The bishop and the pee

A couple of weeks ago, I fell over backwards - such is a hazard of Motor Neurone Disease. The initial shock was bad enough, I thought, but the after-effects (bruising, soreness and aches and pains) have been harder to shake off. The downer about it was that we were due to go to New Wine last week. That has been a high point in my spiritual year since I became ill and could no longer go camping. Jane, my wife, drives me to the cottage in Barton St David in Somerset and wheels me round the Bath and West Showground, which is where New Wine takes place.

Thanks to praying friends, in the event, last Monday, we made it to Shepton Mallet and have had a wonderful, if uncomfortable, time. I thought I'd reflect on some nuggets which have helped me. So I'll start with the Ugandan bishop. Bishop Zac Naringiye was wonderfully down to earth and passionate. He spent last Lent, I think, in a Kampala slum, which even for him was an severe education, and he told us about a young American woman who did the same. He told us her experience of drinking bottled water before she went to bed. She woke up in the night wanting to go to the loo. (He was graphic in his analysis of slum sanitation, and the failure to remedy it.) However, the doors were shut, the loo was outside - and she couldn't get there. I won't tell the whole story, partly because I was in fits of uncontrollable laughter - Bishop Zac is a class stand-up comedian - and partly because, if you want, you could get the whole talk (NEWB07411, from www.essentialchristian.com). The immediate point he was making was that she prayed desperately about "pee", and actually that was entirely appropriate because God is concerned about all aspects of our lives. And I thought, "Actually, I have prayed about just such earthy matters too." And I was relieved to have received a bishop's blessing for having done so.

The point for this blog, I think, is that there's nowhere that God is absent. We'll find him in the most improbable situations - confined to our homes or to a nursing home or hospice, even on our hospital beds or in our wheelchairs. I'm hoping that together we'll discover the truth of that amazing poem, Psalm 139:

Whither shall I go from thy spirit? or whither shall I flee from thy presence?   If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there: if I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there.

If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea;    Even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me.

If I say, Surely the darkness shall cover me; even the night shall be light about me.    Yea, the darkness hideth not from thee; but the night shineth as the day: the darkness and the light are both alike to thee.