Blue and blurred

Depression and the church's fuzzy approach.

How do we work together to overcome blurred thinking?

I am not pretending to have any answers but wondered if this is something that the church needs to start tackling more pro-actively - not curing, not sorting, not fixing but by listening, by taking seriously and by engaging intelligently with the depression that grips many of the people in our congregations and increasingly clergy themselves too.

According to the World Health Organization, over 121 million people on this planet have struggled with a depressive disorder. As many as 850,000 people worldwide commit suicide each year. We were all struck by the suicide of Gary Speed which had friends and colleagues aghast at how this could have occurred with Gary having only given an interview a few hours before in which he seemed to be on top-form and making plans for the future. That is what the radio broadcasts explored that I listened to as the news broke. Many people in the public eye suffer from depression: actresses Vivien Leigh, Kristy McNichol and Linda Hamilton, and comedians Ben Stiller and Stephen Fry who is very open about suffering from bi-polar. Marilyn Monroe is thought to have struggled with this disorder too.

According to a Grove booklet: Ebook version: P 123 Suicide and the Church: A Pastoral Theology,  someone commits suicide in the UK every 85 minutes and men are less likely than women to give any indications of struggles beforehand, alerting people to their condition. 

Carrie Grant spoke very powerfully about postnatal depression at New Wine last year and so charismatic expressions of church are recovering a sense of the need to engage with these issues.

David Parker also preached about depression last year in the morning sessions.

I have been wondering of late how our churches tackle depression and particularly how charismatic theology engages with depression. Where it is triumphalistic it can damage, where it engages in spiritual warfare approaches to depression, it can also do damage.

I posted a quote from a preacher on facebook without accrediting it to the person who said it, to protect him (perhaps an error to have not set more of a context.) It was interesting to see responses flood in. I anticipated that this might have been the case. I am open about being a charismatic and so I suspected that people would think it was my own reflection that I was posting.

The preacher said:

"I have had many opportunities to get depressed - I just do not take them."

The congregation seemed to cheer in response to the preacher's claim. This is just that kind of triumphalism that can lead many in our churches to abandon church, suspecting that within it there is no room for them. Mike Parsons in the book linked to earlier says,

'Our desire to share the joy of our Easter faith, the joy of resurrection life, can lead us to a false and 'ersatz' spirituality... Most of our congregations can tell us this is wrong, viscerally, deep in their bodies, but in so many cases we have never allowed the darkness to be expressed and owned. Rejoicing in resurrection hope is great; but we have to go through both Friday and Saturday before Sunday comes. Sometimes we need to say, ‘It’s Saturday—just let us stay there a bit to realize how it really feels.’ Then maybe we have some insight ...'


There are many types of depression. The most common is clinical depression but there are many others, postpartum depression, holiday depression, reactive depression, manic depression, and many others.


A few weeks ago, I hit rock-bottom, prompted by something and nothing. It obviously triggered other stuff. I took my feelings to a friend and spent an afternoon with head in hands on a bench and then needed to talk issues through for a few days with who ever would listen really. We all tackle depression differently and maybe this was not depression, it passed rather quickly. Depression can take a range of forms. As church, we need to keep talking about depression, working through the biblical models that are helpful and being careful where the wrong application of biblical models can be damaging.

Parsons says churches that cope better with depression are those that are

• genuinely inclusive and is very careful about the use of the word ‘family’ in its worship and publicity.
• work hard at involving single people of all ages.
• own and acknowledge brokenness and failure in its members as well as deliverance and new life.
• teach a doctrine of hope that recognizes that the kingdom is both ‘now’ and ‘not yet.’
• take Holy Saturday seriously and that can carry the Christ light for others when they need it.
• will weep, and in its worship, be a church that has learnt how to lament as well as to praise.

Some books that might be helpful are:
Life on the dark side of the cross: supporting depressed people

A series of articles from a blog on the subject ( I do not endorse it all). Some of it might prove helpful. 

Other helpful books:

Ebook version: P 125 Understanding Self-harm: A Biblical Model for Encouraging Recovery

Ebook version: P 123 Suicide and the Church: A Pastoral Theology

Ebook version: P 120 Ministry Burnout 

Papyrus is an organisation that educates about youth suicide.

Vicarette

Vicarette being one of the names I have been known to answer to

From The Telegraph

I am reading through a 48 page document in preparation for tomorrow's 'Annual Meeting of Women Clergy in the Diocese.' We will discuss ideas, concerns and issues pertinent to women clergy working in the diocese. The title – The Challenge of Mary and Martha – will enable us to consider the balance between life and work.

