FOFOF

FOFOF - not a misprint for BOGOF. It's an innovation we started on Friday with our friends, Pete and Jane. It stands for... No, first let me explain. We were having a meal together in the evening, and relaxing with Jane's (not my Jane) rather excellent cake and coffee. I'd said a bit about my sermon of the week before - they don't attend the same church as us. I'd been preaching about God the restorer and used the illustration of kintsukuroi. As someone said to me today, a picture speaks a thousand words. And this one did.

The point was fairly straightforward. It's like what God can do with the broken bits of our lives - if we'll let him. I found this rather apt quote from the website of the Japanese kintsukuroi artist, Hirasawa Hakusui, "Please feel richness and the tender-heartedness of the mind that oneself has in repairing the container by all means." I had pointed out that it wasn't talking about instant miracle cures but about painstaking bit-by-bit life-long restoration. The sad thing is that often we don't recognise the beauty in the finished product.

Anyway, going back to Friday (and kintsukuroi is sort of connected), a few weeks back we had determined to pray more regularly for other people. And so we compared notes - the conclusion of which, in brief, was that we all totally failed. Hence the start of FOFOF - the Fellowship of Failure (on Fridays): FOF for short. We reckoned it might not be hopeless, remembering that Jesus said something like, "I've not come for the successes, but for the failures in life. I've not come to mend the undamaged but the shattered, " and he seemed to be more at home with the drop-outs than with the people who'd made it. 

So, if you're down this way on a Friday, and feel you might fit might the description (and hungry), you're welcome to come to FOF - just give us a call (01235 760094)! And if you're not down this way, it's still true: Jesus loves the failures.