Melancholia

It's been a sad morning.

Normally, the day is not long enough for all the good I would want to do. I want to be preaching the Good News in season, out of season and close season. Carrying other's burdens. Shouldering my cross. Generally fighting the good fight.

But I decided that it was better for my physical and spiritual health to take a day off. After all, I have two deacons, and Oswald and  Basil can do any emergency pastoral work that does not need the official minister. And the need for Sabbath - especially when one works on the Sabbath, as I suppose technically I do - is built deep into Man.

And so I am going to take Thursdays off.

So this morning I rose at 5.30 am. I felt a lie-in would be a good start. Then an hour's prayer in my spare room, and then an hour of singing Psalms in the garden, until the neighbours asked me to desist. Indeed, Prov 27:14 has it about right, at least in Sandy Lane. So I spent a couple of hours in quiet contemplation of the Good Book, and then sorted through the post.

A couple of leaflets from various Baptist Missionary projects. A gas bill. A letter which seems to have been delayed, asking me to sign a petition against a slurry pond at Willow farm. A Next Directory addressed to my predecessor.

It must have been seeing the young couple yesterday that put me into a melancholic mood. They obviously, despite their sinful jumping of the nuptial gun, loved each other dearly.  I fell to musing about Marjorie, and how I lost her.

Surely it was just a terrible misunderstanding. We'd put our house in Milton Keynes on the market, planning to buy somewhere smaller now the children had moved out. I was called away on business - a week-long Underarm Deodorant Industry conference at the NEC.  When I came back, the house's new owners had moved in and of Marjorie there was no sign. We'd not even exchanged contracts when I left on the Monday morning.

I'm sure she must have left a message for me, but somehow it was lost. And maybe her mobile phone memory was wiped so she couldn't find my number.  And she'd never taken much notice of my job, so maybe she just didn't know exactly where I worked.   And it could have been just a misunderstanding that led the buyers to think she was single.

And so I had been musing for a while there in the kitchen, thinking about Marjorie.  Then I realised I had  absently-mindedly flipped my way through the Next catalogue, drawing lines across the legs of all the female models to indicate the length their hemlines should have been to preserve the appropriate amount of modesty.

God is a help in trouble, our refuge in ages past.  The Spirit is my guide.  But I'm really missing Marjorie.