Easter memories

There have been many memories from the Easter season....two of my children got baptised....it was a fabulous day.  In their words...

My name’s Lucy, I’m 16 years old and I’ve been in Reading Family Church for nearly 4 years now. I’ve been a Christian for as long as I can remember so I can’t give a specific time and date for that first moment of understanding-it happened slowly over many years. Both my parents were Christians, in fact around the time I was born my Dad started training to become a vicar however he died suddenly when I was still very young.  While he met Jesus face to face, my Mum brought up me and my brother. We lived in New Malden mostly, and as a child I first discovered Christianity though bible stories I heard through Mum and at church. I started at secondary school there, which I hated, and moved to Reading in 2011 which was also difficult but through these things I came to know and rely on Jesus more personally.  I also gained a stepdad, Craig, 3 more siblings, Esther, Ben and Olivia and moved to a new school which I enjoy much more. My Christian life also grew.  I joined Reading Family Church, where I’ve had a great time helping with the 3-to- 5 year olds in “Stars”, attending the youth group and meeting and learning about God at the Christian Youth camp, Newday, in 2012 and 2014.  So, I’ve decided to get baptised today because I believe that Jesus died and rose again and through this washed away my sins. In the Bible it commands Christians to be baptised.  I want to be obedient to this and follow God’s will in my life rather than my own.

 

Hello, I’m Ben.  I grew up in a Christian family and I have been going along to church for as long as I can remember.  I am so grateful to my parents for introducing me to Christ early and now I have great Christian friends and role models in my life.  I would say I became a Christian when I was around 6 years old despite having very limited knowledge about who Jesus was and what he has done for me. Since then I have grown in my relationship with God but for me being a Christian hasn’t meant an easy life.  In 2008 when I was 10 years old, my mum was diagnosed with cancer. At the end of a horrible journey together, I remember sitting down in the Duchess of Kent House Hospice with mum, dad Sean and Liz and was told my mum was going to die. On the 12^th of February 2010 she died but my faith in Jesus Christ makes me confident I will see her again when Jesus calls me home. My dad’s continuous trust in God’s plan for our lives rubbed off on me and my faith didn’t waver despite the incredibly hard journey I had to walk.  Looking back now I can see how right he was. Dad met Ellie and now I have a great step-mum along with another brother and sister bringing our family to a grand total of 7 people. So today I’m getting baptized because I believe I’m forgiven and as an act of obedience as I choose to pursue Jesus for the rest of my life.

 

Trying to cater for 50 people after the baptism with no kitchen and no cooker was a challenge....yes, the building work still keeps going on...but is now nearing completion (at last).  There has been a skip on our driveway since last July....we are looking forward to seeing the back of it in the next few weeks!  Recently I overheard Ellie reply to one of the children that the herbs were "in the kitchen behind the scaffolding poles".....the saga continues... 

Other worlds to sing in...

February...our least favourite month of the year....we are in the lead-up to our sad anniversaries and, as is normally the case, the time leading up to the anniversary, is normally worse than the anniversary day itself.  We've both been a bit "on the edge" this week....

On 10th February, it will be 15 years since Ben died
On 12th February, it will be 5 years since Karena died.

Neither of us can believe the amount of time that has passed - it seems like yesterday, and yet at the same time, it seems like a lifetime away since those horrors.
So many memories.

I'm reading a book by Rob Parsons at the moment called "The Wisdom House" and it's just brilliant....chapters are short and very easy to read with great nuggets of wisdom within the pages.  I read a chapter this week called "Other worlds to sing in" which made me cry (I just read it to Ellie and it made her cry too!)  Here's a quote from it about the calendar of our life :-

"The one I use is made up of boxes, and each has a date written above it.  Every day I am pulled from one box into another...at one second past midnight, I am pulled through a door into the next box - and for the next 24 hours my life will be played out within its walls.  If I am foolish, or simply too preoccupied to reflect, I can believe that there is an endless supply of boxes waiting for me.  But there is not. And for that reason I must try to live my life in the present box, grasping the preciousness of this moment.  And this is vital, for although we may find it hard to grasp our own mortality...there is a last box. And this one has no doors that can lead me into the next day.  The biggest question in the universe is this : does that last box have no doors because it is just a coffin and death is the end ?  Or does it have no doors because death is a beginning and that particular box, unlike all the others....has no walls ?"

CS Lewis says it like this :-
"But for them it was only the beginning of the real story.  All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and title page:now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read : which goes on forever : in which every chapter is better than the one before" (The Last Battle)

I remember reading this to my daughter just after her mum died.  Great stuff in the midst of the pain of the journey!

Here's a photo of the house extension....things are progressing well but slowly !

Santa Christmas Carols...

Yesterday was a fun day....I had applied to do the inaugural Reading Santa Run a few months ago, primarily because it was a fund raiser for Duchess of Kent House (where Karena died) and also for the Alexander Devine Children's Hospice - both charities feel close to my heart.
Having got out of bed rather reluctantly in order to get there in time to register, I decided to run it full-pelt (is there any other way?) with the more serious Santas - there were 1000 of us in total.  I don't know my overall race position (top 30 or so I think) but I came across the line in a good time.
Even the real Father Christmas turned up which was nice - you can see him if you look really carefully in the photo.

