I watched Back to the Future this evening with the intention of working out whether I could show it to my sons.  I’m trying to educate them in the ways of movie high-watermarks of the past 30 or so years.  I know they would love the film (what’s not to love?) but I couldn’t remember how ‘grown up’ it was.

One of the things that I thought as I watched was about how the movie is going to seem so old to my sons (they’re both under ten).  I’m not sure that they’ll get some of the cultural references to the mid-eighties.  To them, the film will be a period piece about a man leaving the past, to go further into the past, to then return to the near past, which is referred to as ‘the future’.

Weird.

Anyway, this retro-movie love fest was spliced onto the end of a day that was full of reminiscence for me.

I am moving house with my family and I’ve been trying to clear out the loft.  Our loft is (or, indeed, was) crammed full of all of our sons’ clothes from all the time that they’ve been alive.  I wouldn’t say that we’re hoarders, it’s more that we put things out of sight and hope that they’ll deal with themselves.

Occasionally, as I rifled through old baby-grows and miniature hoodies, I would be hit by a sudden jolt of memory.  One stripy, knitted hat in particular sent me back to a clear, crisp winter’s day when my youngest son was tiny.  So it has been a day of sudden gasps of memory.

I also spent this morning thinking of my home town, Medway.  This place is a fairly deprived, average sort of group of towns, which is obviously special to me.  I will, quite reliably, begin to miss being in Medway every 6 months or so, despite the fact that I left about 13 years ago.  The place is obviously full of people I love and plenty that I haven’t seen or spent time with in too long.  I have several dark memories of my time there to contend with, as well as lots of happy ones.  I think the place is tarnished for me in a, probably unfair, way.

As well as all the nice things that I came across in my loft, there were plenty that reminded me of less happy times.  There were reminders of things I’ve witnessed or things I’ve done that I’m ashamed of or wish had not happened.  All these past events, good and bad, shape and determine my character and behaviour in some ways.

I’ve recently been aware that I’ve been living in a way where I’m allowing my past to affect my behaviour in the present in some unhealthy ways.  For example, it’s easy to convince myself that I’m not the sort of person who does things successfully.

One clear example is with a novel that I’ve been writing for a comically long period of time.  I think it has great potential (I’m biased), but I’m at a certain point, in Chapter 5 that is proving brutally difficult to write.  This is the point where a young man has to climb a wall to get away from his past (I know, in terms of metaphor, it’s hardly subtle, but you know me).  Well, the poor kid has been stuck at the bottom of that wall for at least two years.  I literally cannot bring myself to write him over the wall, get him free and get on with the novel.

I know it’s weird, but I think it rings true for a lot of us.  We become stuck in the illusion that we are a certain person, living with certain damage and cannot get over that wall.  We can’t get over our past and back to the present day – and our futures.

I think that grace is a concept that recognises that we cannot get over that wall.  Instead, it introduces the fact that there is a door.

I suppose I need to begin turning the handle.

I’m striking for the first time tomorrow.  It isn’t something that I’m happy to do.  I’d actually prefer to be at work and earn that day’s wage.

I really feel driven to strike by the UK Government’s mistreatment of public sector workers.  I believe that I have a responsibility to myself and the rest of the public sector to stand up and be counted.  I will not be a nameless drone.  I want the Chancellor to notice our collective dissatisfaction.

Now, you are probably fairly likely to agree with my attitude on this – if not my specific interpretation.  My main way of publicising my under-achieving blog is through Facebook and Twitter, where most of my friends or followers are likely to hold similar political points of view to me – with a few, happy exceptions.  You might disagree in part or in total (in which case, please accept my apology and celebrate with me as I retract my huge assumptions about my ‘readership’), but I doubt you’ll tell me so (please do tell me through comments – you have no idea how happy it makes me).  But whatever the readers of this post think, there are whole swathes of people who would detest the very notion of the second paragraph of this post and that really interests me.

I have an irritating trait of always staying passive and non-confrontational, so the act of striking seems slightly foreign to me.  There are people who disagree with me and my act of striking is essentially designed to heighten the confrontation.  This is not normal behaviour.  But I believe that it is healthy.

One bloke who used to be my youth worker, but is now a ‘Pioneer Curate’ at Rochester Cathedral (basically, he’s a special sort of vicar) taught me a bit about this idea of engaging with debate – probably without knowing he was doing so.  I guess I’d wrapped my passivity and neutrality up with my faith.  But I saw Rob engaging with debate, being a passionate member of a political party and arguing vibrantly through social media about serious issues.  I guess I registered the fact that faith – and perhaps especially Christianity – has to engage with debate.

