Arti's accounts

A: The amount of sleep you get at one time when a cat is skittering round the flat and meowing most of the night!

Yes I have a house guest this weekend. Honey is a very beautiful pedigree cream English shorthair cat and I am looking after her for the weekend while my friend Gentle ( taking Dee’s idea about names here) is away. She is lovely and friendly and even likes being combed but she did have a little difficulty in understanding the concept of “night time”. She is currently sitting on my living room window watching the inaccessible wildlife outside.

Actually I am pretty sure Honey’s middle name is Marge as she likes to make noises like Marge from the Simpsons! It’s pretty difficult to reproduce in print but if you imagine Marge saying “rmrrm Homey” you’ll get the idea. The rmrrm bit I mean – she’d be a bit of a clever cat, as well as a telly addict if she could manage “Homey” as well!

…of the young people at our church. Last night they put on an evening of entertainment in aid of Tearfund and a project that is taking place in Indonesia following the tsunami. They were brilliant. We had sketches and a really good street dance group and a lively youth choir plus a range of solo and small group musical items. I really enjoyed the evening. You know what I noticed though – nearly all the audience were related either to the young people or to the youth leaders in some way – out of a large church there were very few others who had come. I was a bit disappointed about that.

Some of the statistics presented in the evening were a bit shocking too.

Did you know that:
the number of children in the world living on the streets is equal to three times the population of the U.K?
another child becomes an AIDS orphan once every 14 seconds?
the amount of money that it would take to provide everyone in the world with clean water and sanitation is less than Europe spends in a year on ice cream?

It has really made me think!

as well as pretty hard to take in!

Another one of our church homegroup members died today. M is E’s mother and she died this morning. She was very elderly and so in one way it was expected but it’s still a shock and I feel very upset for E, having to cope with the death of her husband and mother in such a short space of time. This is the third of our homegroup members to die since January (F, who was in her early 20’s and recently married, died of cancer earlier in the year).

My head is reeling rather and I’m finding all this really hard to process.

D’s funeral was yesterday – it went well and was an uplifting time as well as obviously a time for tears and sorrow. There were loads of people there (guessing 500 to 600). His two daughters spoke about their memories of him and so did some of his friends and a work colleague. One thing that really made me cry was seeing D’s son helping to carry the coffin. When I first lodged with D and E, their son was only 9. Lots of my memories of him are as a small boy. Of course he is in his 20’s now but somehow seeing him carrying the coffin brought home the “wrongness” of it all. The service was positive too though – the reality of D’s own faith in Jesus was very much evident through what was said and E’s sister read a poem that E had written following D’s death. It was about how our response could be either just to look at the great gaping hole left by his absence or to reach out to the same source of life and hope that D had reached out to. Amazing that she was able to write something like that so soon after his death but also some how very like her to do it. I hope our homegroup will be able to love and support her a lot over the next few months – I think we will!

I couldn’t really believe it when I heard of M’s death today. She attended the funeral yesterday nad of course it would have been a very tiring day for her but I still am finding it hard to take in that this has happened so soon after D’s death. I just hate the whole situation and am feeling that I am one really angry Arti! Death really stinks!

Well – it’s been a very unhappy week. Yesterday I met with others from my homegroup (of which D was a part together with his wife E). We were able to pray and cry together. Yesterday was the first day I was able to cry about it all properly- I feel very yuckky today but it has probably helped.

When I first came to live in this city (many more years ago than I care to remember) I was a lodger with D and E and their family. It was quite a difficult and unhappy time for me but the home that they provided was a real God-send. I lived with them for 5 years, watched their children grow up and shared many aspects of their family life. It is still hard for me to realise that D is no longer here. He was such a lively, healthy, larger than life person, a great raconteur and a generous giver to others. He was still quite young (58ish) and he and E had such plans for things they would do together once he retired. They were a very close couple and worked as a real partnership. Things were so sudden and unexpected. Last week we were meeting at their home and D was in bed unwell because he hadn’t got over a virus he probably picked up on a recent trip abroad. By the weekend he was in hospital. There are times when you just cry out the unanswerable questions like “Why him?” and “Why now?”

We talked a lot about pain and suffering and asking difficult questions of God at homegroup last night. One thing I am really wondering is whether we can really love the world unless we suffer as others suffer. Whether it’s AIDS orphans in Africa, a mother who had her child ripped out of her arms in the tsunami, or us who are grieving at the sudden and unexpected loss of a friend – I wonder whether it is really only our own experiences of pain and loss that give us real compassion and empathy for others. This isn’t a conclusion I like very much but I’m wondering if it is true.