The document I am reading is the result of a meeting on 19 September 2011 which saw sixty members of the Church of England attend a conference at Lambeth Palace entitled ‘Transformations – Theology and Experience of Women’s Ministry’. Issues discussed pertained to the experiences of women’s ordained ministry in the context of the current consideration to appoint women to the episcopate. The suspicion was that discussions would highlight the nature of the 'inherited model of ordained ministry' and how and whether this could be changed. The attendees were hoping to explore and challenge the church's increasing tendency to adopt 'bureaucratic processes' and 'inappropriate business models' at the cost of 'engaging prayerfully both with God and with God’s people'.

It was interesting to read the contribution of the bishop of El Camino Real, California, in particular. She reflected on her diocese's part in the Continuing Indaba Process, in which I am involved. She talked about how there has to be an 'honest sharing of views on scripture, on theology and ethics.' Their triad is with the Diocese of Gloucester and the Diocese of Western Tanganyika. She talks about how their efforts with one another involved not trying to 'convert the other to our point of view' and the importance of  'being honest.' She describes being 'honest about who I am, how I read the text and how my theological values work and what’s really happening in my diocese.'

She does a lot to unpack issues of power and authority and I am really grateful for this. One of my hot-topics is authority and power. At the clergy conference, during a debate about the atonement in which about fifteen of us were involved...more on that later, I was bold enough to challenge one colleague's description of serving the needy. I know that this is often what the gospel is reduced to and we have the servant-king who came to serve and not be served but for those of us who are not Jesus, there can never be that complete emptying of self and giving to another - such a kenosis is not ours to be had, neither is our ministry ever totally incarnational as Jesus' was and both of these terms can be misapplied and should be reserved for the second person of the trinity alone. 

As soon as I am to be server to the served, aid to the suffering, I am aware of the balance of power and its precariousness. Even in our churches (our!) we need to be careful not to perpetuate an atmosphere of host and guest. The welcome extended is important, of course, but not if it also creates an imbalance of power - the church does not belong to us and it is not ours to open and close at will. This does, of course, mean that any teaching about 'welcome' needs to be carefully navigated. 

People are increasingly rejecting the 'help' that the church wants to give and so we have to be offering something else. There are so many alternatives that people are turning to and they are investing less confidence in inherited models of care-giving and they are less inclined to see clergy people as authoritative or even able to help. The Rt Rev Mary Gray-Reeves talks about how, 'If we talk about mutuality and servant-hood, that changes the conversation and it honours that the person who may need something from you also has something to offer you. And that changes how it works.'

This seems to have been something that she developed more keenly through the Indaba Process. Mary Gray-Reeves describes how people commented on her Indaba triad, noticing,

'There’s something extraordinarily close about you all, in your partnership.' She explained that 'That’s because we argued for the first four months. And it’s true because we told the truth to each other and we had to find our space of negotiation.'  

Relational power is what it is all about. 

I had an interesting time at the recent conference meeting someone who only knew me through this blog and had read my first few struggles through the women's ministry debate, through which, amongst other things, God called me. I explained how we are all on a journey and how many of those conservative evangelicals with whom I had wrestled theologically, or perhaps the straw man versions I created as my Pipers and Carsons and Jensons and more local characters all morphed into each other and I wrestled against a polarised version, had become my friends and theological dialogue partners, how really I had very much more in common with them than my liberal Anglo-Catholic friends but that existing in some inbetween place is often strange, holding to many of the same ideas as other evangelicals but all with rather a post-modern and progressive twist, which sees women leading just as much as men but with models of authority that bear little semblance to the inherited models of leading church that belongs to many of those leaders a couple of generations above me. 

Through blogging and dialogueing I learn too, like Gray-Reeves that 'The only non-negotiable thing is that we have a relationship.' I shook hands warmly with the man who only knew me because of my blog, who does not believe that women should be bishops. He extended his hand first. I am unsure as to whether he came up for communion as I took my place with the cup at the front of worship and administered it. It had been consecrated by a male bishop and so perhaps for he did, but I missed it. In the future, perhaps he will not. He was there with us at conference and that is a good thing. 

