jayber crow

In our little corner of the world we just spent a few weeks exploring the foothills of the strange and powerful Book of Job. Early on in the drama, after Job has lost his wealth and his children, we hear these familiar words from his mouth: 

Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked I will  depart.

The LORD gave and the LORD has taken away; may the name of the LORD be praised.

These are among the best-known and best-loved words in Job, and we often take them to be straight-forwardly admirable – this is how a faithful person should respond when tragedy strikes. Job’s words have even found their way into the bridge-bit of one of our best modern worship songs. And I’ve no doubt there’s a lot of courage and wisdom to be found in those words.

It’s just that the more I look at the story surrounding these words, the more I’m not quite sure how to respond to them. For one thing, Job’s confidence doesn’t last very long – as his suffering intensifies, his next expression of confidence in God sounds a lot more wobbly, and a few verses later he is cursing the day he was born and wishing he was dead. The impression I’m left with is that the words above represent a kind of conventional, expected religious response – the one Job had been trained to give, the right answer. He uses it as an instinctive response and protective wall, but it isn’t able to hold back the rising flood waters of doubt and anger and confusion which soon burst through. To find a place of honest hope, Job will have to give voice to all those dark emotions and wrestle with God. So I find Job’s later expressions of trust (“though he slay me, yet will I hope in him”) more honest, more hard-won, more powerful.

But that’s not all that bothers me about Job’s initial response. What troubles me most is the way Job bluntly attributes the death of his children to the direct action of God – Yahweh gives and Yahweh takes away. It troubles me on a personal, emotional level, but I think it’s also in tension with the opening scenes of the drama of Job, where we saw God in dialogue with the Adversary. There we heard the Adversary provoking God to “stretch out his hand” against Job, but God responded by giving the Adversary permission (within set limits) to attack Job. For those of us who have overheard this dialogue behind the curtain, it seems clear that it wasn’t the hand of God that struck Job, but the hand of the enemy.

Of course that distinction doesn’t take away the dark questions about why God gives such freedom or permission to the enemy to hurt and kill and destroy. But it seems to me like a vital distinction emotionally and pastorally,  for the sake of our hearts and our view of the Father’s character. We need the space, given by the drama of Job, to say in the face of tragedy that  ”this is not how it’s supposed to be”, “this is not good”, this is not the good and perfect and pleasing will of God. We do damage to our hearts when we look at something damaged and twisted and evil (demonic) and try and find a way to call it good.

As Mrs Landingham once said, in the greatest episode of the greatest TV show ever made, “God doesn’t make cars crash and you know it.”

A friend of mine, who has walked through his own Job-like story with the death of a brother and a father, recently wrote these words after losing a friend:

Blessed are those who mourn, who do not go gently, nor call that night “good”, who rage when brushed by Lazarus’ stench, who defy every story’s ending, who contradict Job (who hadn’t seen the adversary behind the curtain), and say, “He gives and gives and gives us life, he does not take away”, whose final enemy, like Life’s author, is death, whose love, like His, is stronger than the grave. Who do not confuse the will of God with the will of His enemy, but, like Jesus, weep bitterly at the tomb and mock its clutch by calling it “sleep”. Blessed are those who mourn, for their greatest comfort will be the surprising joy and wholeness of hearts long torn, when the cloud of lost onlookers is to flesh reborn and once again we embrace and our eyes meet, never again to be still.

 Terence Malick’s breathtaking film, The Tree of Life, is deeply influenced and inspired by the book of Job – but Malick chose to put the words “the Lord gives and the Lord takes away” on the lips of the “Job’s comforter” character, mumbling useless platitudes with no power to comfort a mother who has lost her son. That seems kind of right to me. I’ll confess I’ve always struggled to understand why some people seem to consider it a comfort when a child or young person has died to assert that “God took him.” These words from David Bentley Hart seem to me to strike a better, deeper, more hopeful and healing note:

As for comfort, when we seek it, I can imagine none greater than the happy knowledge that when I see the death of a child I do not see the face of God, but the face of His enemy…We can rejoice that we are saved not through the immanent mechanisms of history and nature, but by grace; that God will not unite all of history’s many strands in one great synthesis, but will judge much of history false and damnable; that He will not simply reveal the sublime logic of fallen nature, but will strike off the fetters in which creation languishes; and that, rather than showing us how the tears of a small girl suffering in the dark were necessary for the building of the Kingdom, He will instead raise her up and wipe away all tears from her eyes—and there shall be no more death, nor sorrow, nor crying, nor any more pain, for the former things will have passed away, and He that sits upon the throne will say, “Behold, I make all things new.”

