Finding Space

I write this from the place I do most of my writing, the Starbucks on Baker Street (up by the station), just a few blocks away from church (St Marys). I usually would be sat here with Holly but in her own words "ditched me" to escort her mum and god daughter home. It was that phrase - ditched, that got me thinking. To Holly and to many others the idea of giving someone two hours to do nothing in particular can be a negative, but not for me. I think we could all do with ditching ourselves once in a while, partiulaly if you are like me a coffee junkie city type with a schedule that has a mind of it's own. It's somethig that I have been thinking about for a while, the fact that we have gradually let a subtle form of consumerism creep into our lives that makes us feel that if we don't allot a task to a empty spot of time that somehow, we are not living life to it's fullness.

Maybe we aren't individually to blame for this, in fact I am not sure that blame lies at anyone's doorstep, but collectively many of us seem to have duped ourselves into a busyness that consumes so much of our time that we rarely get a moment to realise just how busy we have become.

Workplaces, family life and sadly the church has not helped in this. The 9-5 is a myth, extra curricular activities for many occupy more time than the curricular, and we in the church have got our meetings down to a fine art, so much so that it just seems wrong not to cram ever evening of a week with another one.

We seem to as a society become so good and developing, editing, polishing and delivering content that we have lost sight of the reason we developed it in the first place - that reason, I think, is connection.

We saught to create courses, classes and creativity thinking that by giving people something to do, connection and community would just burst out, but somehow there is still so much disconnection, isolation and busyness. Maybe our content got in the way of that connection ever forming in the first place?

So what can we do? How do we get back to a place where we can connect at a truely human level? Well I think it's by opening up some space, in our spirits and in our diaries to just... be. Because how will we ever hear the footsteps of God walking with us if the sound of our own thundering to the next meeting drown his out?

So may you next time you get ditched, dumped or deserted, allow yourself, give yourself permission, to have some space, to reconnect with the one whose diary is always free for a chat, and who set the rhythms of the universe in motion.