I couldn't have done it without David

Well Saturday night / Sunday morning found me doing the Moonwalk with my sister, niece and daughter and around 10,000 others, mostly women). My sister had the idea, lets do this as it'll be an incentive to deal with the fitness and it's a great cause. Now sometimes my sister has great ideas - it was her suggestion to do the Great Wall of China trek last year and the fitness thing has been an issue and it is a great cause...so we signed up and have been training for the past few months. 26.2 miles, starting at midnight (well actually 12.15 a.m. cos we were in the last group off) walking through the night around the streets of Edinburgh, including up to Dunsapie Loch on the top of Arthur's Seat. The castle and other main buildings around Edinburgh were floodlit in pink and there were people outside their houses in their pyjamas saying "well done girls keep going".

At 11 miles the people who were doing the "half moon" turned off with 2 more miles to do to get back to the finish. Unfortunately at that point, having signed up for the "full moon", we had another 15.2 miles still to walk! I didn't know you could do the "half moon" and to be honest it would have been a bit of a dawdle really. But no my sister thought we should just go for the full thing.

About 15 miles in walking along Seafield Road was when the knees started to really feel the pain - really wondered what I was going to do - would I make it? After some paracetamol and ibuprofen I was making it - just. Then the blisters started - 2 corkers. In exactly the same place as my sister got hers - (design issue with Asics trainers? - we were both wearing them) And in spite of my Nike blister proof socks! Then there was the half hour wait in a toilet queue while our joints and muscles stiffened up!

When we got to the 22 mile marker all of us got our iPods (and other types of mp3 players!) out. My choice - David Crowder - the man is after all a legend. I cranked up the volume and gritted my teeth and we ground out the last 4 miles. I've never been so happy to see the sign that said 500 metres to go.

We walked over the finish line at 9.40 together holding each other's hands high and stumbled up to claim our medals.

Was it worth it?

Moonwalk Edinburgh set out to raise £3million pounds, £0.5m going to Maggie's Centres in Scotland, £1.5m to the Breast Cancer Institute at the Western General in Edinburgh, rebuilding the breast cancer ward and opening a new theatre to cut waiting times, and support for the roll out of the anti-hair loss system into each hospital in Scotland.

Was it worth the pain and the exhaustion....you bet.

Generosity

Walking along towards "Life" on Saturday night about 2.00 a.m. we were stopped by a couple and asked the inevitable "What's a Street Pastor?" - so I got into conversation with L. She described herself as a 'wild child' and whispered to me what she does for a living - she's a stripper; and she talked so lovingly about her godly grandmother who "goes to church all the time" and has obviously had a huge impact on her life, she clearly just loves and accepts her granddaughter as she is and the impact of that love was obvious. L clearly admires and loves her very much. We got into a conversation about the feeding of the five thousand (L raised the issue) and she explained to me that how she saw it was that Jesus had something when other people had nothing and that he shared what he had with the people who had nothing. The whole story was about generosity - living life and never seeing someone else in need when you can help them with what you have. As she talked I became aware of God saying to me - "she's amazing isn't she, look at her heart, she's so lovely - I really wanted you to meet her because I knew you'd love her". I know that sounds a bit crazy, even maybe to some, pretentious, but in that encounter, I kind of got why Jesus hung out with "tax collectors and sinners" and how he feels about us. God doesn't just put up with us, tolerate us, accept us - he really does adore us, everyone - even, in fact especially, the people that the church might not normally "approve" of. We see Christ in the 'least of these'.

As if to underline the theme as we walked back about 2.45 we bumped into some young guys who had bought a whole big pizza and found that they weren't really that hungry, so they asked the SPs if we'd like a piece. So we munched pizza and blethered to them for a bit. Then the owner of the pizza place, who I guess is Muslim, came out with a box of pizza and handed it to us and said - "you help when you speak to people outside our shop so we wanted you to have this". So we took the pizza back to the other SP team back at base.

So I guess, whether you're a godly grandmother, a wild child, a street pastor, you never know the impact you'll make on someone else's life by being generous whether it's with your time, your attention, your love or your pizza!

"Happier not Richer"

Spent the day in Stirling considering issues around how we can create a "Greener" Scotland. What I found interesting was a graph which mapped satisfaction with life against the gross domestic product of Scotland. What it demonstrated was that although our GDP has increased steadily over the last decades our life satisfaction doesn't actually change - it's pretty much plateaued. We also thought about the government's strategic objective of creating a Scotland which has sustainable economic growth, but we considered what we meant by that, is this about more consumption? If we keep using energy at the same or a higher rate this has a consequence globally. What if every country desires to grow it's economy based on consumption and the greater use of energy? It is clear that things need to change.

When participants were asked to describe their ideal world of the future, they talked about things like being happy, having a good balance in their lives, having close relationships and connections with others, with family and with community, meaningful work and activity. Actually no-ones ideal world was about buying more "stuff". People were describing values which were beyond material wealth. Someone speculated that perhaps beyond the economic downturn people might not return to their old patterns of consumption.

We had a great input from the Children's Parliament and they said some pretty fantastic stuff like one boy's horror at people "shopping as a hobby, it's buying stuff you don't even want or need, it's over-consuming" and a girl who talked about us being less selfish and knowing the difference between "what we like, what we need and what we want" and learning to know the difference. These kids are about 11 years old!

Check out their video here.

We talked about some of the things we can do in addition to looking at our own patterns of consumption and energy use, maybe we could do some of these in the church

Create new spaces which facilitate new conversations.

Ask outrageous questions.

Articulate a vision of what we want to see.

You can also check out my maladjusted friend who's made a good start on this kind of stuff.

Emergent & Rahner

As I am reading my way through Rahner I increasingly feel that Rahner and Emergent go together - so I was having a Google on this basis and came across this article here on Prodigal Kiwi(s) blog.

Prodigal Kiwi is quoting from a paper by Declan Marmion titled “Theology, Spirituality, and the Role of Experience in Karl Rahner,” Louvain Studies, 29, 2004, 49-76 and I particularly liked a couple of quotes; Rahner

...transposes questions of God into the transcending adventure of human freedom rather than speaking of faith as primarily an ascent of truth... This means helping people to accept and recognise an immediate closeness of God within the ordinary and extraordinary drama of their own life…

I also liked this quote which ties the spirituality of Rahner back into lived theology and social justice;

...The contemporary focus on spiritual experience ... can easily fall into both the “despotism of the sacred” and the “narcissism of the self”, whereas what is needed is a genuinely personalised religion that unites affectivity, intelligence and social responsibility in the light of faith...

I really like this so I must get back to Google and see if I can find the article. Oh yea, and I think that if I were one for labels I would now officially be a post-evangelical emergent Christian