Belief itself is obviously a huge area of contention at the moment.  The big Atheist/Theist debate is a famous one right now – despite the fact that there seems to be very little actual debate.  Instead, what actually seems to be happening is that there are several people (largely middle-aged men) shouting (often in a very childish way) about how wrong everybody else is.

There are some places where people are trying to grow debate on this issue.  In a series of articles  on the Guardian website, Julian Baggini has proposed some articles of 21st-century faith to create some common ground to begin with.  Unfortunately, as Jonathan Chaplin points out, Baggini’s idea of common ground is not particularly common to all sides of the debate.  (Note that the comments on these articles tend to be pretty aggressive and wide of the mark – I would recommend staying ‘above the line’.)

I have been convinced for many years that questions about whether any god exists will not be answered through debate.  Sure, some people might be convinced either way – though rarely through debate alone – but I think the wider argument will be ongoing until that inevitable point where each of us finds out first hand the answer to the question ‘What happens after death?’

In the light of that (I know this might sound strange from a Christian), while I believe that the question of whether God exists is the question upon which the whole of life rests, I think there are more fruitful disagreements to offer my interest to.  There are arguments about justice issues in the Church a the moment that seem very pressing to me.

The debate about sexuality and sexual orientation in the Church is obviously one that is imperative.  I do find this debate difficult, partly because of some of the extreme views expressed on either side.  I tend to find myself in a sort of permanent dissonance on this issue, where I’m very aware of the Biblical point of view of sex as a celebration of the male-female marital relationship, but also aware that love, compassion and mercy are at the root of my calling.  I guess my stance on this issue tends to be similar to person-centred counselling – with congruence and unconditional positive regard for all people, brought together by empathy.

Whatever my views, this is an important debate – if only because of the amount of people who are hurt by it and who will continue to be hurt – and it is well worth the effort to engage with it.  There are some great writers on the web on both sides, including Symon Hill (a Christian who previously expressed homophobic views, but later came out) and Peter Ould (who describes himself as ‘PostGay’, became a Christian, married and had kids, then became a vicar).

What about other arguments in the Church?  Women in leadership is another current issue, especially for the Church of England, who are working out whether to accept women bishops,  I saw a really interesting debate on Twitter between Peter Ould (see above) on the more conservative side and Vicky Beeching (who has, for example, written this on women in leadership).  I do come down heavily on the side of women in leadership on this issue, but it’s a debate I’m really interested in.

I could go on forever about the endless debates in the Church – from the intensely emotive (abortion) to the slightly less intensive (predestination) – but I think the point is clear.  There are a huge amount of debates that are worth engaging with both in the Church and out of it.

My own church has its own way of doing this.  We basically have a few ‘primary’ issues, which all the members agree on and then several ‘secondary’ issues, which are (unsurprisingly) secondary to membership.  This essentially gives us freedom to disagree on several things, but still live in community together.  I guess that one problem with this way of doing things is that, despite our great interest and our best intentions, the secondary issues just don’t get spoken about.  We never really engage with the debates, perhaps because we know that, in those debates, there is potential for pain and damage to the community.

I think that, when two people disagree, God can do amazing things through that disagreement.

I know two members of a family who haven’t spoken to each other in several years.  They disagreed over a very important issue ages ago.  After a huge argument, they announced that their relationship had ended.  I desperately hope that they will meet up again and that they will speak about the issue in hand.  The reason I hope that they will speak about this cause of their friction is that it is only when we engage with an issue where we feel wronged, that we will be able to forgive the other person concerned.

By engaging with each other in our differences, wrongs can be righted.  Bad relationships can be made good.  Love can blossom.

Love is easily worth an uncomfortable disagreement or two.

I had a strange revelation today.  I used a Johari Window tool for the first time in several years.  This is basically a way of measuring self awareness, where personal attributes are put into four sections of a square and each of the sections represents one of the following categories:

• Things only I am aware of about myself
• Things other people are aware of about me, but I don’t know
• Things both myself and other people are aware of about me
• Things nobody is aware of about me

It can be an excellent way of helping people to think about how self aware they are.

