenge is to make it all fit to the meaning of Ang's word... here we go!So, archaeology was my real passion through childhood and my teens (OK, there was a guy too, for much of that period, but we won't talk about him today... much). I was, and still am, captivated by the everyday lives of people in the past. Things that bore other people, presumably because they are merely the pages of a book or the stones of a wall or the broken remnants of a pot, jump into life for me. Interestingly, our Son 1 is the same, and the photocopied words of his history lessons become real people to him.

I spent long periods of my childhood and early teens alone, excavating a midden of broken pots in my grandparents' garden, accessioning artefacts in the spare room which became my museum and researching the history of our new home at the local library in Pinhoe, near Exeter in Devon.

*

Looking back on it, it's wonderful to have such an interest and such an occupation, but there are some curiosities, too! How much of my solitary enthusiasm stemmed from an unwillingness to relate to real people outside of my own family? Was my passion for the people of the past a safe way of relating to people who couldn't relate back? I rather think so...

*

I was isolated by my experiences of having moved a lot (father in the Royal Navy, new homes and new schools in new countries where I always had the wrong accent, whichever accent that was). And I deliberately isolated myself further through the common childhood perception that my family's way was right and everyone else's way was therefore, logically and inescapably, wrong. In a gentle and understandable way, A was clearly for Arrogance, too.

*

I went to Reading University to study Archaeology in 1987, leaving behind my boyfriend of three years (there - I mentioned him!). University was all that it should be - an absolutely delightful upheaval from all I'd ever know, with some education thrown in for good measure. I can't say that my arrogance was shaken much, but some serious life-lessons were still learned, and I did realise, with a shock, that my family church-going had had virtually no impact on my personal faith. I believed things, but just as I had prefered to learn about people in the past who could have no effect on my life now, I found that I believed in a God who had a stately disinterest in my daily life. When some hard times came around, and I saw some Christian friends turning to Jesus as their daily support and eternal saviour, I was quite confused. Their relationship with Jesus was quite unlike anything I knew about, and quite an uncomfortable thing to see. I wondered if they were deluded, or if it just worked that way for some people and not for others.

A Pause In Lent - Reflection on the Cardinal Virtues

Hi, and welcome to the final Pause in Lent 2012 - it's Palm Sunday! I really appreciated my blogging break and I also appreciate your kind words and your understanding of the fact that I haven't been around to read your (surely excellent) Pause in Lent posts until now.I was thinking about which of the Cardinal Virtues that I haven't covered should be the subject of my last post, and I just couldn't choose! Instead I decided to just think about the idea of the virtues as a whole. This won't take long...

What I've been thinking is that, until last year, I thought that these lists of 'nice things' were rather sacharine and cute. They seemed to be about pretending that nasty things don't happen, and didn't appear a realistic way to look at life - similar to the way that I thought about Paul's exhortation to think about 'whatever is good' (I did a post about that last Lent). An alternative way to look at them was that they are all rather dull and hard work - how could a real life full of these virtues be anything other than worthy and unpleasant?As I discovered last Lent, however, choosing to think about the good things, and choosing to live with sacrificial virtues rather than 'a bit of fun', turns out to be neither twee nor bleak. It turns out to be the best way to actually go on living and loving and thriving and growing. Drat. Teenaged cynicism is given its final death-blow. Life is fun and God is good! How hard can that be, really?

Seven Years in France...

Seven years ago I was reeling. We'd taken a leap in the dark, accepting a contract for Ben which was so informal it was hardly written down, and we'd worked up to the last minute, trying to pack in between jobs. I'd tried to take a few French lessons but had very little success - the boys had more fun with a French woman who'd moved to our town, but I was paralysed by bad memories of school French lessons and could only rely on Ben, who'd spent holidays with French families as a teenager, and had continued with evening classes when the boys were tiny.

Seven years ago we'd spent one night in a French motel, inconveniently located far from our rented home, because I'd booked it over the internet and didn't really know where anything was around Toulouse.

Seven years ago we drove to our rental home, with no furniture and no fire lit. The boys played, Ben did something practical, and I huddled in the corner in a sleeping bag. I'd had a run of illness all autumn and winter, culminating in a recurring virus which kept me low for the whole of Christmas at Ben's parents' home.

Seven years ago I felt lost, helpless and incapable of analysing my own situation. I could only hope to press on.

Seven years ago we had breakfast in the motel and saw a French couronne de roi for the first time! We ate one again last night, to celebrate.

Seven years ago we drove out to the beautiful rental house which was so 'Ben and Flossie' that it infuenced our choice of home when we chose to buy out here.

Seven years ago we were welcomed by kind French motel staff and new neighbours.

Seven years ago the boys started free school, with free transport, before we'd even paid a cent of French tax.

Seven years ago I began to notice the weather, the seasons, the sky, in a way I'd never done before.

Seven years ago I began to break. I needed to break because I was too inflexible. The break took a few years and it hurt. It hurt me and it hurt other people as I tried to hold on to my inflexibility with ever-fiercer certainty.

But finally the break came to a point where I wasn't inflexible any more. I became open. I became, just a bit, softer.

Until I had broken, I couldn't take in more. Until I had broken, I couldn't become whole.

Something much more complete, much more real, is filling the gaps caused by that break.

This is a story you may recognise from your own point of view. From my viewpoint, as a Christian, all those years of singing this song now seem to finally be making sense;

Spirit of the living God,
Fall afresh on me.
Spirit of the living God,
Fall afresh on me.
Break me,
Melt me,
Mould me,
Fill me.
Spirit of the living God,
Fall afresh on me.