Are we nearly there yet?

I am in the car alone and it's dark. Despite having driven to Bristol airport and back a dozen times before I've never quite memorised the route. I can't seem to find the same road there and back twice in a row. It's the weirdest thing - maybe they hide it like the entrance to 12 Grimmauld Place or something. I am on a route that is familiar from 3 or 4 journeys ago and I have just enough time to pick up my in laws. I have less battery life on my phone than I'm comfortable with but it should be enough. After 20 mins or so there's a left hand turn at some traffic lights then a right hand turn almost immediately after it. I miss the second turning. I missed it last time as well. This is strangely comforting. Siri says turn around when possible, but it's not possible right now so I drive on in the darkness trying to remember how things panned out last time. Did I turn back or keep going? I think I kept going. Eventually Siri gives up telling me to turn around and re-calculates another right hand turn instead. This road is kind of familiar too. That's good. But then he wants me to turn left and the road narrows and I remember that this happened last time too and I didn't like it. I have flashbacks to a B class road with infrequent passing places that seemed to go on uphill forever making my ears pop. I don't have forever. I need to be at the airport in 17 minutes. 

Soddit... I'm back on the stupid uphill B road. Please let me not meet anything coming the other way.

After a few minutes the fuel light comes on with a dinging sound. Not good. But not disastrous. The incline of the hill makes the car think it has less fuel than it actually does. I still have plenty to get to the airport and get home again. Don't panic. Even though the persistent orange light is glowing thirsty... thirsty... thirsty... much brighter than it ever does in the daytime. Then a battery level low message pops up obscuring the map on my phone screen so I can't see where I'm going anymore. Charging cable... It's here somewhere.... I scrat around in the dark with my left hand but can't locate one. Soditsoditsodit... I close the pop up and continue climbing and yawning to unblock my ears.

Just keep driving. This will be over soon. The road can't go on forever. That's just not possible. The kids are at home alone and only know I'm somewhere between home and Bristol airport. That's not enough information for the emergency services. Plus in laws will be landing soon and have been travelling for most of the day now. I don't want to not be there when they emerge from the arrivals gate. It's an uplifting place to be, actually - the arrivals gate. Even in a really small airport like Bristol. Lots of embraces and smiles and warmth. People being reunited with those they love. It makes me hopeful for humanity just watching strangers at the moment they register a loved ones face... Anyway I digress - and another flashing pop up message draws my eyes back to the screen.

No no no... I have 2% battery left - how is that possible? I'm proper wetting myself now. Cue more fumbling around in dark with my left hand in a vain attempt to find a charging cable. I unearth some loose change, scrunched up bits of paper and a small collection of metallic speaker jacks that shouldn't be here. I chuck an empty IrnBru bottle on the floor in frustration. Must find somewhere to stop and look properly...

After another few minutes there is a driveway on my left. I pull in and put the light on. The charging cable is on the floor under a pile of child's drawings and a crisp packet. The phone blips reassuringly as I plug it in and we're off again. After a few uphill minutes into the darkness, the ground begins to level off and then drop. A few minutes later and the road starts to widen again. Good good. The B road is coming to an end. Judging by the screen Siri should be instructing me any second now...
Any second now...
Any second now...
C'mon - the road is less than 500 yards away...
TALK to me Siri - What's wrong with you?!

Siri is blanking me. What's that about? What did I do to you anyway, aside from plug you into your energy source? The screen continues to show me the route but all verbal instruction has ceased. 11 minutes til touch down. I can still work out where I'm going but the gear stick is in the way and not having him talk means taking my eyes off the road more often than I'd like. Honestly - what's going on with you? Maybe this is some sort of personal development plan. He thinks I can do this. I'm too reliant on him so he's encouraging me to think about the route more. Great plan. Just wonderful. It's just I now have 7 minutes to get to where I need to be and it's pitch black out there so flicking between the darkness outside the car and the glarey brightness of the screen (albeit in night mode) inside the car is not ideal. The human eyeball needs time to adjust to that kind of thing. And you have no concept of that, do you? Because you only understand 256 web safe digital colours and not the 2 million shades I have to deal with. And I have almost no fuel. And I'm rushing and feeling ever so slightly anxious right now. And you're meant to be helping me because that's the agreement we make when I launch TomTom. And now I'm so frustrated by your silence I'm actually shouting - happy now, are we?!?

