Sometimes a blog is useful just as a space to dump stuff that is unprocessed or even trivial but is 'better out than in.'

It's been an odd week.  So far I driven about 450 miles, I have about another 250 tomorrow.  I have seen a lot of motorway, burned a lot of diesel and listened to a fair amount of Radio2 and Classic FM.  I have seen lots of people, some I know well, some I met for the first time, and have talked about all manner of things to do with church life and ministry.  At the time of typing I have just concluded a deacons' meeting that was blooming hard work.  As I closed the door and banged my head (gently) against the wall, I reflected that I'd almost prefer a 'bad' deacons meeting to a turgid one.  Sorry lovely deacon-type people, I know you are all tired and stressed and probably would rather have stayed home with a bottle of wine than signed umpteen legal documents and talked about all the things that are struggling due to lack of personnel.

The thing that has troubled me most today was the man who was killed in a queue in Sainsbury's.  I can't quite get my head around how two families went out to do their shopping, and now all their lives are irrevocably changed.  Clearly neither of them went out to pick a fight, and neither went out to kill or be killed.  Now one man lies in a mortuary and the other has been arrested for his killing.  I have a mental image of orange plastic carrier bags, dented tins, broken glass and spilled milk strewn across a shop floor as some kind of grotesque marker of what happened.  I find myself needing to pray for both families.  And I am left with an unanswerable question of how someone can go out to do their food shop and end up killing someone else.  This man's life, too, is in tatters, his dreams destroyed, his future redefined.  It's one of those situations that drives you to the psalms in search of words to express the questions to which you know you will not find answers.

I still haven't started on my essay re-write - it's scheduled to start on Saturday, so I hope for a good productive day.  So still not much posting for a while longer.  Whilst I can honestly say I haven't exactly missed posting, it is also good to know that this channel is here should I need somewhere to dump stuff.  It has also been good over the last few days to put faces to few more of you loyal readers and connect up a few more of the dots in this weird family of Baptists!