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.

Don't miss out

I enjoyed Saturday. It was dry, which helped. We'd arranged to meet my college pal, let's call him Murgatroyd, and his partner, I'll call her Annie, in Oxford. It's a long time since I've spent time with him and we'd never met her. We arranged to meet at the Ashmolean Museum. They're architects and he had not seen it since its £ multi-million rebuild. It is a most impressive, if confusing, building. They spotted, before following us to Brown's for a meal, the Vermeer painting on loan there.

Jane and I went to see it after lunch. It's the only painting by the Dutch master in private ownership, Young Woman seated at a virginal, and it's quite small (10 x 8 inches); but it stands out from all the others on the wall. It's very simple, but beautiful. It's in Oxford only until September, when it returns presumably to the wall of a very wealthy and lucky person in New York. You might easily miss it.

Opportunities to renew old friendships and make new ones are precious, and it's easy to miss them. That meal in Brown's was a quite simple sharing of good food and talk. Which is what "companionship" meant originally. But it was more. It was the seizing of a moment. It's all too easy to dwell in the past and so to miss what God may have in store. We've all made mistakes we regret, leaving behind hurts. And yet, it seems to me, that Jesus didn't hold such things against people. He invited himself to their homes for a meal. We've all had experiences which have scarred us. And yet he didn't allow such things to keep a stranglehold on people. He restored them to live life again in the future.

I'm sad to see yet another programme is scheduled on Channel 4 about Tony Nicklinson, trapped by a stroke in an unresponding body. Its title tells us that it will be an emotional tract advocating euthanasia: "Let our dad die". I'm sad because I believe he is actually missing out on what fellow-sufferer, Bram Harrison, said, "I enjoy my rather limited life"- see Bram Harrison's locked-in life. I quote Bram because his life is more like Tony's than mine is, for the moment. However I agree with Bram. It's surprising how much can be made of how little, given the opportunity and a positive attitude.