Does anyone else ever feel like God is blanking them? Like he's not left the vehicle or anything, but just pretending to sleep and you can't shut your eyes even though you're really tired because you're driving and there's no safe place to pull over and stop. You feel his presence. The wifi connection is still there. You can see the glow of the screen in your peripheral vision even when not actively studying it, but the clarity is gone. Instructions are fuzzy and you need more. C'MON - TALK TO MEEEEEE. I know you're there...

Oh I know where I am! I'm not lost and ending up dead in a ditch - I've come the back road that brings you out by the tavern on the hill and the airport is 40 seconds away - Wayhey! All is well with the world. Siri, I love LOVE LOVE you and I'm sorry for yelling Xxx

The weather

When our youngest was 3 and a half we sold her buggy on eBay and I purchased a corporate wardrobe of clothes. All within a six week period. My head still hurts a little bit to think about it. My relationship with modes of child transportation is not dissimilar to the one many grown men have with their motor vehicles and I don't enjoy clothes shopping unless it's for denim.

The whole thing was like Bam! - your pre-school stay-at-home years are over and your world is now juggling childcare with spreadsheets and never finding the dishwasher empty. Welcome to the season of always feeling like the thing you should be doing has sneakily been gazumped by the thing you're actually doing right now and sending the kids to breakfast club when they don't want to go because there's no bread or milk in the house. Again.

I missed the season I had just left. I actually missed it in the same kind of way as I missed the last few weeks of coupledom after child#1 arrived four and a half weeks early and then wouldn't sleep for longer than 45 minutes at a time unless the Hoover was on or he was attached to a boob. Hoover frequently lost. Neighbours get a little irritated if you try to vacuum at 3am.

I don't know if new seasons are hard purely because they are hard, or if they feel harder than they actually are because they are new and different and sometimes arrive when you're still dressed for the previous one. And when you're in the middle of a season it's hard to imagine life ever being any different one day. But the days gradually get warmer and the hours of daylight resolutely increase until one day you can't actually remember the last time you wore gloves - just that you don't need them anymore so maybe now's a good time to wash them because they stink of Wotsits.

And so it is with family stuff. Kids drift into and out of seasons so gradually sometimes that things can go completely undocumented until you look at old photos or spend time with a family who are at an earlier stage.

I don't know the last time child#1 asked me to read to him. It was years and years ago. He just gradually stopped asking and other things naturally took their place.

I don't know when child#2 last lined up all his Brio engines in front of the TV so they could watch 'Thomas & Friends' with him. Or when he finally stopped head butting nearby surfaces or the floor whenever he was cross.

I don't know when child#3 stopped her post shower game of wrapping herself in a bath sheet then curling up on the bathroom floor and barking until I arrived and unwrapped the towel to unexpectedly discover a puppy. Every. Single. Night. I might have recorded it just once if I'd not been absolutely sick of the game unable to envisage a time when we'd not be playing it anymore.

Today's weather:
• Child#1 enjoys reading lines and lines of spurious code off his laptop screen to me. These words are in English but their position next to each other in big long sentences (and I use that word rather loosely) means nothing. He's not good at addressing my questions without repeating the same meaningless words back at me in a slightly impatient voice, but he IS good at testing websites and new booking sites for work, finding typos and fixing broken code.

• Child#2 is the most laid back, sociable person I know. It's like a lifetime's worth of aggression was expressed in the first 3 years of his life and now the diplomacy gene is in overdrive. He hates conflict and often mediates between opposing viewpoints (either that or it's all there, waiting to explode again at puberty).

• Child#3 spends a long time after her shower sorting through her cuddly animal collection to select her 'bedtime crew' for the night so no one feels left out. Inspired by Sue Bentley's magic puppy books, she writes stories about talking dogs, draws pictures of sparkly dogs and would love to own a real live dog. We are not getting one. We own a low maintenance cat and 2 mice, who are a year old and therefore due to die off soon. 

I don't know when life got a bit saner. Maybe the season was so mental because too many different types of weather were all happening at once. I was most definitely still dressed for a different climate when it started.

Today's outlook: 

• Child#1 can be left in charge of Child#2 and Child#3 for short periods without expecting payment or major incident.

• Due to my redundancy by stealth programme, Child#1, #2 & #3 get up, dressed and organised for the day with minimal adult intervention, then journey to and from school independently.