The tool I used (this one) does depend on semantics and an individual’s understanding of particular words.  For example, a person might describe themselves as ‘clever’, but other people describe them as ‘intelligent’ – does that mean that they lack self awareness or do they lack a common understanding of the best way to describe intelligence?  So this form of the Johari tool is quite limited, but it’s fairly fun.

So I seem to have shown up as pretty well lacking in self awareness.  There are only two words that I used to describe myself that were also used by other people.

This was unexpected.

I’m contemplative Jon! I’m eminently self aware. Surely?

There are reasons why my description of myself might prove different from that of other people’s. I’m an introvert, so what you see is often a tiny fraction of a bigger internal story. In recent years, I’ve been through some deep stuff that has led me through big personal changes. And several other grasping-at-straws-type excuses. Or I might just be not very self aware.

In the long run, is this sort of stuff something that I should care about?  Is thinking about self awareness something that anybody should bother with?

In the Christian sub-culture, there are people like Mark Driscoll who might say it’s all too effeminate for followers of Jesus (to be fair, I don’t know, Mark might be Johari-ing all over the place) or that it’s too self-centred.  Then there are people like Vicki Beeching, who seems to suggest that self awareness can aid us in worship.

So what do people think?  Is the Johari window only any good when the glass is smashed? (I don’t understand that question, but it sounds quite strong.) Is self awareness a waste of time and effort?  Is is a distraction from the important stuff?  Is it a tool to help us do more and inspire us?  Could it even help us to help others?

I gave up caffeine three weeks ago.

This was a big deal for me, because I’ve been a serious coffee drinker for at least 15 years. So, as a bloke who loves coffee and who currently works in an office where caffeine-tainted drinks are the commas and full stops to the day, I’ve been struggling a bit. At one point, walking through a shopping precinct seemed to take endless will-power because my sense of smell seemed to have sharpened to a crazy extent – but only for the smell of coffee.

Today I took coffee up again. It was bliss! Even the usually less than lovely coffee that I drink all day in the office was an intense, wonderful experience. I felt a sort of giddy rush that was probably more to do with the fact that I was blissed-out on caffeine than my reunion with the taste itself.

Earlier today, I described the feeling that my first cup gave me as ‘overwhelming joy’. And it was joyful, but I don’t think the joy outweighed the deprivation, headaches and anger that preceded it.  But without giving up coffee and feeling uncomfortable for a bit, I would never have experienced the rush afterwards.  In retrospect, I guess the rush and the joy was a sort of light at the end of the tunnel.

The theme of pain followed by joy got me thinking about this beautiful, moving, insightful article from the Guardian that I read this week.  It’s about a prison for young offenders and details daily life inside, as well as some views from prisoners and staff.

As you might expect, plenty of the young men displayed their tough exteriors, speaking about prison in an almost fond way.  One young man speaks about the things he has learned inside:

How to weigh up drugs and sell them, how to make a profit on them, car theft. I’ve learned how to fight in jail.

Others were clearly experiencing the place as a nightmare:

I felt very scared when I came in. I couldn’t cope with prison. I was in healthcare for trying to harm myself, banging my head against the walls, trying to hurt myself with the curtains. I was just feeling it really hard. I thought, you might as well die.

I was thinking about this idea of seasons of difficulty – in this case, seasons of intense emotional, social and mental pain - followed by joy. But it’s no secret that many young offenders don’t have a sense of joy on their release.  Many are released from prison (a home they know and understand) into an environment where there is doubt and unfamiliar stress. Hence the re-offending rates are stupidly high in the UK.

I believe in a God who offers hope. But I’ve always had this difficulty balancing the fact that I’m offered hope (in this life, not just after it) with the fact that nobody is guaranteed a pain-free life. There is not always a light at the end of the tunnel. There is not always pleasure after pain. As with these young men, sometimes the pain just keeps going.

I’m reading Rob Bell’s Love Wins with friends at the moment and Bell points out that hell can often be a good description of our situation in this life.

My struggle is actually a lot bigger than whether to drink caffeine at the moment.  My work situation, as for many people in the UK, is rubbish. My incredibly complicated employment can be summed up in that I’m in a job that does not fit my family, my wallet or my CV. And also, this is happening to me. I obviously pray about this but, like those guys in the article, I seem to see the end of my sentence approaching before hope fades remarkably quickly.  It is hard to keep hope; to keep believing.

Meanwhile, I’ve been reading Psalm 118.  This is a victory Psalm where the writer has seen God respond to him and given him hope. It says:

 God’s my strength, he’s also my song, and now he’s my salvation.