And now, I’d love to hear your thoughts.

It’s always good to end the year doing something momentous, like posting your five favourite albums of the year. Here they are, without comment (except to say I know I’m a year late discovering the Avett Brothers album):

The King is Dead (The Decemberists)

I and Love and You (The Avett Brothers)

The Harrow and the Harvest (Gillian Welch)

Metals (Feist)

I Am Very Far (Okkervil River)

Happy New Year!

Always read something that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it (P.J. O’Rourke)

When I started thinking about my books of the year, my first impression was that it had been a lean year and I was struggling to put together a top five. Of course, after a bit more thought I remembered a few more gems, and in the end I couldn’t trim my list down to less than seven. Here, then, are the seven books that most delighted, provoked or inspired me this year:

My two favourite novels were Star of the Sea by Joseph O’Connor, and The Help by Kathryn Stockett. Both were every bit as good as the hype suggested, both took me into the human heart of a period of history full of political controversy, and both made me think and made me cry.

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle is written by one of my favourite novelists, Barbara Kingsolver. But this book is a kind of journal of a year in the life of her family when they tried to eat only what was grown in their local area, and mainly what was grown in their own back garden. It’s beautifully written (as you would expect) and full of wisdom, not only about food, but also about family, community, work, grace and gratitude.  It has even inspired me to make rash promises about joining Mrs. Crow in the garden this spring to dig and plant and weed and participate in the miracle.

Rob Bell caused a few ripples this year with a book which didn’t deserve the strangely frenzied criticism it received, but also doesn’t deserve to be widely read, being a bit messy and a bit rubbish. But this year I also read Sex God, and it is, quite simply, wonderful. It’s the book I would put in the hands of any young person or young adult struggling with issues of sexual purity. It takes turns being honest, funny, wise, sad and beautiful.

And no.

I didn’t find the writing style annoying.

Seriously.

 I finally got round to reading Life Together, Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s classic reflection on the church and Christian community. It is a deceptively simple little book, full of profound wisdom. I would happily take it in place of all of the twenty best selling books on church growth and “The Next Revolution of the Church of Tomorrow” in my local Christian bookshop. I’ll probably re-read it once every couple of years.

 Friends have been badgering me to read some Stanley Hauerwas for a long time, and it may or may not have been a good idea to finally begin with his memoirs. The first thing to say about Hannah’s Child is that it is a genuinely enjoyable, entertaining page-turner – maybe not what you might expect from a book with the subtitle, “A Theologian’s Memoir.” It can be very moving, especially in the heartbreaking accounts of living with a mentally ill wife. There are lots of paragraphs I copied out, either because they were deeply, powerfully wise, or because I had no idea whether I agreed with him but wanted to think about it. He is never dull. At the same time, I finished the book still not quite sure what I think of Stanley. His most appealing characteristic is his blunt honesty, especially when he reflects on his own faults and failures. But I felt more uncomfortable when he turned that blunt honesty on others, and talked personally about the character flaws of people he has worked with. Anyway, the book impacted me more deeply than most, I’m glad I read it, I think you should read it, and I’ll move on to some of his other books in 2012 (any recommendations?).

But my book of the year by a long way is another memoir by a very different grey-bearded sage. I’m not even going to pretend my review is impartial and objective. Eugene Peterson has been a hero and mentor to me through his books for a long time, and reading The Pastor: A Memoir felt like the closest thing to spending a few days in his company, soaking up his gentle, joyful wisdom. The book is full of stories that are full of life in all its mess and all its glory. His descriptions of both what’s hard and what’s good about being a pastor, and both what’s messed-up and what’s beautiful about the church, were so recognisable and truthful they made me cry. I consider him a prophet of our generation. I would like to take every pastor/minister/priest on this island on a retreat where they can read this book on a mountain, then come down and talk about it together, then go and read it again. I’ll be surprised if I manage to wait a year before I read it again.

So now I’d love to hear about the books that have done you good this year.

Grace and peace to you and those you love in 2012.

 There is a great deal of difference between an eager man who wants to read a book and a tired man who wants a book to read (G.K. Chesterton)

Yes, it’s that time of year when a man’s mind turns to best-of-lists and good intentions to get back into the groove of regular blogging. I’d like to propose a gentle revolution that involves a general move away from Facebook and back to the deeper conversations and richer community of the blogosphere. Anyone with me?