• We still occasionally run out foodstuffs, but Lidl is just around the corner and everyone in the house is capable of going for bread and milk.*

Forecast: Who knows? These things are never accurate anyway. There will definitely be weather of some description.

* Except the cat- who is a pure free loader.

Fake teeth and farming before the internal combustion engine

My mouth is ageing faster than the rest of me. For the past few years I've worn a partial denture to compensate for 2 missing lower teeth. The first of these could have been saved by a root canal filling, but given the time involved for this vs a simple 20 minute appointment and 40 quid for an extraction I went for that instead. Against my dentist's advice. Then about 2 years later I found out why when the tooth next to the space became infected due to being ever so slightly wobbly.

A wobbly tooth is an exciting thing when you are 5 years old. It's a rite of passage ushering in the era of the toothless smile, comments from older relatives about kissing boys and finding £1 under your pillow for every one of them you can wobble out. But by the time the Tesco people are happy to sell you kitchen knives or Jack Daniels without an ID, a wobbly tooth is no longer a good thing.

When you can be bleeped through as a Customer clearly over the age of 25 without anyone ever properly looking at your face, then any space in your mouth where a tooth used to be is already putting pressure on remaining teeth making you more likely to loose another tooth in the future. Who knew? So my wobbly tooth was removed and I got a partial denture instead of a pound coin. Welcome to middle age.

For 4 years after that I didn't think much about my old lady mouth at all. Brushing took longer as the fake teeth need cleaned separately then you need to clean the sides of the real teeth next to the gap, but it's no big deal. Then one day I was cleaning the denture when it broke clean in half.

Annoying. It's amazing how hard the opposite jaw has to work to crunch up cornflakes when the fake teeth aren't there to help. But my ever so lovely dentist quickly arranged a repair (I love the NHS) and a week later the denture was returned as good looking as new. Honestly- you couldn't even see the fault line where it had snapped. I clicked the fake teeth back into place and ... Owwwwwcchh!

This wasn't good. But I figured they just needed wearing in like a new pair of Doc Martins. Forgetting of course that a) this most certainly did not happen when the denture was originally fitted and b) every pair of Doc Martins I have ever owned have seriously shredded the skin on both heels for at least a month.

But I am forgetful and stubborn that way and wore the fake teeth for 4 long days. Sleeping was OK. Not eating hurt a little bit. Eating anything hurt more than new Doc Martins. But the more it hurt the more determined I was that it would be fine. Most of the time it felt as though I had a localised throbbing headache in my jaw. A wad of swollen tissue developed under one side of my tongue causing a slight lisp. I eventually gave up after realising how stupidly asymmetrical my mouth was and made another appointment.

My lovely dentist sorted me out in under 5 minutes after buffing the fake teeth with a metal whizzy thing that removed the extra bit of resin that must have been jutting out. I clicked the teeth into place and... Yay- A perfect fit! Like the teeth were made for my mouth. The tiny bit of material she filed away was almost insignificant, but it meant the difference between functioning normally and being constantly distracted by pain and having an unhealthy interest in soup, milkshake and anything else that didn't need to be chewed.

Then Jesus said, 'Come to me, all of you who are weary and carry heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you. Let me teach you, because I am humble and gentle at heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy to bear, and the burden I give you is light.' (Mat 11: 29-30)

Before the industrial revolution, bulls or oxen were used to pull farming machinery so Jesus' audience would have been familiar with this image. Apparently the animals would work either alone or be paired up and fitted for their yoke which would be individually contoured to the unique curve of their muscular backs and shoulders. The harness was never off the peg, but made to measure. The farmer would try it out, then return with his animals to get their yoke adjusted, perhaps several times, until it fitted perfectly. The animals' strength was vital to their task, but so too was their comfort and health.

Pulling a plough.
Munching up cornflakes.
Walking around in shoes that fit you.
Doing most things in life involves surfaces making contact with each other.
Movement proves we are alive.
And things have got to fit well together or they become worn and damaged.

Especially if you're talking about solid wood vs an ox's shoulder blades.

Or new Doc Martins or rigid plastic vs human skin.

My yoke is easy to bear and my load is light. What does that mean then?

The religious system back then was complicated, entwined within the overarching control of the Roman empire. There were laws and some more laws and then even more laws to regulate the original laws. It was unnecessarily complicated and underpinned by a corrupt multi-layered power structure that was designed to keep people subdued. To keep them on the fringes. To oppress.

Religion was hard.