This is light at the end of the tunnel stuff. I’ve come to thinking that maybe I need to just believe that there is a light at the end of this tunnel and that He will ‘be my salvation’.

Having said that, recent experience reminds me of a bigger picture. I don’t think the hope and joy that we’re promised is solely dependent on a mystical god floating around like some kind of sacred Santa-ghost, bestowing good people with good things.

My family and I recently found ourselves in real difficulty. We were in serious trouble with no apparent way out. We prayed a lot and so did our friends.  Rather than sudden salvation from our difficult situation through some last minute ‘everything will be okay after all!’ revelation, our friends just helped us out.

Some incredibly kind friends just helped us.

So I guess that what I’m saying is that the Jesus I believe in gave us the clear indication that hope does exist and it usually comes in the form of people. People visit prisons. People house people who don’t have homes. People heal other people.

I’m quite excited to be the light at the end of somebody’s tunnel.

There has been a lot said about the riots in England over this last week.  I thought I would add my small voice to the enormous cacophony of opinion out there.  Most of what follows was written on Tuesday, so please forgive me for the apparent lack of timeliness!

Most of the analysis that I’ve heard about the rioting has been trying to provide an answer for the question ‘why has this happened?’  Some people are shouting ‘I blame the parents’ at every opportunity, some are discussing poverty or inequality, while others are interested in how the broader economic situation, the scandals about MPs’ finances and the bankers bonuses are affecting people.  Others, such as the Prime Minister, preferring not to get into murky waters, evade the question and declare that:

This is criminality, pure and simple

They are, of course, all right.

Even the Prime Minister.

I think I should point out early on that I agree with the PM (in some ways).  It’s a basic tenet of my faith that we cannot excuse ourselves from the wrong we’ve done.  This rioting has been ‘lawlessness’, it has been ‘criminality’ and whatever reason we find behind it, it will still be those things.

But this efficient grasp on the legal situation cannot prevent us from asking the infernal ’why?’ question.  As I heard somebody say today, we should stop mistaking explanation for justification.

So, on Tuesday, Boris Johnson’s declaration failed to convince me when he said:

I think we’ve heard too much of the sociology and the economic background of all this.

Clearly hoping to sound like a man of justice, he actually seemed anti-dialogue and anti-academic.  He seemed to be looking for banners to wave, rather than answers.

On a similar note, those wider voices, that name specific reasons for these riots seem to fall short to me.  I realise that Thursday’s shooting of Mark Duggan and the lack of answers got people onto the streets, but as a police officer said on the BBC:

This was not an angry crowd, this was a greedy crowd

The riots have moved from a cause-based event, to one that appears to be driven by greed.

So perhaps we need to ask what has happened that has driven these people to the point where terrible, anti-social acts become possibilities in their minds.  One man was interviewed on a news programme, saying:

The most dangerous things on the streets are not the knives, not the guns, but the minds of the young people

I wonder how these minds become so dangerous?

This is strangely reminiscent of work I was looking while I was studying in the nineties.  There was concern at the time about the criminality of young men and, in trying to find a reason why, we used the broad, cover-all term ‘disaffection’.  This idea that young men didn’t see themselves as having a stake in society was as a result of their broad social context.  We watched films like the brilliant La Haine and the, frankly disturbing Clockwork Orange.  We wrote endless essays about the Bulger murder. We spent days trying to crack the nut of the complex inter-play of a young person’s behaviour and their social environment – which can perhaps be pictured a bit like this:

So the person who behaves a certain way is within the context of a familial situation, which is within a community, which is within a wider national and international context.  The real situation is obviously far more complex than this, but the point remains that individual people who make stupid decisions are doing so based on the influence of these circles.

So if a person has been out on the streets fighting and steeling for the past few nights, there might be a reasonable likelihood that their family context has made this possible.  Maybe they have missed out on good, moral foundations; maybe they’ve lacked a useful father figure; maybe they’ve not had good decision-making skills demonstrated to them; maybe the things that they have witnessed in their families (poverty, parents working so long to survive that they never see their children, drug misuse) have left them with a disrespect for wider society.

But these problematic situations in people’s families will obviously influence, and will be influenced by, their community context.  For example, some families cannot move away from areas where communities have problems  because they will never earn enough money from their numerous jobs.  Meanwhile, if their parent has many jobs, this can leave more room in a young person’s life for peers to influence their behaviour.