But for now, The Lists. It’s been a good year for me in terms of movie-watching. In the last decade my engagement with cinema had declined drastically as a result of moving from Dublin to Coleraine (I assume this needs no explanation) and becoming a parent to three lively children (likewise). When I came to do my best-of-lists at the end of last year, I realised I had only seen about 10 movies in the whole year. That was the nadir and the wake-up-call. Good films have always been a source of inspiration and nourishment to me, a kind of means of grace. So the famine had to end.

We signed up to a postal DVD service, and dived into a year of catching up on everything we had missed the last few years. This will help explain why my choices are all a bit behind-the-times. We still don’t often get to the cinema and the best movies don’t make it to the Coleraine Moviehouse anyway. So I’m usually about a year behind the cultural cutting edge. But I managed to watch 70 movies this year, and most of them were good, quite a few were great, and these were the eight that most stirred my heart and mind:

A Prophet

Man on Wire

Inception

Of Gods and Men

The Fighter

The Last Days of Sophie Scholl

Blue Valentine

Joyeux Noel

For the record, here are the movies that just missed the cut: Crazy Heart, The Dark Knight, Wasteland, Away We Go, True Grit, Munich, Inside Job, Black Swan, The Class, Moneyball.

The worst films I saw this year? Prince of Persia, Taken, Green Lantern.

The biggest disappointments? Avatar, The King’s Speech, Hugo .

And the films from this year that I’m most looking forward to catching up with soon: The Tree of Life, The Artist, We Need to Talk about Kevin.

If I’ve missed something essential or deeply offended your favourite movie, please let me know and share your lists with the rest of us. My music and book lists are still to come…

I suffer from a psychological compulsion which means that I can’t let the end of the year go by without compiling lists of my favourite things from the twelve months just past. I know some of you can empathise. Hopefully putting up my lists may provide a spur to get back in the saddle with some more regular blogging in 2011. And also a spur to sort out my life and watch some more movies next year. Unlike certain other people, I’ve seen nearly nothing this year and had to scrape the barrel to find some offerings.

So without any comment, and in no particular order, here are my top 3 favourites from the culural artifacts that were new to me this year:

First, the music:

The National – High Violet

Over the Rhine – The Long Surrender

Mumford & Sons – Sigh No More

And the novels:

We Need To Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver

The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver

Brooklyn by Colm Toibin

And the non-fiction books:

Surprised by Hope by Tom Wright*

A Million Miles In A Thousand Years by Donald Miller

Planet Narnia by Michael Ward

(* definitely helped by the fact that I got to read and discuss it week by week with one of our favourite people)

And finally, the best I could find from the movies I managed to see:

A Serious Man

Up In The Air

Toy Story 3

(seriously, that’s all I can come up with)

I’m happy to defend my choices against your scorn, but more than that I’d love to hear your nominations (which will then form the core of my choices for next year).

Finally, if you’d like to catch up a little on the everyday craziness of life in our little family, I recommend a meander through my amazing wife’s advent blog.

Peace on all (three) of you in 2011.

I like to think I take a generally positive view of science. And I’m confused by those who seem to think that the creation of the first “synthetic life form” presents some kind of drastic threat to the credibility of religious faith. In the-Christian-version-of-things, human beings are created in the image of their Creator. So the fact that humans have used their God-given resources of intelligence and creativity to copy something they found in God’s creation seems, well, unsurprising.

This is a genuinely impressive breakthrough in the history of human discovery, and of what Kepler called “thinking God’s thoughts after him.” So why do I feel uneasy and not excited? I spent this morning in Starbucks reading Wendell Berry (which is a bit like sitting in the Enron board-room reading Karl Marx) and he put words to my feelings of unease:

The journalists think it intellectually chic to stand open-mouthed before any wonder of science whatsoever. The media, cultivating their mediocrity, seem quite comfortably unaware that many of the calamities from which science is expected to save the world were caused in the first place by science – which meanwhile is busy propagating further calamities, hailed now as wonders, from which later it will undertake to save the world. Nobody, so far as I have heard, is attempting to figure out how much of the progress resulting from this enterprise is net. It is as if the whole population has been gentically deprived of the ability to subtract….