Jesus' method was groundbreaking in its simplicity: Love God and love people. That sums up everything you need to know. It's not easy, but neither is it difficult to understand.

Because it's life.
And growth.
And movement.
And work.
The seasons don't stop and there's farming to be done.

The work required might be demanding, but it's designed for you and I'll kit you out with what you need. It's tiring and exhausting sometimes, but following me is not damaging. The yoke was crafted for you and look! I fit at the other side.

There has always been inequality and power struggles. In every society that ever existed and is yet to emerge there are corridors of power and those who fight to maintain them. But when God says We're in this together, he means it.

Going barefoot

Home [həʊm], noun

1. a house, apartment, or other shelter that is the usual residence of a person, family, or household.

2. the place in which one's domestic affections are centered.

3. an institution for the homeless, sick, etc.: a nursing home.

4. the dwelling place or retreat of an animal.

5. the place or region where something is native or most common.

6. any place of residence or refuge.

7. a person's native place or own country.

Scene 1: We are all at ManChild's new school for a scheduled progress update with his form tutor, a bloke who has known him for seven weeks. The conversation is short, positive and pretty much contains all the information we expect to hear. He works hard. He performs well. He behaves. He appears happy. He's abnormally good at maths, computer science and all things geek (the teacher does not actually use the word geek). He's VERY quiet.

Teachers have been saying similar things about him for the past ten years. And because teachers like goals and action plans and filling in paperwork which proves there are goals and action plans in place, they usually follow it up with 'If you know the answer, put your hand up.' But this teacher doesn't suggest that. This teacher has already discerned that on pretty much every single occasion when an answer is requested from the class, Manchild could probably provide the correct one but chooses not to. Unless he is asked outright - in which case he will provide the answer in a clear, concise way and not whisper something unintelligible while looking at his shoes as he did until year three. (See? That's progress right there). This teacher concludes with 'He's quiet, but it's obviously his personality and part of who he is. We won't try to change it.' 

I like this teacher. He gets my kid. We all go for a McDs tea to celebrate the geekiness and avoid the end-of-day traffic nightmare that is Bristol every weekday evening.

Scene 2: It's 3am and me and a friend are in the 24/7 prayer room, working our way around the stations from opposite directions so it's like being there alone. We're both in our jammies. The heating is on. It feels like the rest of the whole world is asleep and it's wonderful. Thermos of tea in hand, I plod barefooted around the carpeted room having abandoned my crocs at the door. It's a lot like being at home. But it's church. But not church as we know it because there's all this creative prayer clutter all over the place that's helping me think and pray and formulate thoughts about what I believe and why. I sit for the longest time at the foot of a wooden cross which has been upcycled from an old pallet, reading Psalm 65 from The Message:

Blessed are the chosen! Blessed the guest
at home in your place!
We expect our fill of good things
in your house, your heavenly manse.

I am fixated by the home thing and make a list about what HOME means:

Shelter

Basic needs met

Family

Love

Communal living

Discipline
Getting along after an argument

Bringing friends round for tea

Boundaries / structure

Fun

Entitlement / inheritance

Chores
Responsibility

Belonging

Being understood

The first thing I do when I get home is kick off my shoes and put the kettle on. It's all tied in with relaxing and being at home in your own space. (If you ever find yourself in a position where can do this in someone else's house too, then this is a wonderful thing. Hang onto that friend).

So being at home in church - what does that mean when you're NOT wandering around there barefoot and in your jammies (i.e. most of the time)?

It can't be a license for a 'This is who I am and I'm not changing' type of thing. That's kind of arrogant and puts huge limitations on what God is capable / incapable of. He's paid the mortgage and legally owns the house.

But equally, having a healthy sense of who we are and how we belong is a liberating thing and actually frees us from the tyranny of comparison. The form tutor who has known ManChild for a mere half term can already make observations about his character and adjust his approach accordingly - because he understands something of the raw material in front of him.

So how much MORE so does God? The one who knows and understands our deepest thoughts and motives when we don't even get them ourselves? The one who always knew we would be. The one who created the raw material in the first place?

Anyone who intends to come with me has to let me lead. You’re not in the driver’s seat—I am. Don’t run from suffering; embrace it. Follow me and I’ll show you how. Self-help is no help at all. Self-sacrifice is the way, my way, to finding yourself, your true self. What good would it do to get everything you want and lose you, the real you? (Luke 9:23-25)

The real you. I love that. 

