hug – Aspirational Adventures

My friend’s daughter adores Renly and, as you can see from the photo, he’s keen on her. She just wants to be with him, to have him all to herself, to sit, snuggle, lie with him. And she kept saying “I love Renly”.. Photographed by myself August 2024.

I love having friends who are open and who chat and challenge me and make me think. My friends might be very diverse in many things [eg the troll/tinkerbell image] but what they have in common is the way they challenge me – and also inspire this blog! The majority of posts come from thoughts others have inspired in me. I am constantly evolving and morphing as I have open, free conversations with people who I love and trust and who love and trust me!

So here is one that grew from the other day –

We’re struggling with someone and we say, in our heads, “Jesus go and sit with them” when really we could do with Jesus giving us a hug because we are the ones struggling. The “difficult” person could be fine in their own eyes. Yes they do also need Jesus to sit by them and give them a hug but so do we. Too often, I think, we offer Jesus to others and don’t grab him for ourselves.

I got me thinking about my friend’s daughter with my dog. What if we were like that with Jesus?

I think that one of the reasons we do the “sit with that difficult person, Jesus” is because Church tells us that. So many sermons are about asking Jesus to go comfort someone else but very few on asking him to comfort, be with, encourage us. So, I think, we get to a place where we don’t think it right that we should ask Jesus to sit by us when someone else is struggling.

The other reason, I think, is because we don’t think we are “worthy” enough – the enough word again! – for Jesus to want to be with us. And sometimes I think that is because we think we should be the “sorted” ones and we should ask Jesus to be with those we don’t think are sorted.

I wonder if we think that if people we are “reaching out to” saw that Jesus was sitting beside us and giving as a hug of reassurance then they would think we weren’t up for the task of supporting them? A thought!

So we, not so much push Jesus away from ourselves but we do keep pushing him towards the “needy” person when in fact we could be much more supportive, much more helpful, much more giving if we had that support with us.

[Also – and I don’t get how this works – Jesus can be holding our hands and holding the hands of the person we are talking to – and many many other people – all that the same time. Now that is an awesome mystery!]

Speak Simply

Pensarn Beach strand. Photographed by Diane Woodrow — Taken this morning [27th April 2022] on my early morning beach walk with the dog

There have been a few ups and downs clouding my outlook and stopping me looking forward to my holiday. One of them, which might sound trivial, is these prompts from Everyday words. As I have said before they are so full and there is so much to think about that I have been doing them slowly. But they are now filling up my inbox and my “get it done” nature is struggling with them all. So I decided to take a new tack and am doing the ones that are most recent. So today I have done today’s prompt even though I still haven’t done Day 10’s. Coming from this approach has stopped me feeling so overwhelmed. I am learning too that sometimes life in general overwhelms me and I have to find a way out.

Preparing for a holiday can overwhelm me. I feel like there are so many things to get done – packing, sorting and preparing things for the animals that are either staying [the cat] or coming with us [the dog]. I feel like I need the house clean and tidy and all the washing done. Some of that comes from wanting to be kind to my future-returning-from-holiday-self, but it does make me panic a bit. This morning I was really pleased when my husband hugged me and thanked me for doing the washing so that there would be clean clothes for the holiday. It is probably from those words that the inspiration for this poem comes from.

Even though the PDF says one thing I am renaming it “Simple Things“. So the prompt comes from my friend Victoria Field’s poem ‘Dandelions’ which can be found in her new book A Speech of Birds. and Sarah’s suggestion of taking the line “Dandelions speak dandelion…. write about what they might say to each other”

My dog walk this morning was filled very much with the simple things of a dog enjoying being on a walk, of the sea and these lovely plants that grow on edge of the shore, of chatting with fellow dog walkers and a friend giving some wise advise. In my preparations for my holiday I need to keep the simple things in focus and not get all ‘Marthaed” and do what doesn’t need to be done.