Thursday 30th Nov (backdated)

I'm currently sat in one of those swanky coffee cafe places, sipping on my overpriced 'caramel macchiato' and tucking into my 'brie and cranberry' foccacia (nice!). I had planned this. Even the sitting and writing part. It was to be my little oasis in what seems to be, or at least feel like, an everincreasingly busy lifestyle of 'working for the church' - in between all the various church meetings ans the running about. A little pause for thought.

Around me are all the various other people you'd expect in such a place - the mothers & babies, the teenaged-giggly-girls, the passer-bys all too busy to even sit down and drink a cup of coffee. You see there's a wierd paradox of things that went through my mind as I sat there with all these strangers.

That afternoon I received a random phonecall from my pastor - he asked me if I would come on a 'pastoral visit' with him (in about 15 minutes time - this is not unusual for him!). We were going to visit a guy called Dennis. Dennis recently wandered through the doors of our church during a conference, a little worse for wear, living rough and suffering a little - he had a real encounter with God and is now trying to sort stuff out (he is as we speak in a little B&B on the other side of the city, tuning in his combiTV/VHS that we just dropped off for him).

His room is probably a quarter of the size of the coffeeshop I am currently sat in and contains a single bed, a chest of drawers and the now aforementioned combiTV/VHS - there are no trinkets, photographs, souvenirs or in fact any personal reminders or affects of any kind.

On our way to find one of those aerial extensions for his TV, we meet Diego - one of Dennis' new housemates. He tells us about his step-sisters birthday and about his extended family. He seems quite a genuiene guy who's more than happy just to chat, more than happy just to share a little bit of his life. It seems odd that I have spent time now with these other strangers here in this coffeeshop than I did with Diego, yet I know more about him.

We eventually managed to find an aerial extension for Dennis before having to rush off again. The visit was brief - a pause in the routines of life. Yet it is one of those things that are help shaping me and the perspectives of life at the moment.

My little oasis has been spent not thinking about the troubles that had previously occupied my mind but here in my unexpected little 'quiet time' I find myself thinking about the opposites of life and how life seems to be more and more held together by tensions. That it isn't one extreme or another but actually both of them and somewhere in between. That life itself is not really a series of fixed points held rigidly together but a series of things held by the elastics and flexibilites of 'love'.

To be honest, I probably could have had some tea nad toast at home... but I didn't. And the cost was probably twice that of the money Dennis borrowed to buy some tobbaco. I'm left feeling slightly guilty and slightly surreal but mostly humbled by the One who gave it all ... for me, for Dennis and for Diego.