Godliness and Cleanliness!

Every Sunday the car park at the former Dunn's Store on the Crumlin Road is full of people. There are so many cars it can be hard for people to get parked. It would be nice to think that this was because all these people were wanting top come to our church, which is situated just across the road but that is a mere pipe dream, they are at the weekly car boot sale. In that car park you find a veritable united nations of people, all enjoying the social occasion of buying and selling their wares.
if the Superstores of Britain and Ireland are the new cathedrals then this is one of its parish churches.

Rather than let this go unnoticed and without a Christian response we have decided to offer to pray for the needs of the people. We set up a table and make our ministry of intercessory prayer available to anyone, just for the asking. I usually go over after church to allow the person who is on duty, during church, to go home.

This morning I was watching as the people did their business and some merely ambled round looking and interacting with each other. I was amused by the reactions of a woman across on the opposite side as she watched a couple of Chinese have, what looked like, a bit of a row. It was impossible to tell as they were speaking in one of the 300 Chinese dialects, I guess! She smiled at me, as if to say, I wonder what they are arguing about. Every week the mess that is created after the market is appalling, as it remains like that until someone comes along to clean it up. I saw person after person throwing litter down and even tripping over cans and bottles and other bits and pieces without bothering to lift them. Later in the day I was talking to some young boys who were throwing their empty bottles onto the road and throwing bits of food at their mates in the park. That got me thinking about that old saying, "Cleanliness is next to Godliness" and wondered if that is true. On reflection I think it is not far from the mark. I say that because it is a reflection of an untidy thought pattern, it suggests that when I am finished with my rubbish all that is important is that I throw it away, out of my space and how it affects other people is no concern of mine.

Being tidy and thoughtful of other people will not mean, necessarily, that I am a godly person but it will mean that I have come to consider other people and that is a Godly consideration. It's not just a middle class thing but it is something worth teaching our children to be a value worth holding. None of us are individuals who need no one, no man is an island. We need each other and we have been created to be most satisfied and completed when we are living and working together, we are social beings and that means we will want to consider one another.

A Father's Thoughts

It’s just a week now since we said goodbye to Mark, our second son and third child. This week we will be saying goodbye to his elder brother, Peter. Sometimes it seems like life will never be the same again, that our family will never be together again. Sometimes I think that it would have been better for my sons and my daughter to have gone to work at 16 and found work at home. Sometimes I feel like God has taken them away from me but then I know that this is not so, I know that they were only ever given to us on loan. They never "belonged" to us and in doing what God wants them to do they will experience life in all its fullness. Sometimes I have this fear of ending up alone, like some of the elderly people I have visited over the years whose sons and daughters are in various parts of the world so that they have no family near them to look after them in their declining years.

A very long time ago I was out with my mum. It was in the days when the buses had no doors and the driver was at the opposite end of the bus. She placed me on the platform, while she got ready to get on herself only to be horrified at he sight of the b us moving before she had a foot on the platform. All I had for companionship was my panic. Thankfully this lasted only a moment as the conductor realized there was a problem and rang the bell to tell the driver to stop. I do not want to be in that position ever again!

In my more lucid moments I know that God will never leave us and He has blessed us with four great children, who are no longer children. Then I remember that God gave us His only Son, to die that we might live. In the last few weeks I have been given just a glimpse of what losing a son must be like, what giving a child for the benefit of others feels like. I have had the sorrow of burying the children of parents who never imagined, for a second, that they would outlive their children. We read the story in the Old Testament, of the sacrifice of Isaac wondering how he could do such a thing. The God we worship is a giving God who tells us that he will "love you with an everlasting love". I have been telling the congregation that this is God's default position and we should take great encouragement from that. We are told in the book of Hebrews that Abraham believed that God was going to raise his son from the dead as. God loves me and He loves you, the reader of this piece, with an everlasting love. Does that not warm your soul? You are loved! Now, I dare you, ignore Him, tell Him He can stick His love. On the other hand you could thank Him and ask Him to be your God for ever.