The future: so what of it?
I'm struck by the verse in the book of James (4:13-17) that I looked at as part of a Bible study that I occasionally lead within the CU.

"Now listen, you who say, "Today or tomorrow we will go to this or that city, spend a year there, carry on business and make money." Why, you do not even know what will happen tomorrow. What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes. Instead, you ought to say, "If it is the Lord's will, we will live and do this or that." As it is, you boast and brag. All such boasting is evil. Anyone then, who knows the good he ought to do and doesn't do it, sins."

The future, sorry the Future, is on my mind really quite a lot at the moment. I just can't puzzle it out; where will I be next year, what will I be doing, who with, how? I know I have a house I'm staying in for another year at least, but beyond that I have no real clear-sighted, firm or definite plan.
Of course as a Christian it's easy to pick up clues from other people about how you're supposed to approach future plans; look solemn or pious and state that you're 'trusting God', 'and it's all in his hands'. But often I think I just say this because I think it's the 'right answer' - it's something I've heard other people say.

But how much do I actually do it? How much do I believe it?

It's easy to mutter some vague comments about maybe travelling or spending more time writing or just getting a job to pay the rent and seeing what happens - so easy in fact that it's what I fall into doing at least four times a day, whenever someone asks me what I'm going to do after I graduate.

But this passage tells me that's not enough. It's not enough just to duck out and hide for a few years because you want a rest, some time off, because you just want an escape from stress and bother and people asking you what you're going to do, and then from people telling you what to do...it's not enough to want to just fade away and disappear.
You've got to do something with your life. That's what they say. And of course, they're right And as the passage says, what right do you have to just up and decide what you're going to do, without reference, save in lip service perhaps, to God? "You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes."
Does that mean my life is irrelevant to God? No. It means that He is God, and I am me, and that this is the relationship now of Father and one of his sons. So how could I not consult God? How could I not bring eveything, every idea, every notion to Him and say 'Lord, this is where I am in my thinking, but how can I see things your way? How can I serve You?'

That's the challenge, but it's the challenge I believe God is constantly willing me to take.

Today was tiring, and in a way writing this was the last thing I wanted to do, if only because it's highlighted how far from God my thinking has become. But I don't think love is just about feeling, but a kind of certainty that provokes action. In a way, a lot of what the book of James talks about illustrates this, the problematic relationship of faith and deeds. Perhaps it should be redefined as 'love and deeds'. Look how much God loved, in Christ, so that you could be forgiven. Now may your love, which you may reflect back from His surpassing love (Paul prayed that the Ephesus church would "grasp how wide and long and deep is the love of Christ" and that they would know that it surpassed "all knowledge" Ephesians 3:18-19 and of course, that we may know this too) may cause you to act in a way that shows this.

Relying on God?
I've been thinking about the future, probably while I should have been doing something else, today. I probably have a tendency to excessively worry about the future and what it might hold, and I'm challenged by the fact that Jesus teaches his followers to do exactly the opposite (Matthew 6:25-34). I suppose I'm equally challenged by the assertion that Paul makes in Philippians 4:13 that he can "do anything through him who gives me strength", meaning not Paul himself, nor his friends or personal trainer, but Jesus. Also, as Jesus says in the gospel of John (John 15:5) "apart from me you can do nothing." There are of course many more instances of this principle of trusting fully in God in both the New and Old Testaments.
So how far does this principle rule in my life? More importantly, how much does Christ rule in my life? When I worry about the next few years, months, hours or minutes, how much is my thinking infused by my faith in the risen Christ? It's a question I have to ask myself, and I think it would be deeply hypocritical not to. If it is He upon whom my life is now based, rooted, then I am convicted that there shouldn't be massive glaring areas of my life that essentially have nothing to do with Him.

The Bible passage I quoted on Sunday is one that I think speaks on so many things; grace, mercy, the necessity of thinking for oneself rather than following any kind of 'tradition', whatever form that might take.

Last night while reading more of Mark 7 I was struck even more by how radical what Jesus says to the Greek speaking woman is.
Perhaps the first thing that struck me was based on something I had started to feel walking through Manchester city centre on a Sunday morning..essentiallly how Jesus drew people to him, people went to him who were sick, both physically and spiritually, the scripture from Matthew 8 springing to mind (Matthew 8:16-17)

Spent some time chatting to a man who sells the Big Issue in Manchester city centre today - he was a really gracious and bright guy and I enjoyed chatting to him about a few things. We talked about the magazine, the problems that he's seen with aggressive sellers and people using it essentially to beg, and we spoke of faith in God. He remembered a time he'd been praying in a church in Manchester, thinking to himself that he really needed some new clothes, and a complete stranger had approached him shortly after with a bag of designer stuff that he said he didn't need and more, and promply gave to him.
It was a cool story, and another example of grace perhaps?

MARK 7:24-30
"Jesus left that place and went to the vicinity of Tyre. He entered a house and not want anyone to know it; yet he could not keep his presence secret. In fact, as soon as she heard about him a woman whose little daughter was possessed by an evil spirit came and fell at his feet. The woman was a Greek, born in Syrian Phoenicia. She begged Jesus to drive the demon out of her daughter.
"First let the children eat all they want," he told her, "for it is not right to take the children's bread and toss it to their dogs."
"Yes, Lord," she replied, "but even the children under the table eat the children's crumbs."
Then he told her, "For such a reply, you may go; the demon has left your daughter."
She went home and found he child lying on the bed, and the demon gone."

Tired, tired, tired.

So many ideas, but they're all slipping away from me. I can't seem to get anything down on paper. Everything is a stream of tiredness, there's no energy it's...

I'm still at work on my dissertation. I'm still puzziling out the relationship betwee the modernist movement in the arts, in this case specifically in literature, and the form of the modern city. The idea I took from Raymond Williams that originally set me off on this topic is still the most cogent I can find...that the city 'created' modernism, that all the communications technology, the institutions of the late nineteenth/early twentieth century city were the conditions that 'created' the artisitc forms of the (then) avant-garde.

But it's putting it all together that's a grind. Where at every turn you feel a desire to be rhapsodic, to 'write' the city, you have to box it in with footnotes and bibliography and jargon and deadlines and all the rest of it. The idea in my head and reality on the page are frustratingly different things.

Found myself in the pub this lunchtime, and on the jukebox too. Nursing a 'quiet pint' which turned out to be very quiet indeed, I was thinking about music. What I like, what I don't like. What I'm indifferent about.

My tastes aren't too unusual really. Reasonably conventional with a bit of the vaguely estoteric thrown in. And promply thrown out.

Boys, men, lads love lists, don't they? Supposedly so. I do too, I guess. But not that much. A musical list?