Today I am working on my last reflective service based around Brueggemann's take on the psalms.  The psalms of reorientation (or 'new orientation' in strict Brueggemann langauge, and to be fair there's a subtle difference in meaning) which are the group of psalms which express a 'transformed faith' in the light of real life experiences.  Now, Brueggemann makes no claims that his classifiaction is definitive or even necessarily correct, but it has been a helpful framework to work with. 

What intrigued me was a comment he makes in his discussion of the last group of psalms where he draws on the work of another scholar who makes a distinction between 'songs' which are personal and 'hymns' which are communal... songs use 'I' language and hymns use 'we' langauge.  This is a very different way of distinguishing between the two from what I've come across elsewhere.  More typically people say that hymns 'tell a story' or at least have a progression of ideas verse to verse, whereas songs express a single idea.  I have to confess my own way of sneaking things into services that people might be reluctant to sing is to call them 'songs' whatever they are (so Iona or Taize stuff in a SoF church and vice versa or MP in a 'Green Book ' church).

Irrespective of what they are called, we will be singing a variety of stuff on Sunday evening from a number of different 'stables' as we endeavour to re-orient ourselves towards God in a world where life contrives to dis-orientate us.  Unusually I'll give you the running order:

I watch the sunrise (3 hanky weepy)

The Lord is King (golden oldie) (can't find a you tube version of it being sung - check your oldest hymnbook!!)

Let us break bread together (world church)

Sing of the Lord's goodness (kinda 70's feel)

This week I am in awe of Angela who trained herself up to run a 6k race to raise money for research into prostate cancer and completed her run in 44 minutes.  Running is not something I can do - my ankles will not stand it and, since I was redesigned, even trotting across roads necessitates clinging to parts of my anatomy!!  What I can do, and love to do is walk.

As I have mentioned just a few times before, in September I am walking the Shine Glasgow half marathon to raise money for research into breast cancer (look there's a little button on the top right of my blog where you can sponsor me if you haven't yet done so!).  I have now decided it is high time my training moved on from general fitness and walking to a more focussed approach. 

Usually at this time of year I would be walking around 5 miles every evening as training for a long distance footpath.  When I hill walk with a big pack (or at least that should say 'hill walked with a big pack', I'm not allowed big packs anymore) I can average around 2.5 miles an hour including time for navigation and stops - that's deemed a good pace for hill walking.  By contrast, when I walk to work (mostly uphill!) my speed is more like 3 miles an hour without any real effort.  At peak fitness I can do about 4 miles an hour sustained ovr 2-3 hours.

For the Shine walk you had to guesstimate how long it would take, so I went for the longest slot (4-5 hours).  At peak fitness I reckon I could have aimed for 3.5 hours, but know I'm not going to be at that pace by September, plus I am walking with three other people who might not want to go at that speed.

So, my aim is to get to a little over 3 mph which would give me a target time of 4.25-4.5 hours.

Just need to up the walking a bit now, aiming to build speed not just stamina.  OK then - left, right, left, right...