I will take another of Bishop Mary's sentences into my next and final Indaba meeting which will occur in Mumbai in January 2012. She describes how a Sufi poet expresses 'Beyond the field of right-doing and beyond the field of wrong-doing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.' This is good. I found the last Indaba process conversation quite exhausting. In a way, I have been practising this kind of dialogueing for quite a few years in an intense way now and so my spiritual and emotional exhaustion came as a surprise to me. Through the blog, particularly in its early years (that's only a while back really - 2008) I have been practising this. I am glad that what I practised there and made mistakes over and grew from can inform other aspects of my involvement in mission and ministry now. I like the way that Gray-Reeves engages with a kind of 'joined-up thinking' as tools that she has developed in parish-life equip her for Indaba and for the Women Bishops debate and each in turn informs the other. None of this stuff is wasted. 

Mary believes that legislating procedures is a last measure, one to be avoided and in some ways I think that she is right - we are right back to that bureaucratising and to those 'inappropriate business models.' In many ways there has to be another way, however idealistic that might sound. 

Grace was interesting at the Clergy conference as a woman led to ask God to bless the food and addressed God as both mother and father. In the papers that I am reading, as I prepare for tomorrow, I see that there is a discussion about our shared liturgy and how even as early as 1994, it was said by the  Liturgical Commission:

‘that God may be addressed in prayer in a variety of ways and that authors should be encouraged to incorporate a wide range of metaphors, especially those drawn from Scripture, in the forms of address of the prayers.’ 

Common worship does not seem to have done justice to this.

There were several discussion groups and Rosemary Lain-Priestly's discussion group decided that a national database should record the patterns of ministry that have proved successful for women so that good practice on flexible working and a helpline could be made available. She does much to highlight the transfer of giftings between motherhood and priesthood and calls for the further recognition of this. I need to work out for myself whether my husband giving up work to stay at home is because my vocation is unmanageable without this, whether it is what works for us - we have never both worked whilst bringing up the children, but delegated the role to one of us and whether it also has much to do with his disillusionment and desire for a break from the business world in which he spent many years and became rather dejected, even if he was well-paid. I suspect that it has very little to do with the former and more to do with the latter two.

Lain-Priestly's aim, despite the word incarnational, which has issues, is to demonstrate

 a different way of being that is about fullness of life and not exhaustion, that demonstrates attentiveness and stillness - that is more Mary than Martha. But at the same time we want to authenticate the messiness of women’s lives, in celebrating an incarnational theology that really values the godliness of Martha’s ministry.

As the Archbishop's words close the report, he responds to 'meaning-making' with something which I think is at work in the Indaba process. This also makes sense of my journey displayed through this blog, despite my first rallying against those voices I did not agree with as this blog got launched, I learnt and learn that we have to keep listening to each other, inviting each other to sit at the table (conscious of power there). The Archbishop describes how in interpreting scripture we need to think about who is there and who is not there, which is again, why I am glad to have shaken hands with that particular priest at the clergy conference, conspicuous in his presence in contrast to his absenting like-minded colleagues - good for him. 

Biblical literacy is not just functional literacy. It’s a matter of being alert to the fullest range of meanings that those words possess. And if you're going to be alert to the fullest range of meanings you have to have the fullest range of readers. So a group whose readership is restricted is actually not going to be a fully literate group. So I just want to make that connection in response to the double point about literacy. And so that needs to go back to the bishops as a question about their biblical literacy. You have to ask at some point “Who’s not here?” before you know how far you're reading adequately or intelligently.

I enjoyed the humility with which he closed the document and his simultaneous shooting of two myths out the water - very clever:

...in my reading of the Bible, my partial reading of the Bible, my partly illiterate reading of the Bible, I don’t read in the New Testament either a rights discourse or a complementarity discourse. So what is going on?  ...in arguing for and working for the full inclusion of women in the ordained ministry of the church, what we’re after is not simply justice, though that’s not exactly insignificant, but we are after the humanising of the ordained ministry and all that that might mean in terms of mission and the health of Christ’s body.

Looking forward to tomorrow!

Update: 

What I learnt and appreciate

That we have a progressive diocese, engaging generously but intelligently with the issues.

The candidness of women sharing their struggles and their joys.

The sense of perspective given by someone offering that our struggles are the struggles of all those juggling the demands of life.

What I think we need to do better:
We were all women apart from two male bishops - if we are really talking about the humanising of the ordained ministry then we must invite men to these discussions too.

We must not think that women juggling these demands are pioneers causing the church to ask questions and working through solutions - men can pioneer this alternative servant-hood too - being fully present fathers and husbands and clergy people and working that one through in community. There will be clergy men whose wives have high-powered careers and also pick up much of the childcare - this is not a gendered issue.

We must continue to listen to those with whom we disagree.

