My good friend Diane has just passed her PhD so big congratulations are in order.

She was exploring a new way of looking at ageing and older people in our churches and the central thread is that 'old is beautiful'.  Challenging the myth of the body perfect and the quest for perpetual youth, she has become a champion for the older people in her church, and more widely for older people in all churches.  I wouldn't claim to understand half of what she's written, it's far too clever for me, but I am thrilled that she has passed and that her unique and precious contribution to Baptist (and wider Christian) life is recognised.

My post title echoes the Adrian Snell work of 1993 which explored issues around a child born with disability, a work which I recall as being quite significant in making me think through how we define beauty and worth, success and fulfilment.  Since then I have beocme aware of theologies of, and emerging from, disability.

My own experiences over the last few months have embodied questions and explorations of beauty, of worth, of meaning - something none of us ever thinks will happen to us.  Apart from discovering I actually looked good with no hair (not that I intend to repeat the experiment!) I learned first hand what it was to be stared at or avoided because I looked 'different'.  I have learned to love my scars, to embrace the brokenness and to understand more fully that beauty has little to do with physical perfection and everything to do with inner perception.  I think I am a little more appreciative of what I am able to do, a little more gentle in my expectations of myself, and far more conscious of the finitude and frailty of human life.  The flip side is I am less tolerant of trivia made large, grudge-bearing and feuding.  Life is beautiful and precious, not to be wasted in bitterness and ugly attitudes or actions.

I am contemplating calling myself Robyn for the next few weeks due to the effect the radiation is already having on part of my anatomy, but even in that thought is, I guess, a humour that accepts and embraces the changes that are occuring.

Learning to love ourselves, as we are, in our imperfections, that's part of what Diane is about in her ministry, and I rejoice that she is a Revd Dr.

One of the joys of Christian disicpleship has to be the diversity of opinion that exists among people who are all on what is, to use contemporary parlance, the same spiritual path.  Whilst there are core things that unite (though what they are and how they are understood is pretty diverse too) there is much where people of goodwill and in good conscience disagree wildly.  The ability to live with this diversity is part of what I love about the Gathering Place where all manner of views coexist without too many fall outs and without a wishy-washy laissez faire atmosphere.

Thus it is that this Saturday one friend of mine will be (presumably) inside Faslane as a naval chaplain, another minister and friend of the The Gathering Place (I know him, but not well enough to use the term 'friend') will be be outside it protesting.  Their views on things nuclear, their views on defence, their views on what it means to be a disciple of Christ will overlap and diverge many times but I have no doubt that each is called of God and is sincere and devout in his own discipleship.  I probably sit somewhere between the two, retaining a view in favour of the peaceful uses of atomic energy (and wishing people would stop confusing human error/arrogance with technological frailty) andhaving worked in defence (albeit primarily in terms of civilian worker and public safety). 

I recall at college meeting someone who had been at Greenham Common protesting when I was inside 'that place in Berkshire' trying to get the MoD to design a facility to meet safety standards.  This came up in the context of feminist theology, where she was waxing lyrical about the power of women tying bits of wool to barbed wire fences and I recalled the struggles of being taken seriously as a woman engineer in a male dominated world.

So, how do such tensions become creative rather than destructive?  My minister-friends and I hold disparate views on many things but endeavour to listen to, and learn from, one another.  Of course we all think we are right, but we try to do do graciously.  Sometimes we succeed, sometimes we fail.  Hopefully as 'iron sharpens iron' (as the Good Book says, somewhere) in the sharing, disagreeing debating, questioning and so forth we each grow and become more thoughtful and mature disciples of Christ.

Where will I be on Saturday?  In Glasgow listening to the findings of the Poverty Truth Commission.

God bless you both, A and S as you serve in the ways you believe you are called.