Then in the afternoon, Ellie and I along with 2 of our daughters were singing in the choir at the annual Reading Family Church carol service at the Town Hall. It felt like a great privilege, was really enjoyable, and the wonderful truth of Christmas was declared in a mixture of traditional and contemporary styles, with Jesus birth, death and resurrection right at the centre of it all.

The Santa Run was brilliant fun, but singing "Fall on your knees" from the carol "O Holy Night" in a 3 part harmony made my legs buckle with emotion.

Merry Christmas !

A great day....

My daughter got baptised on Sunday....this is what she said before she got dunked.....

"Hello, my name is Olivia and I am 14 years old. 

Throughout my life I have been brought up in a Christian family and have been in this church since it started in 2001. From an early age I was taught about Jesus and the significance of him dying on the cross for everyone who believed in him. When I was 5 years old I made a first time commitment to God in my bedroom. From then on, my faith and understanding of who God was grew, through being around other Christians, going to kid’s church on a Sunday and quizzing my Dad from the age of seven about some of the questions I had around Christianity.

Nothing really unexpected had happened in my life when I was younger, until one evening in 2008.  It was then that I found out that my mum had been diagnosed with cancer and was to go through a course of chemotherapy to make her better. From then on, I became used to mum feeling unwell and going in and out of the hospital every few weeks for chemotherapy.  

A year later, mum was moved to Duchess of Kent house hospice as her condition didn’t improve and it was there, a few weeks later, that my brother, sister and I were told that in a week or so mum would meet Jesus face to face.  In the dark days that followed I became more increasingly aware of God’s love for my family and I, and that when mum took her final breath, she would be with Jesus Christ in heaven.  

At 8 o’ clock on 12^th February 2010, mum went through the gates of glory where she is now partying in heaven.

In the years that followed there was lots of crying and pain but I also had a great sense of peace over me as I knew where mum was.  I also have great confidence that one day I will meet mum again and like the 'picture' that God gave me a few months after her death, one day, I will run into heaven where she will be waiting for me, and I will pick her up and spin her around laughing.

Later that year Dad met the amazing Ellie at a bereavement conference where God showed us that he had more plans for our family.  A year later they got married and I also gained another brother and sister!  

In the years that followed up until now I have learnt more and more of Gods’ great love for me through events like Carroty Wood and Newday and despite the death of my grandma earlier this year, I have learnt and realise that God really does work for the best of those who love him.

I am getting baptised today as a declaration of my faith in Jesus, to be obedient to God’s word and the plans that he has for me in the future."

I am so proud of her!

Mud mud glorious mud...

It's been quite a while since my last blog...I haven't felt like it much to be honest.

So here's an update on life in general...
We had a great family holiday cycling in Holland....we did a circuit around the country covering about 250km in a week.....the children really enjoyed it even though some got a little saddle sore at times.  A great memory!

We made up a song on the final day's longest tour stage(!) - you can sing along, to the tune of "On Top of Old Smokey"

My buttocks are aching,
My muscles are sore,
But still we keep cycling,
Can't take any more!

The wind it is blowing...
Right into my face,
But still Ben and Barn'by
Won't slow up the pace

Oh Dad he keeps stressing
And shouting for speed
But we go in circles
When he takes the lead.

And so we keep going,
Tho' our bottoms are red...
We can't wait to get there
And flop into bed!

Our beautiful daughter Esther started at University in September - she seems to be thriving despite a tearful start (until we left the car park I think!)....we are so proud of her, she seems to have settled in really well, has been making new friends, exploring churches, and has joined the horse riding club.

Our two boys both did really well in their GCSEs and are now working (hard?) on their AS levels.

Our building work got hugely delayed, causing no small amount of frustration...long story short...it was due to start at the end of July and after many unfulfilled promises and false starts, it eventually started about 3 weeks ago!  All looked fairly good until they found the drain problem....I have to say that when I was thinking about an extension, I wasn't really expecting this (photo taken this morning!).  It's been a long, stressful, sleepless and expensive couple of weeks trying to sort it all out!  I have to say (much to my surprise), Thames Water were brilliant with quickly approving the revised revised updated modified plans revision 6 (!) 
The builders have totally trashed the garden tho!  Hey-ho, at least I hadn't just turfed it :-)

We found the stress of it all quite hard to deal with, it's caused sleepless nights for Craig and migraines for Ellie.  We read this morning about simple trust (Psalm 131).  Nicky Gumbel writes,

"How does this total trust happen?  First, resign as general manager of the universe.  Stop trying to control everyone and everything.  Second, put your trust in God in the same way that a baby has total trust in a parent."

So, onwards and upwards...and looking forward as best as we can (over the mound of earth !!) 

Making sense of it all...