The only science we have or can have is human science; it has human limits and is involved always with human ignorance and human error. It is a fact that the solutions invented or discovered by science have tended to lead to new problems or to become problems themselves. Scientists discovered how to use nuclear energy to solve some problems, but any use of it is enormously dangerous to us all, and scientists have not discovered what to do with the waste. (They have not discovered what to do with old tires). The availability of antibiotics leads to the overuse of antibiotics. And so on. Our daily lives are a daily mockery of our scientific pretensions. We are learning to know precisely the location of our genes, but significant numbers of us don’t know the whereabouts of our children. Science does not seem to be lighting the way; we seem rather to be leapfrogging into the dark along series of scientific solutions, which become problems, which call for further solutions, which science is always eager to supply, and which it sometimes cannot supply…

It is dangerous to act… on the assumption that our knowledge will increase fast enough to outrace the bad consequences of the arrogant use of incomplete knowledge. To trust “progress” or our putative “genius” to solve all the problems that we cause is worse than bad science; it is bad religion.

(From Life is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition)

I’ve been reading a strange and fascinating book called Planet Narnia by a scholar called Michael Ward who claims to have uncovered a hidden theme running through CS Lewis’s Narnia books. I was pretty sceptical of the whole idea of a “hidden theme,” but I was first hooked, then floored, then completely convinced by Ward’s arguments.

The basic idea is that each Narnia book reflects one of the seven planets in medieval astronomy (Jupiter, Mars, Sol, Luna, Mercury, Venus, Saturn). Lewis was endlessly fascinated by the medieval worldview, and always believed that there was wisdom in that era that has been lost in the modern, scientific age. He knew that the medieval view of the solar system was not “literally” accurate, and he didn’t believe that the planets influence life on earth in the way that astrologers (medieval and modern) describe, and he didn’t believe in the pagan deities named after the planets.  But he did believe that the seven medieval planets were useful as literary metaphors, or as “spiritual symbols” of “permanent value.”

Each planet had its own particular character, which Lewis believed reflected some aspect of reality, of life, of God himself. And so Ward argues that each Narnia book was crafted to reflect the particular character or mood or atmosphere of one of the planets, especially in how it depicts the character of Aslan. You’ll have to read Ward’s book to find out how the flip that works.

But the bit that has grabbed my imagination is the way Ward (and Lewis) talk about the relative significance of Saturn and Jupiter. This is the tricky part to write about, since each planet represents a mood or atmosphere, and can’t be reduced to a strict definition. But in very simplistic terms, Saturn is the planet that speaks of sorrow, disaster, melancholy, pestilence and ill luck. He is “the last planet, old and ugly.” Jupiter, on the other hand, is the King of the planets, and speaks of benevolence, festivity, peace and joy – of “winter passed and guilt forgiven.” (For those who are interested, Saturn is the planet corresponding to The Last Battle,  and Jupiter is the ruling planet of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe). The influence of these symbols is seen in the adjectives which are still sometimes used to describe these two different moods – “saturnine” (OK that one’s not used very much today) and “jovial.”

Lewis argues that the modern age is dominated by the spirit of Saturn, as reflected in the sombre, bleak, “realistic” literature of highly-admired writers like TS Eliot and John Donne. As a young man, Lewis was drawn to this kind of literature, but he later grew to question the dominance of this serious, melancholy mood.

Of Saturn we know more than enough, but who does not need to be reminded of Jove?

The view Lewis came to (and expressed in his Narnia books) is that Saturn must be given his place – there is pain and sorrow in the world, and it must be faced, and felt, and acknowledged, and lamented. But Saturn is not King, not the centre of the universe. So sorrow and melancholy are not the last word, are not the deepest truth we can bear witness to about reality. At the end of everything, at the heart of everything, Jupiter is King. Joy is at the heart of the universe.

This gets me thinking about a lot of things. A lot of times our Christian subculture  tries to skip past Saturn and get to the joy of Jupiter, and we end up with a cheap, sentimental, chirpy cheerfulness.  This is what I find reflected in a lot of Christian art (music, fiction, etc.) as well as in a lot of sermons and Christian books. It doesn’t face the depth of the brokenness that’s in the world and in our own hearts and lives. As that old saturnine prophet Jeremiah once growled, it “dresses the wounds of the people lightly.” That’s why in spite of the surface chirpiness and optimism, I find this music and writing strangely depressing and dispiriting.

I think it’s for that reason that I ended up being drawn to the art being produced outside the Christian bubble, and developed a great love of depressing novels and music and films. They seemed to describe the world more truthfully, more courageously than a lot of Christian art and teaching. They were deeper, more mature, more grown-up. There was wisdom in Radiohead and Fight Club and Ian McEwan that was missing from the shelves of Wesley Owen.

