Author: dianewoodrow

I married Ian in 2007. I have two grown up children, who I home schooled until they were 16. My son has just joined the army, my daughter has just moved to Cardiff.
I have a degree in History and Creative writing and a PGDip in using Creative Writing for Therapeutic Purposes.
Until Feb 2016 I lived in a beautiful part of England and now I live in a beautiful part of North Wales where my time is filled with welcoming Airbnb rental guests, running writing workshops, writing, serving in my local Welsh Anglican Church, going for long walks with my little dog, Renly, and drinking coffee and chatting with friends

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Lord's Prayer wisdom youth group

Just Do It

Blurred picture of a white egret in flight over Conwy Beach as the tide recedes on spring day. Photographed by Diane Woodrow
Egret flying over Conwy Beach Saturday 18th March 2023 Photographed by myself

Last Sunday I was leading the discussion for our Church youth group. We are working our way through The Lord’s Prayer. [If you go back through some of my posts you will see I am a bit “into” the Lord’s Prayer] This week’s couplet was “your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”

As always the young people are much less religious than adults and have reach a point of trust with me and my co-worker so they aren’t saying what they think we want them to say. There were some great things that came out of them about the closeness of God’s kingdom and the ease of doing God’s will.

I will paraphrase one girl but it was the bit that stayed with me. She said something along the lines of “God’s will being about trust and if we trust God then we can just do it, just go out and believe that God will make what we do God’s will.” Basically trust that what we feel in our hearts is God’s will. Too often we get into weighing up and judging and then disbelieving, sitting back, not doing.

Of course there are things we should not do, things we should run by those we love and trust – and that means we do need people in our lives that we can be open with and trust with our dreams, our desires, our hopes. So I suppose firstly we need to build up those people around us.

But at the same time as doing that we need to build up the trust in our own hearts. I am getting more and more to a point where I trust my heart and am aware when I’m not “feeling it”.

With these words of this wise thirteen year old girl in my head and a feeling in my heart that I had a space that needed filling in my day I went on Indeed to job hunt. I wasn’t overly serious because I had set myself quite firm criteria – children/young people and afternoons. Well up popped an job in an after-schools club in my town. I scrolled on past but couldn’t get it out of my head so in the end applied. I’ve got the job. I start next week. But when I was at the trial afternoon I felt my heart settle for being there, felt that it was a safe place that I was going to for the right reasons.

Then yesterday I was telling the vicar I co-run the youth group about the job and about how much this girl’s words had impacted me and I realised that this job was totally of God. It stops me from taking on too many things because I will be tied to work every afternoon but also if I want to write I won’t be able to do much during the day. I do have a couple of commitments but that is ok too.

So I did trust my heart, trust that my heart was hearing God/the Universe’s will for my life and I “just did it” and then it appears that I was given a reassurance that I had done right.

So yes it will be tough fitting everything I want to do in to my morning, and will be odd being committed every afternoon and only have weekends and holidays to roam randomly. But that doesn’t mean it is wrong to do. In fact it all feels very right.

Sometimes we do just have to trust and do it

Photo by Lucas Allmann on Pexels.com
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Follow Substack

Substack

I battled with various Photoshop/Adobe type apps until I finally worked out how to do this. This the banner for me new Substack account. Though when you go on the account I have no idea where it has gone. But I’m still proud of working my to this point!

I have decided to start a Substack account for my writing, especially for a new project I’m planning about “parenting adult children” [just a working title for now.

It would be great if you would follow my Substack account too on https://dianelwoodrow.substack.com/ If you have any difficulty following please message me here or email me and I can add you – I hope.

I’ll still be doing random blogs roughly weekly here too as there are things I want to write that don’t quite fit in with the project ideas so please stay tuned here too.

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Champions peace

Champions

I was doing a writing exercise with HerStories, a US group of mid-life women writers, about our Champions. It was an interesting follow on to one that came from one of the workshops about thinking about who you imagine you are writing for. Some of those you imagine are champions but some are negative detractors. We all have voices that we hear from those who often love and care for us but who tell us writing isn’t a “proper job”, is a “nice little hobby”, and even with life about how that “oh that’s nice dear” can sound so condescending.