Does the word 'discrimination' adequately convey what we are really talking about. I do not believe that it does, but I too am struggling to provide another word. Any suggestions? I used to work with the language of two integrities but many people beyond the church are struggling to see that ideas of male headship or catholic representation of Christ are not simply discrimination. What language do we use to explain the struggle to a mystified secular Britain?

Get ready

The light is moving into the darkness

Watch this link here

Come and explore this advent at Cross Roads 10am Openwoodgate, Belper - a fresh Expression of church starting 27th November 2011

Branding

Jo branding the church - helps or hinders?


“I'm not really a churchy person although I do think Jesus was a good bloke." says Jo Brand. 

Okay - that's a start, I suppose. 

It all reminds her of her childhood in a small Kent village. Billy Graham recovered latent and dormant faith for people in the 1970s. We could be onto something here. 

She describes how there are many people who are not regular churchgoers but who get along to a traditional Christmas service. So this is certainly a time for seed-planting and subtle ish evangelism.


...so the church of England website is using Jo Brand to promote its new Find a Christmas Service site. 

Emm - to what extent do we use the kudos of celebrity to promote the church? 

Perhaps we do. We are to speak creatively into contemporary life and engage with it rather than ignore it. 

I wonder if her backing helps the cause.


I am interested in how at times we borrow from the world for the sake of the Kingdom, so that as our churches begin to strive for excellence and quality and even a little glamour, we might do so to point people to the only excellence that will ever really be found - along the difficult road to discipleship and amongst the struggles and sharings of humanity, with eyes fixed on an otherness and a sense of completeness that can only be found in God.

Pete Ward in Gods Behaving Badly: Media, religion and celebrity culture, describes how we judge and we adore and I wonder if when we exalt and glory in celeb life, our fascination reveals that we are searching out the grandest, gospel meta-narrative, one that we have lost and need to recover. 

As I read Ward I spin off with my own thoughts. We are choosing insecure gods and creating gods out of ourselves rather than locating ourselves in a grander and much more excellent narrative. Ward looks at our obsession with Michael Jackson in chapter one and the hysterical reactions to the death of Diana.

I once articulated an idea for what happened at the cross using Jade Goody and how in some ways she served to tell us about something else entirely. You will remember this young woman counted as nothing and reviled due to her behaviour on Big Brother. She suffered a horrible death through cervical cancer at 27 years old and invited the world to watch her decline. Through it being photographed, she would be able to provide financially for her children. She also attained a kind of glory in her dying, giving life to others as many young women were drawn to her and inspired by her openness to go for tests for cervical cancer so they might secure life and be released from potential death. 

God rebuked us all I think for our judgmentalism; our voyerism but then transformed all that sin by revealing it in Jade and bringing it to a new life as we watched her exaltation through the courageous and life-giving way she dealt with her own imminent death.


...so perhaps celeb life can point to and away from the gospel and perhaps at times quite literally as Jo Brand describes how she will do church this Christmas.

What do you think?

Small groups and how? and for whom?

Diving in to something new

How do you feel about gendered Bible study/fellowship/prayer groups? I tend to shy away from such groups, however, Aune (2008, 283) describes how, 'Evangelicalism will retain traditional women but is under threat because of the decline of women's domestic and family roles and the increasing diversity of women's lives.' It would seem that whilst some women are adhering to Brown's (2001, 228) nineteenth century archetypal, pietistic Christian housewife and mother, there is a call for a re-articulation for what it means to be a 21st century Christian woman. The church must demonstrate how the Bible can speak into the post-modern situation, without requiring women to return to the nineteenth century vision of the home-making mother and wife, still propagated by some forms of conservative evangelicalism, as they perhaps react to a secularisation associated with the feminism influencing society since the 1960s.

Does the shifting nature of female identity in part legitimate women meeting together to be discipled as women work out this shift together? Is it being too idealistic to think that evangelical men and women can work this out together in a shared group?

...and anyway, are female stereo-types still constraining women?

Is it perhaps that the wife/mother role is a choice?

When is it not a choice?

How many are there of us, like me, who are now not running children back and forth to school, organising dance classes for daughters and cooking the meals but are instead married to a man who has taken on these responsibilities for the main part?

Brown, (2001, 68) describes how 'piety was constructed as an intrinsically feminine quality to be expressed in female duty, biology, dress and recreation, and femininity was enshrouded in a pious respectability but Mary Daly (1971, 351) describes how:

...we have moved into a prefigurative culture, where one can't look to the past for a model of what one will be. Technology has really put the future into our hands...as a part of this rejection of the stereotypes of the "eternal feminine," women will challenge men to liberate themselves from the "eternal masculine."