I'll never be a worship leader. But I'm not meant to be. I'm meant to be a worshipper. 

I'll never be a teacher. But I'm not meant to be. I'm meant to locate good teaching, listen to and apply it, ask questions when I need to and share what I learn along the way. To be teachable.

I'm really, really not a morning person. I have tried the whole get up early to exercise / read / bake cookies nonsense. It really doesn't work. But I can do creative middle of the night barefooted praying in my jammies with sharpie in one hand and cup of tea in the other.

There are other goals on the action plan. I won't bore you with the details. But the form tutor gets well excited when I reach them.

Randomness

• Pressing snooze on alarm then immediately falling asleep and starting the day in my head. Perform mundane start-of-the-day activities until alarm goes off again. Get up and have to do activities for real. Feel confused that I've been awake less than 5 minutes and have peed twice.

• Pressing snooze and fight the urge to do boring getting-up-stuff in head and will myself to dream of flight instead. Unsuccessfully. This is disappointing. I was born to fly. Something inside me is perpetually frustrated by gravity.

• Walking around the house while brushing teeth in order to do other things with free hand. Then gag due to volume of toothbrush foam and sometimes almost vomit during the sprint back to the sink.

• Getting annoyed at cat for just sitting there watching me rush around doing 5 things at once and not offering to help. (Certain tasks are still possible without opposable thumbs. Cats just wants us to THINK they are useless).

• Silently curse neighbour's tree for shedding leaves onto the patio that I swept clean only yesterday. Tree should clean up it's own mess. That would be like me shedding teeny tiny skin cells all over the place then never dusting. Then remember tree produces Oxygen and I do quite enjoy breathing. Forgive tree.

Falling and drowning

Everyone who is old enough to remember 911 will probably remember exactly where they were and what they were doing when the news broke. I was pushing a buggy down the main street of the city where we lived when I realised a crowd of people were gathered around Currys' window, watching the headlines develop. (Before the age of the smart phone an electrical shop was the place to hear breaking news while outside the home, should there be any). A squalking baby and the lack of a soundtrack to the breaking news meant the story was hard to follow, but I knew something massive had happened.

At home I watched the news and fed and changed and bathed my baby and cried at the world I'd brought him into. When he woke in the night, I put the TV on while I fed him and watched yet more of the horror unfold. Onsite reporters. Back to the studio. What we know so far. CGI schematics of the towers. A statement from the president. This was not good use of a sleep deprived parent's time. Now I had multiple things to keep me awake.

There are many iconic images of that day. Many stories of heroism and selfless acts of bravery. The anonymous falling man is one of the best known and most uncomfortable, especially as there are many who cite that no one jumped that day. No one chose to die. All deaths were homicides.

Obviously. And even if people DID choose to jump, how horrendous were the conditions they chose to leave? Breathe sweet, smokeless air for the last 10 seconds of your life or spend slightly longer in an inferno, choking and vomiting, lungs blistering until they stop functioning and having your internal organs cook inside you? Jump or burn. Those are unbelievably shitty options.

Unlike 911, the refuge crisis making front page headlines does not have an exact death count. The symptoms are chronic rather than acute. The desperate people fleeing what's left of their countries after years of western sponsored violence have had longer to weigh up the options and decide that the possibility of drowning at sea is preferable to remaining in the rubble of their lives. But like the falling man, at some point they decided that leaving was more tolerable than staying.

I'm genuinely confused about the hostility and lack of compassion in the media regarding images such as these. We don't consume chronic problems as well as the train wreck type catastrophes that are immediate and change one's life within a few hours or minutes. Misfortunes that you didn't plan for while eating weetabix that morning. Tragedy that sneaks up on you and pounces when you think life is going just fine. We like those stories. Deep rooted, persistent suffering is more problematic. It's messy and complicated and less sensational.

And the media reflects the sensational stuff far more favourably. Because it's not a sentient being but a social creation. A tool of commerce that reflects life back to us the way we like it. Papers get sold. Links get clicked on. Income is generated. Win win.

Unless you're the falling man.
Or a citizen of Syria.
Or Iraq.
Or Afghanistan.

The list goes on and on...

I won't pretend I know how to fix this. After so many years of hostility and complication and layer after layer of half truths and lies, navigating the complex web of international relations would take the greatest minds on the planet many years more to unpick and even start to put right - even with an international commitment to unity and justice and a shared understanding of what minimum human rights even look like. But I do know we can't profit from political instability, conflict and repressive regimes without some consequences eventually knocking on our front door. Or flying into our skyscrapers. Or washing up on our beaches.

