The Shack

You've probably heard the huge hub-bub surrounding this tale of a man called Mackenzie Allen Phillips whose daughter is kidnapped on a family camping trip and then brutally murdered. His daughter was six years old. Three and a half years later, Mack receives an invite from, 'Papa' or God to return to the shack where the last remnant of his daughter Missy was found.

There was so much hype all over this book I was most aggressive in resisting to read it. But floating about Target last Friday I came across it and dropped it into my basket. Unbeknown to me God would use those 250 pages to wreck all I thought I knew of Him.

I shan't spoil the experience of being a fly on the wall in Mack's unusual weekend with the Lord of the Universe. But I will tell you that during it you may just grasp the ridiculous depth of God's sheer pure love for His creation. You will never see such a devoted heart as God's own. And so I imagine you too will be wrecked, undone and pieced back together again in fear and trembling for the one who loves only you.

And that's the key thing here I think I learned. It isn't solely that God loves the world and the people in it. It's that He loves only you.

He loves only me.

Wine nose

My younger sister has a gift. She can smell and taste any wine, whether white, red or rose and tell you what year that wine was produced. It's an odd talent and in the early years I thought she was cheating her way into our awe. But years later and several bottles tasted she can still astonish us into silence by telling us the year.

On my most recent trip home I was thinking unsuccessfully how to make money off her gift (horribly capitalist of me I know) but ever since 'You Bet' ended years ago I have really come up dry. So perhaps her gift is just for our entertainment and to make her merry and giddy. Perhaps it's just another example of the random wonderfulness of our God's power to offer and implant the strangest gifts to his children.

Hairaisers-not the holiest thought today

I was cleaning out one of the folders in my Hotmail account and came across a press release sent to me by some PRs a good while ago (11th July 2006 to be exact). It was a brief paragraph about how the packages that contain 100% Human Hair are in fact from reliable sources, namely Hindu volunteers who shave their heads in honour and worship of their gods.

Now not only has this thrown me off in the sense I have maintained the staunch argument that no corporation can have that much access to flyaway hair of all colours, but it's now added the added trouble of a spiritual dimension.

Of course if we remember Christ's words to Peter when our fisherman friend was staring at a picnic blanket teeming with all kinds of critters, that praying over things makes them clean and acceptable; but what of hair? Hair dedicated to Hindu gods that now has a new journey being tied and woven to my fro?

I'm as yet to wrestle with that one and hear what God's thoughts are and do a bit more research and prayer and perhaps get a bit of an answer.

Why this is taking up valuable blog space on Easter Sunday when I am remembering that my hero is alive and well, I have no idea. Perhaps that's what happens when you've been oscillating between health and colds, deep sleep and early starts, reading in silence to too many lunch dates.

Either way; London has been a fun time.

Hope you've had a happy, 'He is Risen' day.

Live and let live

It's been a week of pain, disappointment, misunderstanding, misrepresentation, belittling, shame and tears. But today the sun has shone. Not merely over us on this cool spring morning, but through me where shadows and hauntings have lain. Where my dreams have been filled with taunting and my mind addled with sadness.

I've prayed, wept, knelt, laid down, found distractions but perhaps best of all, I've run to the safest arms I've ever known.

It's in the invisible I've have been kept from falling over the edge and instead been lifted to see the sun shine, just that little bit brighter today.

Dear Frankie

I'm not sure what year this film came out but it was before Gerard Butler became famous for his, 'This is Sparta' role, and devoted deceased husband in 'P.S. I love you', but it's a film that has caught my breath in my mouth and thoughts.

I found the DVD in the local library after a roommate watched and recommended it and remembered seeing the trailer for it eons ago in London. Sometimes there is a reason why things come around later and watching this film tonight as I just did I see why.

It deals with an absentee father, a mother (Emily Mortimer) grappling with being both roles to her son and fearfully overcoming the deep-rooted mistrust in others. It tackles being different, both in deafness and the new outsider. It peels back the secrets we all keep hidden and our desperate attempts to be brave. And it offers love as the tender, humanising hope we all harbour. But perhaps more touchingly; it reminds, how incredibly intelligent children are and what their little eyes take in and understand.

I can't really add more to it then that. There are awkward silences where you find yourself falling into the screen and the moment the camera captured. Or willing and wishing for a tidier ending than the one given; but at the same time loving the clever twists that it leaves.

It is a beautiful, simple film, set in Glasgow with all the overcast and sometimes sunny skies that makes the U.K, the U.K. It has dialect, folk song and people muddling along this grand long journey called, life.

An honest treasure to find that for some reason switched a light on in me.

Without a crystal ball

How on earth is one supposed to plan their future when they haven't the foggiest what it will entail?

I read this, this morning and it made me pause but not necessarily think calmly on it:

"Do not those who plot evil go astray? But those who plan what is good will find love and faithfulness." - Proverbs 14:22

Perhaps this bothers me because I am in the middle of sorting through that daunting task and veiled abstract thing-the future. Trying to decide where to live, how I will afford to live there, when will I live there, how long I will be there, what I will do for work, how long to commit are questions that are shredding my every nerve and stealing every thought that could have been valuable daydreaming time.

Because all I can see with complete clarity is I have no idea how to answer any of the above nor how to thread together some sort of resolution. And with that same complete clarity I know I can not last much longer in this limbo of que sera, sera.

I have always thought plans were dubious things. You spend hours poring over them and maybe with a couple of ulcers and cold sores for extra measure and you may even write them down. Then you keep pottering on with the mundane and sometimes your plans secretly come to life and start to breath. Whilst other times they go further into deep hiding and something else sprouts up in their stead.

So alas what is one to do with all this uncertainty? Keep scribbling in pencil I don't doubt and be prepared for the one who has the ink to tell you what will make it into that veiled abstract thing.

Finishing the first draft

Yesterday I finally finished writing the first draft of Ridley's story and it was the oddest moment when I typed that final full stop. Perhaps it's because I recognise there is still so much to go before it is printed, bound and sat upon shelves waiting to be taken home by eager hands in exchange for a few gold coins.

The writing process is long and arduous but the world of fiction is sheer magic. To spin out lives and flesh out characters, to know their deepest secrets before they do and see it all unfold at a measured pace makes the coming rewriting, editing and redrafting period, well worth it. Or perhaps it's simply knowing that at some point soon others will be able to share the places and lanes and hear the conversations and mysteries that have been whizzing about my head for months on end.

As I write this my little charge, one year old Aliyah is sat on my lap watching nursery rhymes and dogs, Lars and Alaska have managed to wrap themselves around my back and hip and fallen asleep (occasionally kicking out at random as they dream). This observation has absolutely nothing to do with writing a children's book except to say this was my life as I wrote that book. Us writers have been known to be multi-taskers and never have I felt it more truly as I do right now.
And now I must leave the book alone for a week to rest my eyes and brain before picking it apart from beginning to end and tying up those loose ends. Oh yes and finding out those things that I wrote in the story ages ago that for the life of me I now can not remember where exactly I did write them!