Additionally, communities can be the context for a person’s marginalisation – an individual might feel pushed to the edges of society because of their ethnicity, their economic status, or their age (I saw this great piece on inequality today).  Why is it that the media are representing these rioting groups as largely young, male and black? Whether the media image is true or not, we need to asses why these particular groups are being consistently marginalised in our communities.  Maybe the truth is that, as the heroic Patrick Regan from XLP suggested on Tuesday, we need to:

Separate the criminal element from the young people at the edges

Similarly the national and international context for a person will have a huge influence on their community, their family and the person themselves.  The media message that the way forward is ‘more possessions with less effort’ will surely affect people.  As will the sight of rich people running the country and speaking disparagingly about poor people, while cutting services and calling for reduced taxes for the rich. Or perhaps, as others have suggested, having authority figures in politics and business portrayed as ‘grabbing what they can and running’ might represent an example of how to behave.

If any of these examples are true, it seems clear that an individual develops within a system of these circumstances and contexts.  No single problem, whether parenting or international markets, can be said to have created these riots.  As Patrick Regan said on the BBC:

We need to tackle the reasons why people get involved in crime and get involved in guns

The stupid decisions of individual people have to be seen in the context of a wider system.  The problem is that, if this complex system of contexts and influences is true, every person must have an influential part to play.  For that reason, it seems more important than ever that all of us, Boris Johnson included, get our heads out of the sand, find their part and play it.

I’ve been listening to Emmy The Great‘s new album Virtue today. This could be one of those rare albums for me – one that actually spends hours on repeat.

Her voice is pristine. It’s a beautiful, pure, fine-crystal voice; it shows both precision and playfulness.  The album features pastoral and industrial landscapes in the same songs – not with a focus on contrasts, but on the life within them.

Ah, this is a very, very lovely album.

This album has a back-story that is fairly widely known.  Emma Moss (the lead singer – or the artist – Emmy The Great is one of those confusing mixtures of solo artist and collective) was engaged, about to marry a guy who became a Christian.  He left her and became a missionary. This is particularly addressed in the stunning Trellick Tower, which is a powerfully sad song and yet easily holds its own.

When I heard about this story, my mind spun in a couple of different directions.  In one sense, I was interested in whether this would mean that the album would be another piece of ‘Christians are annoying!’ art.  In another, I was angry at the guy and the Christians around him – ‘Why did he leave her? Was he told that this what God wants? Why does a loving relationship need to end when a person finds that they are loved by something bigger?’

I found answers to those two fairly quickly.

Firstly, the album is no one-dimensional rant against Christians.  This is a far more intelligently written album than that.  Emma seems to have plenty to write on about Christianity and her experience of its fall-out, but this never seems to be either thrashing, judgmental rant or dismissal as irrelevant.

On the second concern, my answer came with the recognition that my concerns were irrelevant. I know less than half a story that has been filtered by a PR machine. I have no idea about the motivations of one man I’ve never met.

But as I listened to Trellick Tower, my thoughts did turn to the distance that Christians put between ourselves and others.  One section of the song goes:

You propel yourself into the arms of God
and Christ and all the angels
Now you’re high above the people
who you used to call your equals
I will stay behind and live this life

This, apart from being one of the saddest things I’ve ever heard, made me think of the ‘sacred snobbery’ that we portray.

‘You are not one of us’ is surely one of the strongest messages that churches send out.

I had a conversation with a guy who isn’t a Christian recently.  He told me about a relative who constantly – probably inadvertently – offers the unspoken message that ‘we cannot have a meeting of minds until you believe what I know to be true’.

My concern in this is that our example to follow is one of a God, entering humanity, walking with everybody, engaging with any needs, talking with anybody.  We don’t need to be heading in the same direction as other people to relate to them.

If we allow this perception of Christians to continue – a group of people who believe themselves to be ‘other’ or ‘higher’ as the song puts it – we will be crippled in our ability to engage with people.  And ‘engaging’ is surely the whole point.

Conversely, if we allow ourselves to engage, if we compassionately discuss pertinent issues with them, if we become a safe place to deal with unexpected pregnancies, sexuality, poverty, racism, violence and abuse – then won’t we encourage better relationships? Won’t we see people relating in a far more healthy way with each other – and with God?

More than anything, I don’t believe that our mission is actually about doing more compassionate things. It is actually about being more compassionate, engaging, enjoyable people, with less desire to convince and more desire to engage.