But I think Lewis is right. Melancholy has its place, but it’s not the last or best word we have to say. Cynicism is not more truthful than hope, and sorrow is not more mature than joy. What we need to bear witness to in our art, our preaching, our lives, is the joy that lies on the other side of sorrow, or even in the midst of sorrow.

Lewis says that capturing this truly “jovial” spirit is much more difficult than the melancholy of Saturn, and there are very few writers who pull it off. I think Lewis is one of those who did, and this jovial spirit, this infectious joy-beyond-sorrow, is the heartbeat of his best writing. It’s also the heartbeat of  the writers who most influenced Lewis, like George MacDonald and GK Chesterton, and of his old friend JRR Tolkien.

But are there any artists in our generation who manage to convey the spirit of joviality? Only a few come to mind for me. Wendell Berry, Marilynne Robsinson, Sufjan Stevens, Gillian Welch…? Among popular Christian writers, Frederick Buechner and Philip Yancey. There must be others. I’d love to hear your suggestions.

I’m also convinced that this is the heart of the challenge for preachers and for the Christian community. How do we acknowledge the heartache and brokenness in the room and in the wider world, the reality of cancer and depression and divorce and abuse and war and debt and anger and lust? Saturn must have his due. The sorrow must be felt and faced. But still, we must bear witness to a reality deeper than sorrow. Jupiter is King (because Jesus is King). We are to be a community of hope and joy and good news. We’ll let Tolkien have the last word:

there is joy beyond the walls of the world, more poignant than grief

OK so without any further explanation, here are my favourite records of the past decade for your entertainment and ridicule. I’d love to hear what you would include instead…

Heartbreaker – Ryan Adams (2000)

Time (The Revelator) – Gillian Welch (2001)

American IV: The Man Comes Around – Johnny Cash (2002)

Yankee Hotel Foxtrot – Wilco (2002)

Ohio – Over the Rhine (2003)

Illinois – Sufjan Stevens (2005)

I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning – Bright Eyes (2005)

Our Endless Numbered Days - Iron and Wine (2005)

Songs from the Deep Forest – Duke Special (2006)

 Boxer – The National (2007)

Happy Christmas everyone!

(and a special word of sympathy and affection for Zoomtard and his two broken wings)

I’ve been reading High Fidelity and it has reminded me of the simple, boyish pleasure of compiling “top 5″ lists. At the end of every year I like to try and pick the best books, movies and music I’ve discovered that year. But until the other day I had turned my nose up at all the “top 50 whatevers of the decade” lists that were popping up everywhere I looked. I like end of year lists and I like all time lists, but decade lists just seemed unnecessary and random.

But then I read Zoomtard’s delightful romp through his favourite movies of the last decade. And it got my list-maker whirring. And I realised on reflection that decade lists make more sense given the way I now engage with pop culture. When I was a student, I tried to keep up with new music and movies as they came out, and my end of year lists would have consisted mostly of newish releases. Now, with a house full of kids, I catch up with new albums and new films just whenever I can get round to it, which is sometimes two or three years later. So looking back on the “best of the decade” suits my middle-aged, behind-the-times, consumption of pop culture.

So first, here are the movies (I’ll do the music tomorrow). I tried to be honest and left out critically adored movies which I appreciated but didn’t love (like No Country For Old Men, The Royal Tenenbaums, Lost in Translation). These are the ten movies which I loved most deeply, which really stirred me and delighted me and floored me, and lingered in the memory. I haven’t tried to rank the ten so the order is chronological:

Memento (2000)

Traffic (2000)

The Lord of the Rings (2001, 2002, 2003)

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)

Brokeback Mountain (2005)

Hidden/Caché (2005)

The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (2005)

Juno (2007)

Lars and the Real Girl (2007)

There Will Be Blood (2007)

There were some brilliant documentaries which kept trying to force themselves into the list, so to keep them quiet I made them their own list. My five favourite documetaries from this decade:

Bowling for Columbine (2002)

Spellbound (2002)

The Fog of War (2003)

Grizzly Man (2005)

King of Kong (2007)

I’ll be happy to make a passionate defense of my choices if you want to question my taste and cultural illiteracy and lack of basic human decency. But I’d also like to hear what you would include that I’ve left out. I’m aware that there are some widely-praised movies I haven’t got round to seeing yet, including Children of Men, The Lives of Others, Gran Torino, and The Dark Knight. What other gems have I missed out??

