First Blog Post

Life is full of humbling moments.

There is the good kind, the “Oh wow, what an amazing world/creation, and I am just a tiny, tiny part of it” kind.

Then there is the more uncomfortable kind, the “oh dear, I really shouldn’t have done that/should have known better and now I have to eat humble pie” kind.

I love the fact that God is so generous with the first kind of moment. But I wouldn’t mind it if he was a bit stingier with the second

Case in point: I was very careful, when we began work on our new website, to ask our lovely web designer Daniel McPherson to call this an “occasional” blog. This is because I reckoned that committing to a new post every week or even every month, might be a bit ambitious. Minister’s weekly timetables are often unpredictable things.

And anyway, did folks really need to hear from me that often? Between weekly services and a monthly letter in the church magazine, my voice isn’t exactly unheard.

Confession time - I also thought if I kept things general, then a casual visitor to the blog might not notice if it happened to be three months out of date!

Alas, as the Scottish bard almost said, “the best laid plans o’mice and ministers gang aft agley”

The fact is I have never been a very general kind of writer or preacher. My writing, and preaching, tends to be responsive and contextual - growing out of the connections between what I find in the bible and what I notice is happening in the world at any given time, whether personally, locally, nationally or globally.

This means, for example, that the chances were pretty slim that I would get to the end of this post without mentioning that I currently have a broken wrist, or that the Catholic Church has just chosen a new pope, or that it was VE Day this week; or that the weather in the North East of Scotland was affa’ bonnie for the Run Garioch.

Of all those bits of context, the one that felt the most relevant and real and lasting enough to stay up on this blog until I get around to writing the next one was a quote from the new pope. I liked the quote and used a bit of it in my last sermon.

So I put it in my first draft and sent it off to Daniel to post.

Only it turns out that the pope probably didn’t say those exact words. My humbling began when a younger person to whom I had showed the quote commented that “It seems a bit too convenient to be real”. I did a bit of searching, and so far, it looks like they might be right.

It is likely that someone decided it was what the Pope meant. So they put words in his mouth and popped it into a social media meme for people like myself to share. It’s even possible the quote was AI generated, with someone putting in the prompt “express a plausible reaction of Pope Leo X1V to the accusation of being called woke”

I don’t like feeling tricked or misled, even if the originator meant it benignly. Nor do I like having my perception of myself as a relatively savvy user of social media punctured!

But hey ho, being humbled every so often when you are in the public position of helping people to interpret God’s word within today’s context is undoubtedly healthy - if not very comfortable.

Part of the call to ministry - whether you are a world famous pope or a local parish minister - is being willing to be held accountable for what you say, do or share.

So I want to promise that it will always be me writing this blog. Not someone or something saying the kind of things I might say. You might not like nor agree with what I say, but at least you will know it is me saying it.

And I will try to double check my sources when I am quoting others; because in an increasingly artificial world, authenticity matters.

In the end I am glad that the words I rely on most to help me understand and explore the nature of God and of God’s kingdom - the words that both humble and inspire me - have been around for at least two millennia.

And so while I could easily take advantage of the lack of a word limit on this blog (we may have missed a trick there Daniel) to bring in all the bits of context I mentioned above, I am happy instead to finish with a few of Jesus’ own well known words as a reminder of what really matters.

“Love one another, as I have loved you” (John 13:34)

There’s a quote which I am happy to have up on this page forever,

Every blessing

Rhona