‘What is the most loving thing to do right now?’ This was the question I left my church with last Sunday. We were exploring 1 Corinthians 13, Paul’s famous chapter on love, in which there are 15 verbs about love…that love is something we do, not just something we feel. Often that space for action, to do, is very small, as we find ourselves reacting to things that happen to us. It is into this small space that I suggested we could try to wedge this question, what is the most living thing to do right now? It was Victor Frankl the Viennese Psychotherapist and Auschwitz survivor who famously said “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” Frankl believed that the choice to love, painful or as difficult as that maybe, is what leads to growth and freedom. And as I heard someone say just this morning, love begins when convenience ends. We usually know we love s
When I go to the hills, along with my rucksack full of the usual, I often take with me something I'm mulling over...the hills are a good place to mull. It could be a decision, a project, a passage from the bible, a new idea I'd just come across, or as in the case today something I'd been reading recently that had rocked me back on my heels. A FB pal Graham (we are yet to actually meet!) had kindly sent me a wonderful book for Christmas: Backpacking with the Saints . I had just been challenged yesterday to give myself to Joy in the full awareness of all the unrealised joys in my life. To embrace felicity (bliss) despite a world of endlessly unmet needs. The author is referencing Thomas Traherne an Anglican priest, mystic and poet from the 1600's who had a very intense spirituality and an amazing way with words. He believed that God himself recklessly participated in unfulfilled desires and that in the Cross He assumes the pain of all our thwarted hopes and