All over the place

It's been a while. Sorry about that, though not sincerely. It was an accidental thing borne of exhaustion in this new stage (I started my discipleship groups a few weeks ago), then a deliberate choice to change the rhythm of my days, including blog-day-Monday. Blogging's no longer a priority for the day and the fact that I'm now open to it on other days will probably hardly change things. But I still have so much I'd like to say so I'm not giving it up - it's just that I need time to think on Mondays, and not towards an end.

But now it comes to it I find I don't actually have much to say. So please do share in my consciousness. I'm reading a book about how the Christian life is worship before knowledge and practice before worship (a book that very much overplays its hand), and beginning to think what that might mean for my groups. I've found a great, safe place to go dancing and am still revelling in a perfect dance from last Thursday night and trying to put my finger on what it means, while knowing that, if I could, most probably there would be no dance. I'm wondering at how draining my groups are and how much I love our time and how I couldn't keep it up without a rest day and a thinking day and how I can't keep it up without God and how my life would be easier if I had a regular job and how I'd be sad and unsatisfied. And I'm glad for how muddled I can be and how God will answer a heartfelt prayer so well and sweetly. And glum over how sinful I can still be, given the right situation, and how the good things I know don't get through to me then and I get lost in my sin, and how relieved I am that I am forgiven, that I can get up the guts to ask forgiveness, and press on.

And I think I would prefer to live with someone else in a funky suburb a little out of the centre of town. I think I would like to write something, damnit: the great Australian novel, a swath of faultless verse. I think I would like to really roll up my sleeves and 'do life' with 'my women', be a person who takes a moment to call others or send a little note. I think I would like to get married and have some kids.

It's a strange life this. Such rich blessing, such deep, revealed truths, so much security, so much that is okay, so much satisfaction in the things you have to do, so many people caring for you and thinking highly of you, and the deep pleasure of other people's creativity in the buildings and grafitti alone. But then so much that nearl... that falls short, that smells of disappointment. You're knackered and salivating over the chance to watch a film, and you do and it doesn't satisfy and you feel a little dirty for not having done something more wholesome with your time. You have one glorious day to think and write and you never quite get going and anyway, what might you write? And church on Sunday is pure and centred and you trust in your brothers even while you know of their lives, and then it's over and you go home.

And there are these mountains-