This lovely friend was one of my champions and of course is sorely missed. I have a couple of other friends who have died who used to root for me. But it is easy to miss things too. I was talking with my husband saying I had applied for a part time job and his first response was “make sure you still have time for your writing”. Sometimes with a comment like that one can see it as a negative; you won’t have time, you are doing too much, etc, etc, etc. But that is that bundle of negative voices hassling around in your head that can miss it so easily. So sometimes we have to listen properly to our champions.

Champions come from all sides but we can miss them so easily. Those that have hurt us at times with a comment but who have changed their ways and really do want to support. But what we remember are those voices of the past and so we are wary of what they might “really mean.”

I think to have good champions in our lives we need to take what is said at face value rather than weigh it with what has been said before.

With my church youth group last night we were looking at what God’s Kingdom was like. And I would say the bottom line from all of them was that it is inside of us and is that place of safety and calm. Yes I know from the QEC work I have been doing and reading about traumas that this is not always easy. But the exciting thing I have realised is that it is deep inside each one of us and we need to unwrap it from the hurt that has been done it to.

So as we slowly unwrap our hardened hearts we can see that we have that place of safety, calm and peace to be our own champions and to hear those encouraging things that people want to say to us. It takes time and it takes wanting to but it will come if we do that work.

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Listen to my heart not as they seem

Things Are Not Always As They Seem

I have been reading this book about Betsy Cadwaladyr, an amazing Welsh lady, who worked as a nurse in the Crimea but was never as famous as Florence Nightingale. What has struck me through reading this is how Betsy is pigeon holed as a “Balaclava Nurse” and yet she did so much more. She left home before she was 10 and hired herself out as a maid. She leaves North Wales in her teens and works as a maid, cook, lady’s maid, and more, in London. She is still under 20 when she is hired as a lady’s maid and general dogsbody on a merchant ship. She sails to Australia. New Zealand, Singapore, India, South America and more. She doesn’t just stay on board ship but takes up any opportunity to travel inland in these various countries. She is bold enough to tell her different employers what she thinks and will take no nonsense from anyone. She gets various offers of marriage but turns them down because she wants to travel. She doesn’t accept anything that distracts from her vision of traveling. She isn’t afraid of anything.

There is so much more to Betsy Cadwaladyr than being a Balaclava nurse. I am nearly 3/4 if the way through the book and Betsy is back working in London after losing lots of money and being called a liar by her merchant boss. She doesn’t put up with nonsense there even if that means she has to stop traveling. She has not yet got into nursing or gone to Crimea.

It got me wondering how many people we judge on what we see them as at a certain moment in time. For instance I love the people who attend my writing groups because meet these people who live in my town, who are often over 60, often seem set in their ways, then as they get to know each other, as they write, as they share, the tales appear of their past lives, of the amazing things they have done before getting to my dining table to write. It would be so easy to judge them as they are but that is not who they fully are.

It can be too easy to box someone, to stay they are – as in Betsy’s case – a Balaclava nurse but to miss the strength of character that got her to that point. So let us all please be careful in judging what we see at the moment – whether it is people we think we know well, people we meet in passing, people we hear about from others, and remember that everyone has a past that has got them to their present. We need to be open to hear more than what their biggest achievement is. Though I am tempted to wonder if going to nurse in the Crimea was really Betsy’s biggest achievement. Maybe it was walking out of a good employment because they were rude to her, turning down offers of marriage because she wanted more than, maybe it was saying Yes and saying No to things and following her heart. Yes that is the thing I notice most in Betsy’s story; she followed her heart each time.

So let us not judge,. Let us really listen to others when we talk with them. Let us really see what they have done. Let us also do that with ourselves. I might be here and now but I have a huge past behind me that has led me to here too.

But most importantly also let each of us be brave enough to follow our hearts and not do what we think we ought to do.

