yet another good realisation! now that i have no inspiration or desire of my own to muster up to do things, it mean sthat i can only rely on God for it! maybe it's all just a part of his big plan : )

Our garden looks great - poppies, roses about to come out, beans climbing poles, tomoatoes and strawberries growing happily, sunflowers on the way. I love it!! Someday soon my lifelong dream of becoming like the Goodlife people will be fulfilled! Just call me Babs...

Last night a lovely friend pointed out to me that if i scrolled down on my blog a little bit i would see one of the possible causes behind suddenly starting to feel this way - the 'dangerous' prayer one which asked God to make me hunger for him the way i do food when fasting if i wasn't walking close to him. Hmmm... I guess that sheds a bit of light, but it doesn't make it go away! Still needing to do someting about it, but thinking that maybe it's God prompting me makes it seem much nicer somehow : )

Today i am stuck by how much i have fallen into the trap of living out of my own strength. Talking to someone yesterday on the phone and realising how God is a part of everything they do, every bit of planning they do for what they lead at church, involved in all processes of their life, i was humbled into admitting to God that i was rubbish at praying and great at relying on myself. I guess that must be the biggest form of pride that there is. It's so easy to fool yourself i think and maybe it's time i stopped and really saw what my spiritual life is really like. Hopefully it'll scare me into being active!

Sorry Lord for not letting you be my Lord and for thinking i can do it myself and that in my human strength i can pull things together. thanks that you constantly display who you are and it's no more evident than when our earthly plans fail. Help me.

Today is a fasting day (see Bristol Vineyard's 50 days series) and i was thinking about how cool it would be if each time i wasn't waling along with God i would feel hunger pangs for him in the same way i do when i don't have food.

I think i will ask him if he can fix it. Maybe it's one of those 'dangerous to pray' prayers, but onwards and upwards...

Yesterday my goldfish called Keith died.

It was such a sad day. Even though he's just a goldfish i'd grown quite fond of him, as had Tom. He'd spent a few days at the surface of the water and then on sunday morning we found him at the bottom, not breathing heaps and covered in a weird black dots. So we dashed off to the pet shop and by the time we got home with something which could have remedied him, he'd died. I cried and we buried him at the bottom of the garden. He looked so tiny.

I was amazed all over again at the amazingly intricate way that things are made. How something so small could swim, breathe under water, eat, think (yes they do apparently!), interract with other fish. Such a big bunch of effort went into creating something that small that was going to have no significant impact on the earth aside from keeping us amused while he fought off our other goldfish to the food. god is good.

So, i have discovered a couple of new things about Tom over the weekend:
1. he really enjoys watching snooker (oh yes, i know all the number values of the different coloured balls now, and that Ronnie O'Sullivan won the wordl championship!)
2. that he doesn't mind handling worms - a real bonus in my case as i loath them. He purposefully dug some up in edingurgh from a whopper compost heap as you need special worms for composting - the red tiger worms. They prefer that environment apparently!

We had a great time in Edinburgh over the weekend having a Hope family reunion for Tom's granny's 90th. Then we drove home via the length of Hadrian's wall and Durham cathedral. In the cathedral we joined in with the afternoon evensong which happened to be a special Easter one where you process to different stations around the church with the choir and think and sing and listen and move and look at different bits of art and sculptures. It was a very refreshing time, although a little hard to get into at first. I think it took me a long while to calm things down inside my head, all the thoughts that generally whizz around there and then all the objections to the service as there were lots of people who seemed to be there on show. Finally it was a peaceful, cotemplative time though and i liked it very much. I think i need to spend more time doing things like that as it's definitely one of the ways i connect with god.

On Monday we watched Master and Commander with some lovely friends, which was fab. A good swash-buckling tale of the high seas.