A couple of things this weekend/week give me pause for thought.

Yesterday, unsurprisingly enough, despite what one American group predicted, wasn't the day of rapture.  This means that the world almost certainly won't end at the end of this year.  It's too easy either to make fun of Harold Camping and his followers or to criticise their selective and misguided reading of scripture.  Something about motes and logs comes to mind.  People gave their money, their time, their energy to this, and must now be feeling very bemused and bewildered.  Rather than our ridicule or scorn they deserve our compassion.

This week the Church of Scotland holds its Assembly which will include the end of a moratorium on discussing the ordination of openly and actively gay ministers.  It doesn't matter where on the spectrum one sits on this matter, the truth is that the C of S is caught bewteen a rock and a hard place with people threatening schism if they don't get their own way.  Not everyone can get their desired outcome, so some creative thinking is needed to avoid a further split in the Body of Christ.  A lot of the attention is centred on one C of S minister, Scott Rennie, whose appointment in 2009 caused great controversy at their Assembly that year.  People who express extreme views - either way - seem oblivious to the fact that this man, his partner, his former wife or his daughter are real people with real feelings, capable of being hurt, not just pawns in someone's theological argument.  Wherever we stand on the human sexuality issue, we do well to pray for Scott and those whose lives intertwine with his, in what must be a traumatic week, and for the C of S as it seeks to discern God's way, not it's own, in moving forward.  Again, words come to mind: judge not, lest you be judged.

If, as the New Testament epistles tell us, the Church (that is, the global community of believers in Jesus) is the Body of Christ, then the fact that these parts are wounded should cause us to remember that if one part suffers the whole suffers.  Someone may respond that elsewhere we are told to amputate the part of the body that causes us to sin, but I would counter that with the words that only the sinless one has permission to cast the first stone, and seems to choose otherwise.

Whatever we may think about either of these topics, we do well to recall our own shortcomings of discipleship and to try to live more humbly, hospitably and peaceably within this battered body of which we are part.

The last of our short series of sermons today brought together some ideas from Amos 5 and Romans 12.

From Amos the famous, 'I hate, I despise your religious feasts' and from Romans some examples of life in the Body of Christ, 'hate what is evil, cling to what is good.'

So if God says, or mioght say, 'I hate your Sunday services, I won't listen to your singing, not interested in your prayers, your drama, your music....' what might make God say 'I love it when...'?

I love it when you show hospitality... opening your doors and your hearts to people who might be very different from you and challenge you.

I love it when you are generous... not just giving to charity collections but sharing the abundance you enjoy

I love it when you show empathy... genuinely rejoicing in others' happiness and supporting them in dark palces without resorting to telling them how bad it was for you.

I love it when you live together peaceably and in harmony... not a wishy-washy evasion of difference or complex issues but an open-hearted learning to live with difference, to change and to be changed.

What does the Lord require of you, this only this, do justice, love mercy and walk humbly with your God (Micah).

In the end I enjoyed preparing the series, even though it felt hard going at times.  Hopefully we have learn how fear, doubt and hate can, if rightly understood and exercised, be an authentic part of discipleship lived out in faith, hope and love.

Next week some word games for rogation Sunday as I use the title 'beating bounds'.

For most of my life I have thought my name was unique, at least in a UK context.  The arrival of the internet, and with it search engines led me to discover there was someone with the same name living in Australia.  She was (is?) a lawyer (she seems to have disappeared off the radar of Google).  Doing some half-hearted family tree research a couple of years back I found there was one in the north of England born around 40 years after me.  Now I discover there is another one in Glasgow!

The one on Facebook is not me but she quite possibly does live in Glasgow.  Either that or there's yet another one!

Anyway, the others don't have the same number of middle names as me, and just for the record, I'm the definitive version! At least according to me.

So, three days away for one day of conference.

BUGB Women in Ministry (WiM) was fun.  Some long term friends and some new faces.  Some input from Pat Took (currently BUGB President) and some spcae for personal reflection and prayer.  A happy day.

Stayed overnight with two different friends either side of the event, which gave it a bit of a holiday feel.  Great to catch up and laugh together.

A very long train journey back... my cheap tickets (even without the saving I made by cunning booking) meant a circuitous route on the return journey via Edinburgh, taking seven hours from Birmingham on top of the four I'd already done by them... the down journey took a mere five.  Ah well. 

Very glad I went, and equally glad to be back home.

A special hello to those who disclosed themselves as readers of this twaddle, epsecially the Scot settling in North London and the member of SCBA Min Rec.

Not me, the endowment policy I took out 24 years and 11 months ago when I bought my first house, a two-bed mid-terrace (what is nowadays termed a town house!) just outside Derby for the sum of £18,995.  Hard to believe such house prices exsited, but back then they did; back then it was (just) possible for a single female graduate engineer to get a foot onto the base of the property ladder.  Had I stayed in Derby, had I stayed in that house, next month I would have owned it outright.  A strange thought!  Back then 25 years seemed forever and 48, well, old.

Since I took out that policy there has been all the hooha about endowments, about how they couldn't meet their targets.  Since then I moved, bought and sold another house (bought at £31,500, sold eleven years later at £40,500 having spent more than 10k on improving it in the meantime...) and now live, by the grace of God, in a beautiful manse, the price of which I am embarrassed to contemplate.  In between I paid mortgage interest at about 18% - how many people have long forgotten that - and seen house prices rise and fall.  A lot has happenned indeed.

What struck me though, was the final valuation I've been given... it would have comfortably covered my original mortgage, not with huge profits, but with enough to have a holiday or buy a new suite of furniture of somesuch.  I was not wrongly sold a bad policy.  Despite the fact that investments can go down and well as up, it always remained 'on target'.  I am glad I retained this endowment, even though during the living by faith years of college it was hard to find the monthly premium.  Glad not just because it means I have some money to reinvest for the future but glad because it vindicates the decision I took all those years ago as a far more naive person, just setting out into adulthood and being the first person in her family to own property, so without the experience of parents to draw on.  Glad, too, because it shows that what I was told all those years ago was right - investments go up and down, interest rates go up and down, but with a long term investment things even out.

Scottish Equitable, the company with whom I had the policy no longer exists, having been taken over last year, but there's a nice kind of irony in that company name... who'd have guessed 25 years ago the girl buying her first house in the English midlands would see the policy mature as somone living in Scotland?

By the way, if anyone now thinks I'm wealthy, think again; I'm definitely not worth marrying or bumping off for my money!!