Ruth grew up in a loving home in the countryside just outside Coleraine. For fifteen years she flourished under her parents’ gentle care like her other siblings.

But in fourth form she fell in with a crowd of girls who were a little wild, a little rebellious. It started with black eyeliner and pierced tongues and angry music, but with time their rebellion took on more extreme forms. Her parents saw enough to break their hearts, and they kept reaching out to her, but she was slipping away from their influence.

By seventeen she was living with her boyfriend in London. He had some money and introduced her to a vibrant party scene. She was funny and attractive and confident and she moved easily into the centre of a hip new social world.

She jumped at the chance to apply to be on a new reality TV show inspired by Big Brother. At her interview she sold herself as the little girl from the provincial backwater who had become the party girl in the big city and they bought it.

On the show, she found herself acting more crudely to get attention. She got drunk every chance she got, dressed provocatively, got involved with two of the guys. And she entertained her housemates, and the watching world, with hilarious stories about her dull hometown and her small-minded parents and their stupid family traditions.

Her parents tried not to watch but they were drawn like a magnet to the TV, to the internet, to the papers, hoping for some small glimpse of the daughter they knew and loved, but they came away hurt and confused. Their friends eventually stopped mentioning Ruth in their presence because they saw the pain it caused.

For a while after the show Ruth was the darling of the tabloids and the fashion magazines. She was everywhere. But before long there were rumours about her drink-problem, about drugs, about a succession of tempestuous relationships. The stories in the tabloids became more sordid. As the papers turned against her, she seemed to turn to ever more outrageous behaviour to get attention. She alienated everyone she had called a friend. There were rumours about anorexia, about an abortion, about a suicide attempt…

Finally the stories dried up. In the canteen at work her dad would scan the pages of the trashy papers looking for the tiniest mention of his daughter, but her fifteen minutes of fame had passed.

Five years later, Ruth woke one morning in her grotty apartment in north London. She had no job, no money, no friends, no options. Her body was a wreck, her mind was worse.

Suddenly she saw the most vivid picture in her mind, of her family home and garden and her little box-bedroom and her mum and dad and she felt a longing like a deep pain in her side. She didn’t feel like a rebel or a confident woman of the world. She felt like a little girl, lost and alone. She wanted to go home, more than anything in the world.

24 hours later she’s sitting on a bus headed from the airport to Coleraine. She had phoned her parents to tell them she was coming home. She got the answering machine. The first two times she hung up without leaving a message. The third time she told them she was coming home,  told them what time her bus got in. Now she’s realizing the stupidity of her plan. What if they’re out of town and don’t get the message? What if they’ve moved house? She should have waited another day to talk to them, given them some time to get over the shock. What if they just don’t want to see her again, after all the ways she’s hurt them?

She practices her apology for her father. “Dad, I’m sorry. I know I was wrong. It’s not your fault, it’s all mine. I don’t blame you if you hate me, if you don’t trust me. If you’ll let me stay for a bit, I’ll get a job, I’ll pay rent, I’ll help out in the house. Maybe with time you can forgive me.” She hasn’t apologised to anyone in years.

She watches the familiar countryside rolling past her window. Every now and then a sign tells her the miles to go to Coleraine. She feels sick.

Finally the bus pulls into Coleraine station. She checks herself in her make-up mirror, looks at her pale reflection, fixes her hair.  Her stomach is in knots.

She walks into the terminal not knowing what to expect. Not one of the thousand scenes that have played out in her mind have prepared her for what she sees. There in the plastic-chairs bus station in Coleraine stands a group of forty brothers and sisters and little nephews and nieces and great-aunts and uncles and cousins and a grandmother and even a great-grandmother in a wheelchair. They’re all wearing goofy party-hats and blowing party-blowers, and taped across the entire wall is a home-made banner that reads “Welcome home!!”

Out of the crowd steps her dad. She stares at the floor as the tears run down her nose and she begins to stammer out her memorized speech.

But her dad is crying too and he’s holding her so tight she can barely breathe and he’s saying, “Hush, child. We’ve got no time for that. We’ll be late for the party. I know its July but your mum has cooked Christmas dinner and there’s a feast waiting for you at home.”

(OK so clearly I’m not much of a story-writer, but in the spirit of “telling it slant” I’m having a go. The best bits were my wife’s idea, a few lines are stolen wholesale from Philip Yancey, and obviously the whole thing is inspired by the greatest story Jesus ever told…)