Time marches on.  Amazingly, we’ve now been in our house for 6 months and it does definitely feel like home.  We feel very grateful !

We have our ground floor extension planning permission through, and have appointed a builder to do the extension work…. starting late in July.  It’s a long story, but the evidence of God going before us in this process is very clear to us, and as we have 3 children sitting major exams right now (1 doing A levels, 2 doing GCSEs), the timing makes a lot of sense, despite all my hopes and plans to start earlier!

Here’s a few before-and-after photos of the garden – it’s a work in progress but is getting there slowly but surely.  Most notably, digging up ~8 tonnes of concrete path, lots of heavy digging/clearing and laying 90m² of turf…this has made a big difference to the overall appearance.  I am currently building a garden patio/seating area in my usual slightly obsessional way! 

Horace the nutter puppy has settled in well….aside from his irritating desire to dig up our newly laid turf, that is !  Grrrrrr!

The fallout of Ellie and my grief journeys continues….it’s difficult to explain but I know that I am so very different now to how I used to be….most notable is my emotional capacity which is close to “running on fumes” most of the time.   This rears its ugly head in a variety of ways, but particularly in things like conflict avoidance, lack of ability to handle stress of any magnitude, and little energy for conversation.  Most of the time I try not to think too hard about the past but the impact on my children’s lives is one which frankly rips my heart to shreds….which is something I can’t really avoid thinking about despite how much I try to look forward.

What does amaze me is how well the children seem to be doing.  To the outside world we are a “normal” (and large!) family…and I guess we are just that!  I know that I feel very blessed by all that I’ve been given with my beautiful bride and quiver-full of children!

Before...

...After

Before...

...After

I think the only way to make sense of it all is to keep looking up….God knows the pain, He knows the angst, He knows the past and He knows the future too….one day it will all make sense I think but I guess that won’t be until we meet up!  In the meantime we will get on with the garden...

PPI...

In the media, this little abbreviation generally means " Payment Protection Insurance" but not for me….

Until just a few months ago, it meant, "Porridge Performance Index" as I kept a log along with a friend at work of the condition of the breakfast porridge served up in the canteen each day based on our assessment factors of Temperature, Consistency and Taste.  The algorythms used to finalise the days overall porridge quality score became quite complex, but the result was a daily assessment which bizzarly seemed to track the world stock markets quite closely. I had graphs automatically updated each day and even considered publishing the data online but noticed that the stock market falls seemed to be predicted by our PPI sooner than they happened, so in order not to panic the markets, I decided I should not publish the data :-)

There was much amusement to be had when on days of disagreement over scoring, we had to consult the international porridge standards agency, "Offpot".... and further amusement at the thought of Scottish independence which would obviously require the generation of a new porridge standards agency for Scotland, "Scoffpot".   Anyway, enough of my silliness….PPI doesn't really mean that !

Now for the serious stuff….

For Ellie and I, PPI is a term we have coined between us to express our emotional state. 

It stands for "Precipice Proximity Index" and is essentially an assessment of how "close to the edge" of the emotional cliff we are.

The scale we use is 1-20, and the levels work something like this :-

1-2  Emotionally stable.  Wellbeing good.  Living well.  Enjoying life.  Looking forward to the future.

3-4  Emotionally stable.  Wellbeing generally good.  Coping.  Living in light of past pain but not letting it dominate the present.  Looking forward generally.

5-6  Slightly on-edge emotionally but coping.  Feeling fairly low.  Thoughts of the past sporadically overwhelm but generally able to purposefully think about something else.

7-8  Feeling emotionally tired from the grief journey.  Drained.  Physically tired.  Lacking conversational energy etc, looking back too much.

9-10  Feeling emotionally exhausted from the grief journey.  On the edge of tears and likely to start crying at a moment's notice.  Living the children's pain.  Staring backwards into the abyss of grief

11-12  Exhausted, highly emotional ; very tearful; lots of flashbacks; want to curl up into a ball and climb into bed.  Teetering off the cliff edge emotionally.

13-14 Overwhelmed, irrational.  Plummeting off the cliff edge of pain.

15-20+  Highly emotional.  Totally irrational.  Completely overwhelmed.  Suicidal.  Lying in a jibbering heap at the foot of the cliff edge emotionally.

Most of the time both Ellie and I have a PPI of between 5 and 8, and once in a while will drop to a PPI of 3-4 but rarely any lower.  We also rarely venture much above 12 but it does happen to one or other of us sometimes (thankfully not normally both of us at the same time).

It's not meant to be a very scientific scale and is based simply on our experience rather than any any kind of factual research but it does help us to express to each other the reality of the journey's highs and lows more adequately than anything else we've come across.

The trick for me to lower my PPI is burying myself into something which prevents me thinking too hard about the journey…hence I am still pursuing my triathlon training which continues to be my most effective mind-numbing experience to date.  (And I'm very pleased with my recent Reading Half Marathon PB of 1:32:24 !!)

No idea if that makes any sense or not....