(Making sense of) life and work

A new departure this week: sat and read the Church of Scotland regular publication for its members, Life and Work. As Dan is set to continue working with the Scottish Bible Society on their website, and had made reference to this magazine, thought I’d have a look.

One particular comment struck me from a column written by the Rev Jock Stein: “It is important that poets and composers who happen to be Christian are left to write good poems and good books, and not pressured to write ‘Christian books’ or ‘Christian music’.”

He goes on to say “if Christians are to be salt and light in our culture, we need books, articles, films, music written by Christians, not some tame product with a Christian label.”

Have been musing for a while about a pattern for my own life: how to make sense of what I currently enjoy doing, but also what I sense might be around the corner. It all seems to come back to story: the importance of expressing the good, and bad, in our lives and longings.

Growing up, I loved books and music from an early age, and was lucky enough to be given both in good measure. Like many other teens, there were diaries full of angst, and a good few poems too, some with angst and uncertainty, others amazed by the world around me.

Becoming a Christian at 19, it seemed like I now had the answers. There were, and still continue to  be, answers that I need.  But I didn’t know what to write about  – what I had written before (including doubt and uncertainty) no longer seemed to fit, even though I was still experiencing these things at times.

Perhaps it wasn’t coincidence that a day or so after reading the article, and hearing the news of friends having a new baby, I found myself looking in poetry anthologies for something to put in their card. Not finding anything that seemed to work, I took up my pen…and wrote a poem for the first time in ages.

Was it any good? No idea. But it said what I wanted to say to this new life. It was, as I wrote to the little girl’s parents, a gift of words.

What excites me at the moment is that this idea of story is making sense of some of my projects at work. It’s making sense of my musings on my own story, and what God may be saying.

It allows me to think about other people’s stories, through counselling. And perhaps there may even be a chance for that early love of story to come back through creative writing.

The stories are still about struggle. Uncertainty. But also overcoming these, and seeing who we become in the process. Finally, I may just have something to write about again.