The elephant in the church
Published: Wed, 07/02/14
Anyone who has seen me in the flesh since last Thursday will have
noted that I have a cut on my forehead. Just to the left and about
4 cm long. It is fading now but on Sunday it was still pretty raw.
How did I do it? I will come to that in a moment. On Sunday I
was preaching twice, I was planned for the evening but I was asked
to take a morning service too since the planned preacher had a
family event she really wanted to go to. Since I was going to
prepare one service and sermon I thought it might as well have two
outings so I was happy to help. In the morning service I could see
that members of the congregation were noticing the damage to my
forehead and afterwards the main topic of conversation was, how did
you cut your forehead? (Since it is no secret that I teach martial
arts I expect they were hoping for a juicy story regarding a
misdirected battle axe or a lucky/unlucky punch.)
So, before I started the evening service I announced that I was
addressing the elephant in the church, and, yes, I did have a cut
on my forehead. On Thursday morning I had started a new project in
Oxford and one of the first jobs was to take up carpets. I was
cutting through the carpet with my Baho knife and it slipped and I
chopped myself on the forehead, okay, stupid accident, could have
been worse but it wasn't. There was the expected combination
of laughter and expressions of sympathy and we got on with the
service.
Sometimes you just have to accept that there are things you
can't hide and they will be noticed. I bumped into my landlord
who owns the Stav Centre building. It seems people are noticing
how much the building has been improved and he was most
complimentary about how good it is looking. When I am working at
the centre (just two days a week now since I am going to be in
Oxford for the rest of the week for the next couple of months)
just about everyone who walks by seems very interested in what we
are doing there. The next stage is to capitalise on the interest
to get people to actually come to classes, perhaps it will not be
all that hard.
The flip side is that it will probably have been noticed that I
have been neglecting other aspects of promoting Stav, these
postings for example and pushing the day courses and summer camp.
Well, sorry about that but I am doing the best I can, course in
Crewkerne this Saturday (5th July) and next one early August see
http://www.iceandfire.org.uk/forthcoming.html and places for the
Summer Camp at the late August Bank Holiday weekend,
http://www.stavcamp.org more on that at the weekend.
regards
Graham