Well, fairly.  It was taken in September in a food court in Glasgow where I was supping a skinny (hopefully fairtrade) latte.  How long it will last until I change it again, who knows, but it is definitely the most apposite I've used thus far!

Roughly three and a half years ago I was invited to be a keynote speaker at a conference for newly accredited ministers, and told I could speak on anything I liked, so long as it was relevant to pastoral ministry.  At the time I was mulling over various thoughts about 'authenticity' and how that is played out within the role and responsibilties of pastoral ministry.

Circumstances meant that I had to withdraw from that confernece even before I had begun to prepare for it, and the invitation has never been repeated (which is perfectly fine, in case any of the organisers are reading this!)

Over the summer I made some progress on some empirical research exploring how ministers have managed the interface of 'public faith and private pain' which led in turn to the title of the paper I have to write for the international conference I will be attending next February - 'Public Faith and Private Pain: A Quest for Authenticity'.

Last evening I was involved in an innovative project where people bring photographs they consider to be significant in some way and use them as a jumping off point for a conversation.  More to follow on this in a few weeks time, but perhaps inevitably with the photos I chose, the question of authenticity emerged.

And so, three and half years on, or thereabouts, I have come full circle, kind of, and am considering the same topic with very different insights and resources.

Somewhere along the line, I derived a mental image for faith development and/or theological reflection that is a spiral staircase where the vertical axis is chronological time (tautologous but you get my drift).  As life passes you ascend (or descend I suppose, but in my head I go upwards; you can only go one way) the staircase, which may or may not be uniform in pitch or diameter (bet you wish you'd done A level tech drawing now!!) passing and repassing the same point but at a different level.  There is no sense that later is 'better'  or 'more mature' but it does have the potential to be 'richer' with more to mull over and new insights to take forwards.

Maybe it's a daft image, but it works for me, and helps me make sense of the cyclic and linear nature of life in all its fullness.

Having succombed to social media, I belong to a number of 'groups' relating to different areas of interest.

In one of them, someone asked for recommendations for books on 'Spiritual Warfare', which is a whole topic on its own.  But it was one of the replies that really got my goat.  Referring to a 'ministry' the respondent said:

"The basic premise is if there is something wrong the enemy has been allowed in due to sin and if we deal with the sin then the enemy cannot continue damaging people. They link certain illness or groups of illnesses to specific sins so it is easier to discover the sin and deal with it"

Really?  What a load of old codswallop, have they not read their Bibles recently?

Sure, the sinful nature of the whole human race has given rise to conditions whereby sickness arises, but the idea that my sin caused my cancer... or someone else's caused their depression, diabetes, chronic fatigue, etc, etc?  NO!  NO!  NO!

I am resisting the urge to explode in a reply to that post... at least here, in my online space I am free to say very clearly that the premise is utter rubbish!

So, I've now been back in harness for 16 days, and it has been pretty busy and very enjoyable.  None of it has been entirely 'routine' until this week, when normality is beginning to emerge afresh.  One of the things I am trying to do is to retore a greater sense of order and rhythm to my work patterns, which means being less reactive without becoming inflexible.

Way back when, I am led to believe, ministers spent the mornings in their studies reading, writing and beging holy.  Letters were written by church secretaries or even personal secretaries if the church was rich enough, and phone calls were likely to convey urgent news only.  In the afternoons they would visit their flock or, if myths are to be blieved, play golf.  There might be a midweek devotional meeting or an occasional Church or Deacons meeting of an evening.

We inhabit a very different world.  Emails arrive twenty four hours a day.  Answerphones or their digital equivalents allow constant access even we aren't physically there.  There is always something more that could be done, maybe should be done and it is too easy to slip and slide into a never ending morasse of more and more stuff.

So I am trying to be more disicplined.  I am mentally formulating a sort of timetable that will help protect me from my own worst excesses.  I have reduced some commitments from weekly to fortnightly.  I am investigating a more structured approach to some apsects of pastoral care.  I am needing to reinvent spaces for general reading as well as the specific, sermon-centred stuff.  I have always claimed a need for order, asserting that disorder is something I find stressful - one look at my desk and no-one believes that, but it is basically true.  I thrive best when I know where I am to be and what I am to be about, not in a legalistic, unbending way, but in an overall way.

This means that my current plan is that days will have definite focus, based on my priorities for ministry that week or that month, and within an overarching framework of what I am meant to be about.  This is, pretty much, a return to the pattern I sought to establish a decade back, and which got eroded as enthusiasm, workaholism and, more recently, long term effects of medical treatment overtook me.

It's not simply about working 'smarter' or more efficiently, it's about working sustainably and modelling something others might consider worthwhile.  It isn't easy - my enthusiasm outstrips my energy, my willingness exceeds my ability - but I am going to endeavour to live a more orderly life, which will mean that sometimes I actaully managed to string together the fourteenth and fifteenth letters of the alphabet into that difficult to utter word 'no'.

Sunday was our harvest thanksgiving service, and as part of the 'front end' I asked people what they knew about the work of Glasgow City Mission.  Even allowing for the fact that people are shy and reluctant to risk looking daft if the answer is factually incorrect, it struck me, quite forcibly, that I had probably assumed a far greater degree of knowledge than existed.  I didn't expect people to know everything the charity does but I assumed they would have an idea why we support tham at harvest.  Maybe they do, and were just not given the right opportunity to share.

A large chunk of my sermon was didactic - historical backgrounds to BMS and Operation Agri work in Sri Lanka and historical background on Glasgow City Mission.  It's not my 'normal' style of sermon, because it isn't exactly 'preaching' but it did strike me that maybe there is a greater place for 'didache' alongside 'kerygma' in adult worship than I tend to assume.  Way back I wrote an essay on kerygma and didache in child faith development, noting that what we offer children often tends to be 'learning about faith' rather than 'growing, or learning how to express, nascent faith'.  Maybe with adults I tend too far the other way.

Either way, I learned a lot about holy tenacity from reading the accounts of the pioneers who began work in Glasgow and Colombo, and more grist to the mill for my exploration of 'hope' that will weave through all of November.