There comes a point where we need to stop just pulling people out of the river. We need to go upstream and find out why they’re falling in. (Desmond Tutu)

But until the international community gets its act together we need to carry on pulling people out the river (or the sea) And supporting the lucky ones that manage to stumble onto dry land again:

Amazon wishlist: donate to the refugee crisis
Petition: Britain must accept its fair share of refugees
5 Practical ways you can help
London 2 Calais refugee solidarity 

Stop the war
Weapon sales up 70%

1010

This free app should carry some sort of warning. It is not free at all. It costs you hours and hours of your life. I have downloaded then scrubbed it from my phone on 4 separate occasions. It is an OCDers dream slash nightmare.

Remember Tetris? It's just like that, but without gravity. You place blocks within a 10x10 square grid, then once a row or line of 10 is complete, it disappears. If you are smart / lucky, you can clear multiple rows or columns at once eg:

L: Orange block is placed in bottom right corner
R: Both the completed horizontal and vertical lines disappear at once. Boom!

After realising the true cost of this game I repent, screenshot my current high score*, scrub it off my phone, then a few months later I cave and download it again because:
• we are planning a long trip in the car
• I get the flu
• I kid myself I am now mature enough to make sound gaming decisions
• Some other flimsy rationale
And the whole cycle starts again.

I like tidying up actual things that you can touch and read and trip up over. I enjoy putting things away where they belong or reorganising them so the space in the room works better. This character trait is the nearest thing I have to explaining why 1010 affects me the way it does. It's like tidying up a never ending supply of pixels in the most minimalistic way possible. I have this fantastic notion that if I manage to clear the game board completely the blocks will stop appearing. Although this has actually happened twice and the blocks did not stop. This made me anxious.

And now I have the flu and have ingested many over the counter drugs and am dreaming about a constant stream of objects which need to be tidied up. It's quite exhausting. The virus is totally messing with my brain and the blocks represent real tasks that need to get done- like food shopping and updating a website and taking a shower and answering emails and reading to the kids and some other stuff I can't remember the details of, but in the dream it's really important to do them all.

Sometimes the blocks are so difficult to place I'll struggle for ages thinking I've lost in real life - then suddenly a space is there and wayhey! a whole row disappears and the game plays on. Until I wake up exhausted and sweating and coughing and reaching for the brufen before I've opened my eyes.

But it works out in the end. Both when dreaming and awake. Despite the odds - which makes me think that the block order is not random, but divinely purposed in order that a solution is always possible. Sometimes the blocks are a pure GIFT - the next one fitting in exactly the same spot I was focussed on and clearing 3 lines and 3 columns in one move. Bam! The block giver knew what was needed and gave it. Other times it's far more congested and scary and things are really tight and I think this may be the last round, but I've got to just not panic and remember that gravity has been suspended. Like bullet time in the Matrix, there's time to look around. And even a poor decision now can be overturned with the next set of blocks which will offer an alternative. The game is rigged so I win.

These life lessons are interesting, but not worth it on balance. I should scrub this game off my phone again... after the flu goes...

*16543

Distractions and dress code

We are creating a culture of distraction (Joe Kraus)

Unless I'm at the beach or away with work I pretty much live in denim. My jeans are assigned their very own drawer and I wear them in rotation to prevent jealousy in the ranks and maintain an evenness of wear and tear. Slouch, boyfriend, bootleg.... I love them all - jeans are comfy, can be accessorised up or down (mostly down) and don't show the dirt.

Like all things denim, churches come in different varieties too. And like my oldest, comfiest jeans with the hole in the left knee and enough give in the waist to be pulled on / off without undoing the zip, you get comfortable with what you know. There's an expectation and familiarity with favourite jeans. I know how they fit and find comfort in the way my phone fits in the back pocket without either digging into my bum when I sit down or threatning to tumble onto a tiled bathroom floor when I pull them below my knees.

Jeans just work, you know?

