From the Archives - April 2009

I recently went on a weekend organised by New Wine.  It’s specifically for clergy wives; that great army of often overlooked ‘jackies- of- all -trades’.  Apart from all the other things we do we occasionally have to do the youth work at a moment’s notice, provide hospitality for total strangers and be cheer-leader for our sometimes beleaguered husbands.  So before we start knocking back the communion wine with our cornflakes, an annual retreat is provided to soothe our frazzled nerves and restore some equilibrium.  Four of us travelled up from Hastings to the Holiday Inn, Aylesbury where the event was hosted.

It’s not exactly Lee Abbey.  You can almost feel the spectral tread of Meg Mortimer along the miles of motel corridors and what made it more surreal was that regular guests were resident also.  It could not have escaped anyone’s notice that something unusual was going down, especially as 300 of us regularly sang  a lot of worship songs in one of their events rooms.  Eventually one of the guests asked my friend what all us women were doing there.  When my friend told her we were all clergy wives, she ran screaming down the corridor.  Must have been an atheist!

The weekend contained many things I was expecting: times of worship, times of teaching, praying for one another and waiting for the Holy Spirit to work in power amongst us.  There was an opportunity to be honest with one another about the many blessings and struggles we encounter in our unique type of ministry.

The one thing that floored me was quite a simple task.  During the first evening our leader asked us to find someone we didn’t know, tell them our name and say one surprising/interesting thing about ourselves.  My mind went blank.  The pressure!  Go on, try it - you have one minute to think.  Surprising/interesting can so easily spill into something else.  For example boasting:  ’Well we used to have Bono come regularly to our 6:30 services’ or momentous: ‘Before Eric went for ordination I was head of recruitment at MI5′,  or confessional: ‘I used to be a man!’

What exactly constitutes surprising or interesting about oneself and especially to a stranger?  It’s more likely to be a surprise to someone we have known for a while that we once had to be freed from a traffic cone by the fire department after one drunken night out, and no, it didn’t happen to me and I can’t believe you lot thought it might have!

So what did I say?  Something pretty mundane in the end as my brain couldn’t dredge anything up.  Mike said I should have told her that in my friend’s phone book my phone number is stored next to Charles Dance*.  Now that is pure style, terribly interesting and not a bit like showing off!

Love in Jesus,

Lisa

* Yes him, the one off the telly!