Is our 'liberation' good for men in challenging them to re-imagine themselves? Can they do this better
together too or do separate gender groups challenge rather than create opportunities for a successful working out of these things? Do we all need to be working this out together?

Last week, in discussions about starting up a small group with a couple who came to dinner, a group that would be mainly for exhausted church leaders, we were able to talk about the constraints on both men and women as they work out their identities within a Christian framework.

Brown (2001, 228) believes that 'since the 1960s, the loss of the pious femininity in Christian discourse in Britain has left something of a vacuum.' Since the 1980s, he has observed the appearance of 'masculinity expressed as militancy' and 'a greater expression of male religiosity' becoming 'something of a trend'. McCloughry (1992, 249) calls for men to explore a 'plurality of masculinities' which might counteract the narrowness of a spiritual male shape advocated by pastors like Mark Driscoll and John Eldredge. In 'Untamed: Reactivating a Missional Form of Discipleship, A & D Hirsch (42) wonder about Driscoll's attempt to 'make him [Jesus] appeal to "real men"' and they analyse a sermon in which Driscoll argues 'the men created in his [Jesus'] image are not sissified church boys; they are aggressive, assertive, and nonverbal.' In Wild at Heart (2006, 11) , Eldredge identifies “God ordained... stages of masculine development [that pass from] Boyhood to Cowboy to Warrior to Lover to King to Sage.' 

Emmm - not so sure about such stages... not in the men I have in my life. Interestingly it would seem however that in practice the experience of small groups of youth working out their identity in Jesus sees coffee-out working for young women in a way that it doesn't for young men, who are better engaging in discussion whilst being more active, e.g. whilst playing sport, hiking etc. There are exceptions, of course. 

And Content?

Can a Christian community become an appropriate place to explore our gender, in terms of our sanctification towards a Christ-likeness, which in itself transcends and yet does not negate gender? We surely have to be careful here too though with what we do and the characters we might inadvertently imitate. Pete Ward's (2011, 129) critique of our tendency to imitate, (celebrity culture most recently), describes the 'theology' of celebrity culture operating only at 'the level of representation,' giving us a glimpse of 'the future of religion in contemporary culture, both for ill and for good,' (2011, 132). He prompts a critique of discipleship programs which site Jesus and other biblical characters as only representations of what we might become if we were only obedient. Groups should call people to develop a relationship with Jesus and with one another, neither setting up ministry leaders whom others might objectify and measure themselves against, nor presenting the gospel as simply a series of propositions or models for life, but as the way through which an invitation into the life of the triune God might be experienced.

Other reasons for small groups

Appleton and Taylor describe how when people are nurtured in smaller groups a process of discipleship can begin. Warren (1995:327) says:

Our church must always be growing larger and smaller at the same time...Small affinity groups...are perfect for creating a sense of intimacy and close fellowship. It's there that everybody knows your name. When you are absent, people notice.

Small groups also counteract today's isolationism so that hospitality becomes something quite profound. Hospitality must be recovered, according to Roxburgh & Romanuk (156-158) because it is a sign of an eschatologically-orientated community, offering a very different way of life to the one that characterises the world. Its importance can not be too heavily stressed. Community making-meaning together is lacking in the post-modern social milieu in which social cohesion is threatened by individualisation and suspicion. One helpful definition of the post-modern condition describes its effects:

...a liberation into plurality (from provincialism), relativity (from absolutism), and difference (from the old frozen authorities). At the same time it describes the void and anxiety we experience when our very selves are dispersed, bureaucratised, isolated, and rendered autonomous. (Farley, 1996, 45) 

Do small groups help perpetuate that equality and sharing of giftings that characterised New Testament communities? Banks (1994:148) reminds us, 'Paul’s communities were... theocratic in structure. Because God gave to each individual within the community some contribution for its welfare... Everyone participates...'

How would it be to meet together as leaders for worship, prayer and refreshment?
There would be less need for that translation of the gospel for seekers?
Hospitality would be shared.
Leaders leading leaders could be avoided with a waiting on God approach and a not having an agenda? Both genders would attend of various ages and experience.

We will see...

Appleton, B. & Taylor, S., (2010). Closing the Back Door of the Church. Cambridge: Grove.

Aune, K., (2008), 'Evangelical Christianity and Women's Changing Lives,' European Journal of Women's Studies, 15:3, pp.277-294.