But, like wearing a bikini at the beach or a trouser suit while on conference, it's appropriate to wear something different on occasion. And it's probably good to NOT go to your own church on occasion too. Different can be good. Different can teach you what familiarity can't. Having been away from home for 5 weekends in a row and mixing with a wider selection of God-type people than I normally do, I have (re) discovered the following:

• Worship is about glorifying God, not about my preferences

• Lack of responsibility for any part of the meeting is quite liberating

• Even when most elements of a church service are not familiar, the unchanging nature and goodness of God is

• It's quite hard to offend genuine followers of Jesus who welcome honest enquiry

• If God's family can be so diverse within the limited expression of church that I can experience in my teeny tiny lifetime within a finite cross-section of Christendom, then heaven will be indescribably eclectic. (I can just about get my head around people from every tribe, tongue and nation, but talking / singing lifeforms with wings and lots of eyeballs may be a bit distracting for a while).

• I am too easily distracted

Expanding further on this final point (because it's an increasingly prevalent first world problem, plus 5 weeks away gave me lots of material), here are some of the distractions that might get in the way. There are lots more. Please feel free to add your own. The sharing of knowledge is power and all that.

• Unfamiliarity with whole thing

Stupid stuff that regular attenders take for granted can make a visitor feel like an observer rather than a participant. Is there a dress code? What's the order of the service? What expectations or limitations are there that are different to what I'm used to - not because God is limiting or expecting anything necessarily, but the culture within a church is shaped by encouraging / normalising certain things. Or not. Also, under normal circumstances I can plan a sneaky coffee / pee break according to what's coming up next, but as a newbie this is not possible. 

• Feeling conspicuous as a visitor

Especially as several members of our extended family belong here and as such, lots of people already know who I am and some want to speak to me afterwards and I can't remember ANY of their names. That's a fair bit of pressure if you think about it too much. So I don't.

• Arrive late and end up sitting at the front
Rookie mistake. Visiting AND sitting at the front? Forget the bikini- you might as well be naked.

• Worship songs are from a bygone era
This awakens childhood memories, both good and bad, of services dominated by counting the ceiling tiles, doodling flower patterns on the notice sheet and trying to make one packet of wine gums last the whole sermon.

• The worship material contains lyrics which raise theological ponderings

Hmmm - Do I believe in singing to Mary? And if not then is the polite response to sing anyway, not sing at all or just mouth the words? That last one seems like a lie really, so I don't.

• Songs presented in a different style than whe one I am accustomed to 
I shall build my church and it shall involve drum and bass or one of those little church karaoke machines or an 80's electric organ or re-worded Abba lyrics or one man and his acoustic guitar. Oh yes.

• Songs presented by the tone deaf a musician of lower ability
But that's Ok - Make a joyful noise to the Lord. Even if you're at the front. With a mic. And singing in a different key to everyone else in the room. That's absolutely fine.

• No words on the screen for whole songs at a time

Did Windows decide to update just before we got started? Or was this one chosen at the last minute and the techie can't type it in fast enough? Or maybe he's asleep, slumped over the desk at the back. Sometimes it's because the song actually finished a while ago, but the musicians are engaged in free worship between themselves and the first 3 rows. Either way, regular guys here know what's going on but newbie's mind is wandering now...

• And I'm feeling anxious that all the roller blinds down one wall are at different lengths. And the one behind the speaker is squint...
I am not obsessive. I am not obsessive. I am not obsessive.

• Working / hovering at back of big top with radio and ear piece so I can instruct the stewards on when to open which doors or help the medics reach anyone having a panic attack, if required.
So now I'm being paid to be distracted. How do pastors get through a Sunday morning with all these balls in the air?

• Those nearby messing around / not singing / chatting to each other

OK - this affects both home and away games. Rightly or wrongly I am distracted by the behaviour of others. We can help each other to connect with God or make it more difficult for them. Our willingness / unwillingness to engage with what's going on impacts those around us.

• There are no kids in this church and therefore no kids session. And I've brought 2 of mine today. Including the fidgeter.
Oh dear. As the minutes tick by they are increasingly bored and restless. One of them is blowing spit bubbles. I can't work out if it's more distracting to allow this to continue or to ask her to stop. I let it continue as I'm kind of mesmerised by them. Some take ages to pop.

• There IS a kids session (Yay!!) and even though it happens next door, there's colouring in and games at the back of the room from the start.
And kids can access it whenever they want. And they are. No one has to sit with a parent if they don't want to. Kids older than mine are chattering loudly and colouring in and my youngest is distracted herself as she wants to join them. So now I'm distracted because she is.

Missing my church family. I've been in unfamiliar clothes too long and need my jeans with the hole in the knee. (But good to know the bikini still fits).