This time last year, our 'team' in Camden consisted of Somer, Me, and the girls. We were sitting on the floor, eating meals off our suitcases, and feeling very much alone.
Tonight, one year on, eight of us gathered in our home to worship God. Two more couples - one English, one American - and a young Englishman joined us. We have been in the middle of planning the course of our ministry here in Camden, and making time to worship Jesus was a natural extension of that. We were asked to prepare for the meetings by reading through the book of Acts, and I noticed just h
ow many times the message of the early church focussed on the resurrection of Jesus. "Jesus is Risen" is the main cry of his people - one that still shapes all of life for us.
Saw a really great film given to me by one of my friends who lives in Romania. I don't even know what it's called - it was a documentary of Jacques Derrida. This American film crew basically followed Derrida around for a bit, filming lectures, a visit to Mandela's prison cell, and a surprisingly large number of meals (Derrida eats toast with butter and jam, microwaved eggplant, prawn crisps with champaign, and some other random things).
Anyway, the great bit was when the director asks him to talk about love. First he rants about how that's not a question, he can't possibly say anything about love, and that they should think of a question to ask him. But then he says this (I'm paraphrasing):
The question, when you love someone, is 'Do you love them as a person, or do you love something about them?' Because if you love them as a person, as a singular entity, then that love is permanent, whereas when you love them for something - this is much more temporary. The question is, do you love someone or something? And then he says that the reason most people stop loving someone is because they have loved something about that person, and that thing has changed.
I shared these thoughts today with some guys at a breakfast down in Waterloo, and then told the story of Hosea from the Bible. God asks Hosea to marry a prostitute, and after she runs off, God tells Hosea to buy her back again. Then God says "This is how I love my people".
Somer's birthday was yesterday. Last year, we spent her birthday moving to London from the States, so I wanted to give her a better day this year. We did the usual family stuff - girls and I made breakfast, we opened presents in the afternoon after the girls got home from school (oh yeah, it was also the first day of school yesterday), and we went to dinner at a BBQ restaurant. But what Somer didn't know was that I had also arranged to have our friends waiting in our flat when we got home! The good old surprise party.
It went really well - I only had to lie to her once all day (I got a phone call from the bakery that made her gourmet cupcakes, asking when I was coming to pick them up). The last person left at quarter past midnight - quite a party for someone who doesn't like to stay up late.
Last Thursday one of my journalist friends invited me on a guided tour of the pubs of Fleet Street. Her boss, the editor of a popular weekly magazine, was taking a group from pub to pub, telling stories of journalistic feats from days gone by. Fleet Street, if you don't know, was home to many British newspapers until very recently.
We stopped at one pub in the shadow of St. Bride's church, the location of the first printing press in Britain back in 1500. It's known as the journalists' church, and interestingly enough, is also the church where the parents of America's first European-born child were wed, in 1587.
Some of our discussion centered around the fact that Fleet Street grew up where it did (just outside the western gates of the old city of London) because of the concentration of religious establishments in that location. When mass printing first came to England, the main users of the printing press were monks, printing material for priests and other religious scholars. Over the years, newspapers sprang up around the same location, making use of the monks' technology and the proximity of the king's revenue service, which had to stamp each piece of printed material.
ow many times the message of the early church focussed on the resurrection of Jesus. "Jesus is Risen" is the main cry of his people - one that still shapes all of life for us.