Banks, R.J. (1980). Paul's idea of community : the early house Churches in their historical setting. GR: Eerdmans. 

Brown, C.G. (2001). The death of Christian Britain: understanding secularisation 1800-2000. London; New York: Routledge.

Farley E., (1996). Deep Symbols: Their Postmodern Effacement and Reclamation. Valley Forge,

USA: Trinity Pres

Hirsch, A & D, (2010). Untamed: Reactivating a Missional Form of Discipleship. Grand Rapids: Baker Books.

Princeton Theological Seminary, (1971). 'The Church and Women: An Interview with Mary Daly ', Theology Today, 28: pp. 349 -354

Roxburgh A.J., and Romanuk F., (2006). The Missional Leader: Equipping Your Church to Reach a Changing World. San Francisco, California: Jossey-Bass.

Ward, P. (2011). Gods Behaving Badly, Media, Religion and Celebrity Culture. London: SCM

Rev it up.

Another brilliant episode of Rev last night, I thought.

Last week's episode prompted my husband's bold confession.

This week's episode made me realise how possibly completely annoying I am. I have been suspecting for quite a while that this is a possibility and I am trying to do something about it.

I can not play the piano but I do so have those 'let me colour-co-ordinate the vestry' tendencies. It was frightening.

Ministry requires this kind of 'hiding your light under a bushel thing,' which can come as a bit of a shock, pretending to be more stupid than you actually are, sending yourself up frequently and over-asserting an uncertainty about Jesus, the gospel and hearing from God than those more confident, charismatic, evangelical expressions of the faith have taught you.

Adam's vulnerability in the face of Abi's confidence was cleverly demonstrated and we can't help loving Adam. I am not sure how we felt about Abi and I am interested to know what you thought.

Did she fail to reveal vulnerability?
Did she think she knew better than her training incumbent?
She was a little self-unaware, yes?
She was idealistic - certainly, imagining her own competencies would not be a problem but would be encouraged.

The show seems to be very cleverly researched and accurate to life as we know it in the Church of England. It gave me lots to think about.

Yo-yo God

...just right now, I am thinking about all this stuff I do

...some of the impossibility of it, the schizophrenia of it.

There is this time of pouring out your praise, singing full-throttle, sensing the movement of the Spirit, the love coming down. There is prayer with arms resting on the person next to you, in a circle, like a human chain - the extemporary nature of it - the listening... seeing, hearing God's Spirit resting on the people around you, filling them, that feeling for yourself - the intimacy, closeness, certainty. ...so that was Thursday.

Then there is the pomp and circumstance, the ceremony and liturgy, the National Anthem, the bugle, the memories that are not actually mine but somehow are... the sense of precision, the fear of getting it wrong, the hope that the journey of others will be facilitated...comforted.

That was this morning.

and then this. This evening it has been quiet spaces, flickering candles, but I keep time, pace those silences and so I do not meet with God, I meet with time, with clock, with checking, with cues, with service details and atmosphere and that's okay...because other people do and they tell me so ... and that's nice, that's how it should be and I pack up and go home.

...and in some ways I am quite dizzy. I love it - all - I think... but I know where and how I meet with Him so maybe the answer is that my Thursdays resource my Sundays and so my Thursdays matter - Lord preserve my Thursdays.

Husband's confession prompted by Rev

On the fifth of November 2011, I received flowers, courtesy of good old M and S- colours and flowers significant on my wedding day.

"Oh babe!" I said. "Wow - look - the colours..."
The girls looked impressed too by their father's obvious charm and forethought and we began to prepare for friends arriving for fireworks and tea.

There were a few gentle reminders from my husband as to his extravagant and poignant deed throughout the afternoon.

Fast-forward one week later and I return late from DCC (small version PCC) to one very attentive husband who says I have missed 'Rev'. He has watched it but could easily watch it again with me and hastily applies cables to the back of the TV so that it will play through his laptop - no effort spared. I even get a cuppa without asking and we sit down together (rare!).

At the point where Adam finally admits that he is certainly no hero and it has all been a dreadful mistake, my husband says there is something he must tell me: the flowers never came from him. He had forgotten to reveal this in the busyness of the week. He is sorry .... and concerned that I must have a secret admirer.

....silent treatment for a while
.....and then at least a little longer to leave him wondering from whom they might really have been sent. I had already worked it out - no secret admirer but his very own sister.

...so thanks Rev - better late than never, this week's addition certainly added to the colour in my household!!

Going crazy like Jesus?

Meek and mild?

Don't think so!