Ali's blog

The language is old fashioned, but this is a beautiful hymn. If you know God as your loving Father, you can know that everything you experience is from his loving hand. Neither world events, nor your personal life circumstances, occur by random chance. They are guided by a God who is good, wise, kind and powerful. There are certainly forces of evil at work in the world, but if God is your refuge, you don’t need to fear them either. He’s the one who is utterly in control, over all. We all go through ups and downs in life, hills and valleys, joys and sorrows, comfort and pain. Sometimes the valleys can be very deep, and the pain can feel almost too much to bear. But the God who is over all, and who one day will right all the wrongs, is willing and ready to be your God, too, and give you strength and hope in the midst of every circumstance in life. If you know this God, keep singing; keep praying; keep trusting in his Word; keep looking to Jesus; do your own part faithfully. His love is u...

The rain patta-patta-patta-pattas insistently on the shed roof. Tens of thousands of tiny drops explode in quick succession on a kamikaze mission. They batter at my brain, one pin-pointed ‘pat’ at a time, demanding my attention and soothing my scattered thoughts - an army of taps and pats pricking my mind and relieving its pressure.  Patta-patta-patta-patta. The sound washes louder and softer.  I want to sit here all night listening to the rain. It demands my attention, but only to calm me. It commands my concentration, but only to free me from my own darting and distracting thoughts. Attend to this. Here. Now. And let those other worries flow away. God’s hands hold them. God sends the rain, and allows me to listen. Listen.  Tomorrow morning I will be under another roof. A school building, the meeting place for our church. Other demands engage my attention. A child pulling at my sleeve and climbing into my lap. A teenager’s whispered question. The cares and burdens of the...

We've been doing a lot in our garden recently – knocking down the falling-down shed and building a new fence (Jonny's department), but also planting out a few things, enjoying watching other things grow and taking lots of pretty photos (my department). (The children have been involved in both of the above, as well as creating an even bigger mud bath out of the part of the garden which could once have been called a 'lawn'.) It's got me thinking about planting and growing and the cycles of life generally. It's reminded me that gardening is one of my favourite metaphors for parenting – what seeds are we planting day by day in our children's lives? What words of encouragement are we sowing? How are we nurturing the shoots of curiosity and kindness, creativity and goodness which we want to see grow and come to full flower in their lives? How are we guiding and cultivating good and healthy habits, like upright canes which allow runner beans to climb towards the su...

As I type, I'm listening to Rachmaninov's Rhapsody on a Theme by Paganini on Classic FM. (Apparently. So the internet tells me.) The orchestral strings soar over the richly chunky piano chords, coming to a pitch and then subsiding to let the piano's more delicate melody emerge again. There's just time to finish this paragraph as the piece comes to a beautiful, poignant close. On to something from 'Romeo and Juliet' by Tchaikovsky, now. The melody lifts. I type on. From my window I can still see fireworks bursting in my peripheral vision. Stars and flowers, spraying and sparkling in the darkness. A vivid flash of light and colour flies every which way, an exploding pattern of shattering, bejewelled beauty, impressed on the senses for a moment, falling, dying, then gone. Earlier this evening, the children delighted in the few sparklers we found in the storage passage from last year, twirling and waving the spitting, sparking sticks, captivated by their tiny blazes...

I toggle back and forth between the BBC news pages about the new lockdown – 'Lockdown 2.0' – in the UK, the incoming results of the US Presidential election, and the World news section. There I read about terrorist shootings in Austria, school shootings in Cameroon, violence in Mozambique and Ethiopia, gold-smuggling and money-laundering in Zimbabwe and South Africa... a veritable flood of every kind of human corruption and violence, the whole world over. Ugly words, ugly actions, ugly hearts, bubbling up and threatening to overwhelm any remnant of order, goodness and peace. The plight of Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh. Darkness and suffering, displacement and destitution, abuse of power and the violence that follows inevitably from political and social unrest. Tropical Storm Eta 'battering' Central America. Even the natural world is in turmoil, rising up in a literal whirlwind which mirrors the restless and destructive impulses of the human lives on this teeming plane...