So here’s another Mother’s Day.

It’s always a bit weird for me. Not particularly painful necessarily, more of a marker in a journey – a long and tired cycle of grief.

Mother’s Day reminds me that I’ll always be the kid whose mum was dead. I was the one who wrote his hand-made card at school to his Grandma.

In tired moments at infant school, my mates would sometimes accidentally call our teacher ‘Mum’. I called her ‘Grandma’ once; she got cross and I got embarrassed.

Weirdly, this is still a celebration day for me. I remember today all the people who acted up to the maternal role for me: my kind and loving dad; that Grandma, who lived with us for a while and has nearly lost  her memories of me; my step mum who worked so hard; my other Grandma, with her warm welcomes; my amazing siblings, who understood better than anyone; teachers, aunts, family friends…

But I guess the point is that a woman died and nobody else could be that woman.

That’s really the reason that in less than a week I’ll be running the Brighton Marathon.  That is the reason I’ve run very nearly 450 miles since January. I’m running for the Child Bereavement Charity, because death is a powerfully crap thing and it hurts kids beyond the well-meaning repair-attempts of adults.

If you fancy sponsoring, please follow my link here.

PS. Sorry for the lack of updates. Running that much does keep a lad tired/busy – there’ll be more updates (or maybe just less excuses) from 11th April!

Evening.

I was listening, with great interest, to the reports last week about the UK’s government refusing prisoners voting rights.  Prisoners have never been part of the ‘universal suffrage’ culture in the UK – a law was passed in 1870 to refuse prisoners voting rights.  More recently, prisoners on remand were given the vote, but there’s nothing for convicted prisoners.

John Hirst, an idiot of a man (for unrelated reasons), campaigned against this and won a ruling in the European Courts.  This ruling essentially told the UK government to ‘do something’.  Nobody’s really sure what ‘something’ might mean.

What’s interested me is that almost all politicians have made it clear that they feel shocked and appalled. David Cameron thinks he might throw up if prisoners vote. Norman Tebbit says it’s an affront to democracy.  MPs debated and voted on it in Parliament; 234 voted to keep the status quo, opposed to 22.

What I can’t find though is a reasoned argument against prisoners voting.  The line of the argument seems to be:

‘Just think of it! Wouldn’t it be a terrible thing?’

‘Ah, yes. Terrible…’

I just wonder why everything would be so terrible.

Isn’t the real reason that prisons are really about neither punishment or rehabilitation, but dehumanisation.  These are the big, scary buildings where we throw the bad people so that we don’t have to think about them.  They’re a bit like zoos, but without the guided tours, gift shops and dignity.  Placing people in prison keeps them away from ‘civilisation’.

When prison reform happened in the Victorian era, we began to look at conditions and saw them as immoral. Read a bit of Dickens and you can see the way that criminals were seen as sub-human in his era.

Strangely, I don’t think we ever really accepted that the ‘sub-human’ idea was wrong. We just did some tidying up and carried on as normal.

Simultaneously, it seems like we’ve inflated Democracy to the status of god. We send missionaries to spread the word and we speak about it in sacred terms.

Perhaps, for us in the West, democracy has become a secular god, whose altar cannot be approach by those who are unclean: those who have sinned against it, those who are not from its chosen people.  Isn’t this the real reason prisoners aren’t allowed to participate?

Perhaps not.  Perhaps there’s some worthy, rational reason.  Perhaps somebody can tell me what this is…  please?

I have a bit of a confession to make.

I didn’t start training for the marathon until 11 January.  This was a day under 3 months before the event itself.

I think I could be described as irresponsible in this regard.

But anyway, I’m training now.  And while I’m breaking no records, I’m loving it!

I cannot get enough of those cheeky jaunts.  It’s the whole deal:

• choosing my route
• arranging the playlist
• dressing up like a fool in leggings
• recording the trip with a handy app on my phone
• running along dark country lanes, listening to Song 2 by Blur, a comedy podcast like 7 Day Sunday or a talk by somebody at SPTC
• arriving home smelly and caked in mud, ready for a lovely shower and coffee
• uploading my route to Good Run Guide to find I have a new personal best

Seriously, for a geek like me, running is amazing.  It has to be said though, the two things that I love the most are the sense of satisfaction (it’s like I win against myself every time I run!) and the, worryingly addictive, endorphin-fueled haze that I seem to be living in at the moment.