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grief mourning

A Period Of Mourning

The reason for the daffodils is that there were that daffodils were the only flowers on my friend’s coffin yesterday. But these are from my local park. Yes in North Wales we have loads of daffodils blooming already

Funerals in the UK are strange affairs especially now when that painful time of grief isn’t so acute. Five weeks is a long time to hang on to that whereas when someone was buried or cremated within a week or 10 days then it was different.

Most services are great and we know roughly what to do with them whether religious service or not. There are time boundaries, a containment, a space to fill. It works on the whole, but the do after I find the challenge. There are generally a selection of characters for the writer to observe – the one who is holding court and expecting all to come to them, the one who did not really know the person but wept loudly through the service and now stands shyly at the do, the group who stay together because they don’t know anyone else, the locals who have popped in for a party, the family members of the one who is left who have come to support them, the eclectic group of friends who don’t really know each other but know about each other through the deceased. [Note – these are caricatures not real people who were there 🙂 ] There are probably more if I had time to think about it. Feel free to add your own in the comment box. But the truth is we don’t know what to do after the service.

In the UK there is no clear way to mourn; no “period of mourn”, and so much is now “wear bright colours” rather than a nice dark suit. We do the stiff upper lip and move on. Move on to what I don’t yet know. The “let’s celebrate rather than admit there is a space now in our lives”. But even at the do after the service there are a lot of people who open a conversation with “how to you know the deceased?” and the lead into talking about themselves and what they’ve done. But then in a lot of conversations we all open the door to talking about ourselves by asking someone a leading question and following it up with “that is so similar to what happened to me”.

I wonder was there ever an official period of mourning in Western culture? Not just Queen Victoria’s wearing of widow’s weeds for the rest of her life but a place where friends could just say for a week or two, or even at the after service do, confine themselves to talking about the whole this person has left in their lives., maybe where mourning clothes too.

We need a learn how to mourn not just how to deal with grief I think!

Anyway I’ll tell you all about the hole my friend we cremated yesterday leaves in my life – it is these other friends of hers that I know all sorts of details about via her emails. I realised I will never know how they are dealing with their marriages, their children, their illnesses, their futures. Oh yes I could have gathered emails and the like and kept in touch with them, but to be honest it is not the deep details of their lives I want, not their friendships I want, but those snippets that my friend thought I would be interested in what was going on with them. Snapshot snippets!

And I’ve realised too that the only one I could have process the events of both yesterday’s service and after party do with was my friend who knew all the characters that attended.

Holes are strange shaped things

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lent social justice

Clean Monday/World Social Justice/Love Your Pet Day

First published on Godspacelight.com on Tuesday 21st February 2023

Renly, my dog, and Max, my granddog, waiting for their breakfast. Photographed by myself December 2022

Due to Godspace’s format on having Christine’s Meditation Monday post on a Monday this has been published on Tuesday 21st February rather than Monday 20th February.

This year World Social Justice Day, National Love Your Pet Day and the Lenten tradition of Clean Monday all happen on the same day. So you can scrub your house clean in preparation for Lent, like spring cleaning but being able to give it a spiritual twist and not feel so fed up about doing it, as you love your pet and ponder social justice. Interesting too that World Social Justice day comes in Black History month. Is it possible to look at Black history without thinking about social justice? Interesting too that Christine suggested “Breaking Down Walls” as the theme for Lent. Perhaps it needs to start beforehand? In fact that isn’t a real question. Of course it should start beforehand. We shouldn’t wait until there is a designated day or month to think about social justice, Black history or even loving our pets.

With Love Your Pet and World Social Justice on the same day I wondered which one more people would focus on. I am suspecting it would be to love your pet. Why? Because that is easy. Our pets give us something back. They love on us too. But social justice? Well that’s a hard one. For a start, what does it mean? And will it give us anything in return? I think too often as human beings in our modern world we expect something in return. I remember when people would come round with a bucket collecting for some charity, but now when you do something for charity – whether a marathon at home, some many push ups, going up in a hot air balloon, walking the Great Wall of China, or whatever – you will get a reward for your efforts to raise that money. You will get something back.

I think of Tyre Nichols and other deaths that happen in the so-called civilized world. I wonder if those policemen love their pets. A bit of me thinks they probably do. Are they bad men? Well they did a bad thing, but if we are going to think about World Social Justice should we be looking at people like them too? Or is it easier to say they are evil and don’t deserve any justice? What would Jesus do?

