The game is afoot! Time for action

Life is moving on apace and I’m not sure how well I am able to keep up. On Wednesday night we had an excellent Worship Committee in which we agreed some radical changes such as the children coming in at the end of the service rather than the beginning, the use of CDs (rather than organ, piano or guitar) to accompany some songs, and the first Sunday evening of the month being a service of prayer, music and contemplation in which we pray together for the life of the church. I left with a long list of things to do.

Last night we had an excellent Street Pastors training evening in which we talked about the place of prophecy in our work. Not the dramatic kind where we pin people down and proclaim, “The Lord says to you...”, but the simple nonthreatening kind where we pray for and expect to be able to say the right things and address the right questions, and where we are sensitive to words or images that the Spirit may nudge into our minds as we talk to people.

The subject that had kept nudging its way into my mind this last week has been setting up and getting used to my new MacBook. (So far, some of it is a joy to work with. Other bits are unfamiliar, and some bits just don’t work like they should. The jury is still out on whether the move away from Windows is a good thing.) I have tried to be disciplined in how much time I devote to this, but at the moment it’s hard mental work to bring my thoughts to bear on the really important stuff of life. Perhaps this morning’s power cut and the fact that our phone isn’t working is a gentle reminder not to depend too much on technology.

So, good things are happening, but my thoughts are wandering where they shouldn’t and my time is (or ought to be) committed to a wide range of backlog tasks, some of which are very important and increasingly urgent. I think the most important thing for me to do first of all is ‘sharpen the axe’. In other words, spend time in preparation. Help me, Lord, to devote the next hour at least, without distraction (either from without or from within - the latter being the more likely and the more disruptive) to achieving a firm grasp of what I need to do and when.

• Outcome: It took well over two hours and even then I don’t have everything as neatly sorted as I’d like, but at least I know what I ought to be spending my time on over the coming few days. Thanks, Lord.