6th May 2012

By Lviatour (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons. From here 

I heard an amazing story today. And I just love it when the Lord blesses us with little gifts. Life feels so much better when things go right. But just this very minute, I thought I’d go look for a picture of a red deer on Wiki Commons in order to illustrate said story. I’d clean forgotten I took some myself a couple of years ago. Anyway, I thought it was good when I opened their homepage to find the above snap as their picture of the day! No digging about to look for a better one for sure.

So then, a couple of days ago the Lord gifted me a gentle reminder that I still need to complete my grief journey. It’s not hard to think about Jane and how much I still miss her and though it may be a little upsetting, it feels like a very natural thing to do. For the first time in many weeks, as I sat in church this morning, I imagined Jane was still with me… and I shed a few private tears thinking about her and the decades of spiritual oneness. Later in the morning I returned home and spent time continuing to decorate my hall. Little and often is the key… but the amount of woodwork to be painted is particularly time consuming, and I remembered the last time when Jane and I shared the workload. It was so much easier with the two of us, and much more fun than me continually trying to wipe up a deep red paint which was supposed to be non-drip. And isn’t. Christian internet radio helps somewhat, but it’s not really enough.

Then this afternoon the Lord came to visit. So there I was, minding my own business, reading a somewhat nondescript sci-fi novel, simply trying to relax and recover strength after my morning activity; when all of a sudden I had an overwhelming sense of the Lord’s presence. My heart was filled with the most wonderful joy and I just had to throw my book down and stand and spend time giving thanks to God for his wonderful goodness to me. These past few days, particularly, I have enjoyed the most special times of personal worship imaginable. I just feel filled with the love of God. My life would be completely meaningless without my faith journey and having the experience of a personal relationship with Jesus Christ is simply mind blowing. I cannot understand why he pays any attention to me whatsoever, but he does and I’m so grateful.

Mustn’t forget my story now, this morning I received a text from my daughter, she’s been attending a friend’s wedding just over the border in Scotland. A particularly unusual wedding as they’re taking the whole weekend to celebrate by going Glamping; a particularly luxurious form of camping apparently. It may be a tent on the outside, but certainly not on the inside, with all the fixtures and fittings you’d expect in a real house! So this morning my rather athletic daughter decided to go for a run along the adjacent and quite stunning beach. The sun was out and her route took her through a wood where she was amazed to have wild deer, not only run across her path, but then choose to actually run alongside her! Wow, it may be a common experience for some, but I’ve never heard of anything like that before. Life is a privilege and at times really rather beautiful. I’ll have some of that please...

Genesis 1:25 ‘God made all sorts of wild animals, livestock, and small animals, each able to produce offspring of the same kind. And God saw that it was good.’ (NLT)