I’m sure on this day if Jesus was walking in our world he would not have trouble choosing. But then I don’t think Jesus would need a specific day to think about Social Justice, loving a pet or even having stuff in his house that needed cleaning out.

Is the “Clean house” at the start of Lent more of a metaphor for something spiritual as well being a physical thing? I wonder if it is about cleaning out ourselves so that during the season of Lent we aren’t just going through the motions of reading devotions dedicated to the season, going to services, and fasting, but our “houses/hearts” are already cleaned so we can understand what Lent is all about and get close to God, and so when the Crucifixion and Resurrection come our hearts are in a place to fully receive all that is offered in both those amazing events.

If we took seriously the “clean house/heart” and  stepped into this Lent season and the fullness of what Jesus has done for us then we would not need a specific day to think about World Social Justice because it would be at the forefront of not just our minds but our actions every single day.

And I do think maybe having a National Love Your Pet day is really unnecessary because most of us with pets love them each and every single day much more than we care about many other things.

Perhaps someone should do a “Love people not of your social group more than you love your pets” day?

So today as we have all these things to think about, where will your focus be? Social Justice and how you can be more involved with that? Spring cleaning your house? Spring cleaning your heart? Or loving on your dog, cat, bird, rabbit, etc? Will you pick the easy one or the hard one? Or is it possible to do them all?

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Clean Monday lent

Clean Monday

Pondering walk by the river in the sunshine

Today is Clean Monday which Christine Sine explores a bit of in her post Meditation Monday for today. This is a festival in the Christian Orthodox Church, a public holiday in Greece, for people to prepare for Lent.

In the Western Protestant Church we often wait until we are in the 40 days of Lent which starts on Wednesday with Ash Wednesday, before we start the business of trying to find time to set our hearts towards God. I like the idea of having whole day beforehand, before even Shrove Tuesday, which was the day for eating the last of the winter’s rich foods before the Lenten fast. So even before celebrating and preparing the Orthodox Church was clearing out.

I like the idea of clearing out firstly before celebrating and feasting and then moving into fasting and connecting. For me this means keeping my heart right and working on the whole forgiveness things, the whole “clean hands and clean heart” and of creeping closer to God in the way that works for me.

In Christine’s blog she says that “because Orthodox celebrations still follow the Julian calendar rather than the Georgian calendar we are familiar with, this year Clean Monday is on February 27th as Eastern Orthodox Ash Wednesday is March 1st.”

I rather like that Clean Monday comes on 27th February. That is the day of my friend’s funeral. It feels, for me, like that will be a time to clear out some stuff inside of me to do with her, to do with what she represented in my life, and move onwards in a different way.

With all the friends I have each fill a different niche, each have different “functions” in my life. For my friend Tessa that we cremate next Monday the part she filled in my life cannot be filled by another and that’s ok. I have been feeling over the last week that what she filled doesn’t need filling any more, that even before she died the time had come for me not to have that need in my life. But now that she has really gone I have been having to clear out that need. So for me, with my heart, I think Monday 27th will definitely be a Clean Monday for me.

[Watch out for another post tomorrow about Clean Monday which is being posted on http://www.godspacelight.com and I will put up on here]

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broken strikes vision

Is Everything Broken?

From a walk above our house over the Christmas holidays taken by myself – Dec 2022

This post comes about because my friend’s funeral is going to be 32 days after she died. It is a 25 min slot in the local crematorium and there were only 2 spaces left on that day. Yes I know we’ve had covid – more the restrictions than the extra deaths. But surely having to wait over a month to bury someone is wrong. Someone I know said she was told that a month wait is normal. That’s not normal at all. What had gone wrong?

It led to me doing some more pondering about these strikes we’re having in the UK and what is going on there. As I mentioned in Strikes Take Planning a couple of weeks ago it is more than money. It is about conditions, about not feeling respected and more.

Then today I heard from two people who feel they are not valued where they are. One even gets paid a substantial amount of money but felt like no one really cares about people. Again that whole thing about respect.