I am living in a restless state, eager for the next opportunity to run.

I was standing thinking about this restlessness the other day and something apparently unrelated popped into my head.  It was the Bible verse that’s on my mum’s grave:

My soul finds rest in God alone; my salvation comes from him. (Ps 62:1)

I’ve always thought that was a beautiful verse for a grave stone.  In this context it obviously speaks about the believer’s (my mum’s in this case) assurance that they’ll find ‘rest’ in death.

But I’ve always read it as being far more about us: the left-behind.

This is the anchoring line in a poem that’s basically about a restless man who feels attacked on all sides.  The world is set against him, but he encourages the reader and himself: ‘Find rest… in God’.

I really identify with this.  While I had a supportive family and a great dad, there is an element to my mum’s death that looks – in hindsight – like I was being thrown into the tumultuousness of the world to see if I could sink or swim.  Her death had a whole host of effects that left me restless and confused in a frightening world.

I took the message on my mum’s grave as an instruction and I followed it.  And, yes, it has to be said that I really did find rest in God.  I realise that this ‘rest’ could easily be passed-off as a psychological response to a need, but I’m inclined to say that I experienced something ‘other’ – something outside of the tumult.

Anyway, onwards toward the point!

The reason I’m really running is that I want to raise some cash for the Child Bereavement Charity.  I want to see the tumult calmed in the lives of other kids who have experienced a similar loss to me.

Remembering this Psalm reminded me of my own restlessness as a child, as well as my own, far better, restlessness as a running adult.   It reminded me of the real reason why I’m doing this.

This is the real reason why my merry jaunts across the countryside are so good.

So I’m asking again, please join me in this – help this excellent charity to reach into the restlessness of bereavement.  Please donate!

NB: If you’re unwilling to give through electronic means, please email me on distortedjon@gmail.com and I’ll set something up!  Thanks.

Evening all.

You’ll be happy to know that I’ve been accepted for the Brighton Marathon in 2011! Whoop! Yeah!

Oh. Oh, hold on. Right then…

Okay, so this leaves me with two problems.  The first, and most obvious is that I haven’t run 26.2 miles since 2004.  And that was not fun.  Or very fast.

I’m not very disciplined.  The recent snow/ice and the irritating cold I had last week meant I stayed in, instead of embarking on my early morning training runs. Now the snow (and most of the ice) has melted and I’m breathing like a child skipping through a summer meadow.  But I haven’t re-started the running.

I need to start running.

My second problem is that I need to raise a bit of money.  I’m running on behalf of the Child Bereavement Charity.  They’re a great charity, which ‘supports families and educates professionals both when a child dies and when a child is bereaved’.  My target is to raise £800.  I haven’t got very far yet.

If you read this blog much, you’ll know a bit about me.  You might know that my mum died when I was 5.  This early bereavement does still affect me.

By the way, I’m not doing that ‘I think about her everyday’ thing. I don’t. To be honest, I don’t remember her enough for that.  I do occasionally have a little flash of memory – maybe if I hear a Carpenters song or something odd, e.g. I recently remembered Rondo Veneziano’s Venice In Peril (or, more specifically, the freaky picture on the front of the LP) – but usually it’s an occasion (anniversary of her death or Mother’s Day) that gets to me.

But the lack of my mum still hits me.  The man I grew into – and the way I grew – was dictated by this loss. It’s hard to put it into words – and I’ve been trying to do just that, with several failures, for ages – but it’s like growing as a damaged person. I guess it’s similar to nature, when a young animal is damaged and does not receive treatment their growth is impeded.

I’ve come across a lot of young people in my work through the years who have experienced similar damage, have gone without help and have experienced problems since then.  One guy I worked with a few years ago had lost his mum at a very young age and never received the delicate handling that he needed to help him develop healthily. When I met him, he was hanging on the edge of school, beginning illegal drug use, always running from home and at risk of starting a criminal career. I worked with him for a while and didn’t do anything miraculous, but he responded and his life changed.

This is exactly what the Child Bereavement Charity aim to do: support professionals in their work with bereaved kids, so that the loss they’ve experienced is not allowed to become a barrier to healthy development.  The loss is not stopped or reduced, but they are allowed the right to mourn and experience their loss in an appropriate way.

Anyway, this is my begging post.  Please sponsor me! These are my reasons for running.  You might not be able to help me get out of bed and run in the morning, but you might give me some determination to do it.