What's worse than Monday morning?

Categories: uncategorized

Date: 09 January 2006 16:42:43

Monday afternoon, it seems. It hasn't been a bad day really. It was going to be difficult - 2 children and 1 wife starting school and work respectively for the new year. Getting up while it was still dark. I don't think that it was dark when we left the house. And both Wife and I caught our buses!

My hopes for the morning were not boosted when I discovered that the other person who should have been on this morning hadn't returned from Finland. I can't complain, because my colleague who was standing in for her had sat down in the foreground place (we generally have two people on the helpdesk, a foreground person, who has to answer the phone, and is generally reckoned to be in charge, and a background person who usually keeps track of emails), meaning that I quietly became the background person, letting my colleague answer most of the phone calls. But then at coffee time he transmogrified into somebody else, which didn't do much for continuity. My second colleague stayed longer than he really should have, for which also I am reasonably grateful. But I really only properly dealt with one call (which I didn't solve, because it had an SEP field (see footnote) around it).

And I'm getting seriously behind in my bible reading schedule. It doesn't help that at the same time I'm reading a book which is designed to help people whose religious practice has become so obsessive that they have to regard themselves as addicts. I do need a certain amount of discipline to keep going. I really don't want to give up now. But am I trying too hard?

It's frightening to read this book, and to realise how sometimes common sense gets abandoned in a religious context. The author is talking about people who make 'excessive financial contributions' to religious causes. He describes a particular case, where somebody has to tell himself that 10% of his income is too much to give regularly to the church. I have never, ever heard a preacher even suggest that to give less than 10% might be sensible in certain circumstances. Yet, quite obviously, there is absolutely no point in an individual (or a family) causing themselves financial hardship just to achieve the magical figure. I'm preaching to myself here. There's something enormously comforting in a rule which says - give this much and you're OK. Nowhere else are we told - if you can love your neighbour this much, then you're doing enough - or, if you pray this much, then you're probably hitting the mark (Actually, I have read some wise advice which does suggest that spending a certain amount of time in prayer each day is a good idea, and not to overdo it). But because in the area of financial contributions we're given an actual target, however appropriate or inappropriate it might be in particular circumstances, there is (for me) an immense temptation to make this the focus of my Christian endeavour, because in this one area I can say - I've done enough (even if, common sensically, it was really too much).

Balance. At last, in my fifties, I'm beginning to realise that balance in the Christian life is actually a good thing. I'm sure that there is a Proverb somewhere that says 'neither be too good nor too bad', which could be a bit silly, but does make the point.

And footnote: an SEP field is described in one of Douglas Adams' books (I can't remember which one). SEP stands for Somebody Else's Problem, and an SEP field makes the thing it encloses invisible.