I do understand that much has changed since covid and the UK has also had Brexit to deal with but I felt with both these things that there was more to it. Many people I know in both education and the health service say that the problems lie in the area of having to have outcomes and statistics, that is about profit and money. The management are looking at statistics, result charts, comparing with others, rather than caring for others.

My big bug bear always comes from schools because I suppose that is my thing. I work there. I went to one when I was a child, Actually to several. I chose to home school my children. What I see now is a lot of stress, a lot of not knowing what to do with some of these kids. School has lost its vision.

Schools were originally started when the Factories Acts said that children under a certain age could no longer work in factories, in mines, as chimney sweeps, etc, etc. This meant there were a lot of children on the streets with nothing to do. So they were corralled into schools. It was then realised that this was a good place to mold a workforce for the work place. So subjects were then added, made to fit the outcome of what was needed, and so forth. But now I think that vision has gone. Now it seems to be good grades, good behaviour, improving, but what is real need in the workforce now? I think it is more complicated that it was 150+ years ago because we no longer have the factories, the heavy industry, etc.

Where there is no vision, the people perish

proverbs 29:18 {a}

And I do think it is that lack of vision and the need for tangible outcomes, and making money, that have become the issues in too many places – whether education and health service or the company my friend was moaning about, or even the funeral service. People are no longer the centre. That is not to say that there are not loads of people out there who don’t care. These professions and work places are filled with people who care, but it is harder and harder to care if what you do does not make a profit for shareholders, show something good on the league tables, show some outcome.

And again I will say this leads to lack of respect for the majority of the workforce, but also because those in higher management are being pressurised by something/someone higher than them.

A thought to finish with – I came across a post on a friend’s Facebook page. I think it is true that said that so much of what we do is controlled by other people, by money and by our past. And we need to refind the vision as to the what and why of the country we are blessed to live in.

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Not Easy simple

Simple Christianity

Renly on a beach walk. Photographed by myself on a lovely January day in 2023

Always if I want to write about something simple I will put a photograph of my dog in. This is because, as you’ve seen from other posts, he has a simple view of life. His biggest decision he had to make this morning was whether he ran across the park to get a treat from someone he knew or not. In the end he decided it was a bit too far for just a small treat. But he appeared content with his decision.

Anyway I’ve not been to church for a long, long time. I try church on and off and then find that it all gets too much for me. I can’t do it. That doesn’t mean that I don’t hang out with God, don’t ponder the whole faith things – again as you will have noticed in these posts. But it is the complexity of the whole church thing I find hard work. [Interestingly I was reading a post on Facebook this morning that asked if maybe we knew too much and that from reading ALL the letters in the Bible we knew things that were never meant for us. An interesting thought. Perhaps we should only ever read the gospels and talk to God??]

So yesterday I was pondering, praying and planning for the series I want to start with the youth group I co-lead looking at The Lord’s Prayer so that the young people see The Lord’s Prayer as a template and not something you rattle through as fast as possible. [If you look back through my posts or search “Lords Prayer” you’ll see I’ve looked at a lot of this before] What struck me was the simplicity of it all.

Basic tenant – you have to believe in something not just bigger but beyond your understanding who created the WHOLE universe and also not only cares for you but loves you unconditionally just as you are. You are loved unconditionally by the Creator of the Universe. This Awesome Creator gives you everything you need each and every day for whatever situation you are. Not what you think you need or think you ought to have but the simplicity of what you need. But also you have to believe that what you get is what something/someone greater than you knows to be right.

I think that’s why Jesus said we were to say “Abba Father” because a good parent knows their children’s needs, especially when that child is under 10. Remember too that in Jesus’s culture children were moving into adulthood from their early teens and being expected to make their own way in their world, not as we treat children!

So this Amazing Creator thinks we are awesome just as we are and loves us just as we are. But we will make mistakes. The Creator knows that and doesn’t love us any less for it. Though we can love/like ourselves less when we make mistakes and not believe we are loved unconditionally just as we are. This, I believe, is why we have to forgive regularly. I have to forgive myself for each time I mess up, each time I lose it, each time I am fearful, each time I just don’t live up to who I truly am, etc, etc. And for me if I know that My Creator loves me unconditionally even when I screw up it is so much easier to forgive myself.

