Yesterday I was out with the walking group, and was asked to lead communion on a hillside.  It was with some trepidation that agreed - many folk have precious memories of one of my predecessors doing so, what if I mucked it all up?

A lovely spot was chosen, just beyond the head of a reservoir near Dollar Glen.  A memorial cairn acted as a communion table, and my plastic picnic goblet and plate served as chalice and paten.  Around twenty of us gathered in a beautiful spot, broke bread, shared 'wine' and remembered the mystery of a God who would destroy death through death itself.

A special moment.  A couple of people commented they'd found it meaningful, one being especially struck by me tearing and scattering the left over bread for the birds.  As John 3:16 says 'God so loved the cosmos....' it is fitting that the birds are included in the remembering.

Photo (c) Ken Fisher

PS I'm grateful to the Gideon's for my 34 year old New Testament which was ideal size to fit my pocket!

Today is the start of Christian Aid week and so our morning worship connected with the material and theme for this year.  We used a couple of the DVD clips including the reflection with the wonderful singing 'Sing, sing like you've never sung, sing of the joy to come.'

One slight cheat was to plagiarise Anne Wilkinson-Hayes' BUGB Assembly use of Wind in the Willows (which had excited Millie Mole when she found there was a mole in the story) as a way in to thinking about how important water is. Beyond that it was largely my own thoughts linking Ezekiel's deepening, widening river; Revelation's river of life and Jesus' living water.

Revelation is a dream, a vision, a goal, the 'joy to come.'

Last weekend, Anne invited people to jump into the river of mission - which seems to suggest she was starting a mile down Ezekiel's river when she began. Ankle deep paddling, knee deep sloshing, waist deep wading and full flood swimming are all possible - where we are and what we do will vary.  Where are we now?

Jesus was thirsty, Christ is living water.  If the church is 'the body of Christ' how are we living water?  If the church consists of people who thirst - for justice, for spiritual refreshment, how do we drink of Christ?  If we meet Jesus in others, what does he need from us?

After the service and lunch was our church meeting during which lots of good things happened...

• we voted to register as a fairtrade church
• we agreed some experiments in all age worship, me going in to Sunday school and a whole church 'learning and worshipping' plan
• we learned about SOLAS 2010, a Scottish Christian arts festival, partnering with Greenbelt and Christian Aid, which we are invited to support too.

Coming home there was some sad news concerning one of our folk, and yet the words of the song speak into that too: the Revelation promise is now real, the joy has come, our sister, a runner, a hopsital DJ, a stalwart of friendship meetings, is safe home... sing, sing like you've never sung, sing of the joy to come.  JM RIP.

Life in all its fullness - endings and beginnings, old and new, grafting and pruning, reapoign and sowing - sing of the joy to come.

Finally I have reduced my reflective paper to within the word limit - indeed, I am even 43 words inside it.  Miracle of miracles.  Time for minor celebrations.

So, how was this done?  Not by shaprening arguments or choosing clever words but by radically editting from a 'journal' (personal variety) format to an essay with footnotes & references and by excising whole chunks of material.  It is now around 40% shorter than it began.

Whilst I completely understand why the academy needs word counts, personal reflective journals don't fit such a mandate... especially for waffle merchants like me.  There is something 'not right' that it has taken at least twice as long to edit the entries down to size as it did to write them in the first place.  I am far from convinced that the 60 plus hours this exercise has involved is justified for half of the submission for an undergraduate module.  This probably says far more about me than about the expectations of the course.

So, now 'all' that paper needs is for me to tidy up its referencing (hurrah for Endnote!) and then I can write the second, even shorter, essay...

Sometimes I think it must be nice to be a minimalist...

Mulling over bits from BUGB-BMS Assembly and recalling talking to someone who asked how things were going at my new church.

I commented that it was fun - a response deemed 'strange' by the questioner's spouse.

Strange that church would be fun?

Strange that a minister might find church fun?

I asked what would be a better answer - good, maybe, or going well.  They weren't sure, just thought 'fun' was odd.

Ah well, if a church that is fun is strange then I'm happy to be part of something strange.

One of the things that we were invited to do at the Assembly was fill in our church name on a card and swap it with someone we didn't know, committing to pray for one another's churches.  Our swap is to here a church that sounds very different from us.  It is good to pray for them, and know they are praying for us.  Meanwhile God is chortling so much as almost fall from the comfy cloud that forms a seat, being so amused by the Spirit's working and teasing of the church.

So, the votes have been cast.  For the umpteenth successive election I have voted for someone who was not elected, but at least I got to vote, which is perhaps as, if not more, important.  I'm not sure what to make of the events in some English cities where people were turned away after allegedly queuing for 'hours.'  It is easy to blame the returning officers, and maybe they did make errors of judgement.  At the same time if people chose to arrive at 21:30 then they knew, surely, there was some element of risk involved?

I'm always fascinated to watch the Sunderland dash.  Clearly a compact set of constituencies and a committed infrastructure set on a fast turn around.  Must be nice for the candidates to be away by midnight.  And how times have changed that we no longer have to wait for daylight to count in Northern Ireland or a week for ballot boxes to arrive from the outermost islands.

So, as the clearing up happens, as candidates fall into an exhausted sleep, as party leaders head to London to decide 'what next', we have a parliament in which no one has an overall majority.  Might people just begin to work together for the common good rather than squabbling?  Might we discover that a 'balanced' (nicer word than 'hung') parliament can be strong and effective?  Or will we be back at the polls in a few months to do it all again?  Only time will tell.

There is a temptation to see this as 'job done' and revert to life as usual, but actually the challenge is to continue to engage with the issues and be interested in the life of this nation.  My younger brother used to say that democracy was the freedom to choose our dictators.  Perhaps we need to grasp that, whilst we get the government we choose (within the constraints of the process we use), we don't then abdicate responsibility for influencing what it does.