But then comes the hard bit – or at least I find this bit harder – I then have to forgive others. I am working on this and it is an ongoing process. But I also think it is why Jesus told Peter to forgive 70×7 or whatever the sum was. Because it is an ongoing thing not just for different offenses but often for the same offense. But if I believe am loved unconditionally then so is the person that hurt me. If I can be forgiven then so can the person who hurt me.

Just the other day I got hurt really badly. It hit on an old wound and reopened it. I wanted to lick it for a while. Instead I took this hurt to God and was reminded that I was going to be doing this whole Lord’s Prayer thing with these young people and I realised I need to forgive. It wasn’t easy because the person couldn’t see what they had done wrong. They felt justified in what they had said and done. But that didn’t matter. I still have to forgive. I had to let go.

I noticed I hadn’t forgiven when I was writing an email to someone and started to put my moans into it. Thank goodness I didn’t press send because I was able to delete it all and write something more uplifting.

No where though in this forgiveness process have I felt some heavy hand telling me I “Must“. It has been a gentle thing inside of me. I often wonder if because we are made in God’s image then there is a part of God inside of each and every one of us. And I do wonder if prayer is as much tapping into that as it is speaking to something outside of ourselves.

So Simple Christianity – I am loved unconditionally just the way I am, I can ask and receive what I need each and every day, I can be forgiven each and every moment of every day once I realise I’ve screwed up, BUT I need to let that flow outwards to others,, which means I have to love them unconditionally and be willing to forgive them every moment they do something that hurts me.

SIMPLE BUT NOT EASY

Categories
end times joy of the Lord

I Wonder What God Thinks

My dog, Renly, enjoying the sunshine by the river Wednesday 8th Feb 2023. Photographed by myself

This is in response to the post “Is The World Broken?”

I did not want to put what I thought God and the Bible had to say with the last post because it seemed to have got a bit longer than I had expected. Also I’m not sure I know. I just wrote a long post that I have deleted because I really do not know what God thinks. I have read lots of stuff about what people think God thinks but to honest I don’t know.

I don’t know why people die young, why there is suffering, etc etc, etc, but I do know that “God so loved ALL the world that …..” John 3:16. God didn’t just love bits of the world/some of the world/those who are good but God loved ALL the world, every last little bit of it.

I also think there is so much more good going on – not just the Small Kindnesses poem – but huge stuff. The UK is in a major recession, people are worrying about food and energy bills, but they are still giving money to relief agencies – whether for the ongoing issues in Ukraine, to the latest disaster in Turkey/Syria, to the ongoing food banks. People are giving. People are going out there.

I read about a diver who gave his time for free to try to find the dog walker who has disappeared. And you know what if he did get free publicity for it good I think. And he still did the week’s free searching, so not exactly free publicity!!!

I’ve know of a friend of a friend who risks his life driving his truck to places I’ve never heard of to give aid or many kinds to people that the media has forgotten about. But he hasn’t.

I read about people working tirelessly in homeless shelters, in rehabs, in youth initiatives. People who are working from one lot of funding to the other, never being sure if this project will continue or not, but still giving it their all.

Not everyone doing these large acts of kindnesses are saying they are doing it as a response to what God is telling them but I do think this is the antidote to the “wars and rumours of wars”.

In Matthew 24 where that shortened quote comes from Jesus talks of being careful not to be deceived. I think the person in the park who said about wondering if humanity had run its course is allowing herself to be deceived. Not intentionally but through power of the media who too often seem to see it as their job to rob us of our joy, of our security; whose role seems to be to “seek and destroy” any goodness that goes on; to leave people living in fear.

I have a friend who was raped who is now afraid of every single man she sees, understandably I think. But I think too often that is what has happened to those who read the papers or watch the news.

So what is God’s response do I think. I think it is peace and joy even in the midst of the chaos.

Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid

John 14:7

The joy of the Lord is your strength

Nehemiah 8:10