{"id":4048,"date":"2005-10-09T14:12:00","date_gmt":"2005-10-09T14:12:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/elizaphanian.com\/?p=4048"},"modified":"2019-11-22T16:57:51","modified_gmt":"2019-11-22T16:57:51","slug":"gods-sense-of-humour","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/elizaphanian.com\/?p=4048","title":{"rendered":"God’s sense of humour"},"content":{"rendered":"

Back from – very productive, affirming and reinforcing – conference on clergy leadership, principally led by Rob Mackintosh of The Leadership Institute. Details of the course are here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In the course of various discussions, I was working through issues associated with my deafness – bit of a theme at the moment – so I shared with my small groups the various problems I have been having in the parish, and the way in which I thought God was leading me through it. I said, in particular, that the most difficult times were at common meal times – when someone sits on my left, there is lots of background noise, and I find it difficult to have a conversation.<\/p>\n

So, as you might expect, at the next meal (supper) I end up sitting with a free space on my left – free until the guest speaker sat there, that guest speaker being the Bishop of Chelmsford….<\/p>\n

Had to laugh.<\/p>\n

Bizarrely, I also went to a formal meal on Friday night, where I was placed in the worst possible position – at the end of a huge row of tables, with a person to my left and nobody to my right. But in fact – running with the way the spirit is moving me – I thought ‘sod it’ and just got on with conversing – with a hand next to my right ear to deflect the noises from my left so that I could hear my neighbour’s speech. It worked OK – only missed a few sentences – and all this with a jazz combo in the background as well.<\/p>\n

God is certainly up to something at the moment – which is reassuring, in it’s own way, however difficult things might get this week.<\/p>\n

It’s good to be back.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Back from – very productive, affirming and reinforcing – conference on clergy leadership, principally led by Rob Mackintosh of The Leadership Institute. Details of the course are here. In the course of various discussions, I was working through issues associated … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[25,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4048","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-autobiography","category-ministry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3npsc-13i","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/elizaphanian.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4048","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/elizaphanian.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/elizaphanian.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/elizaphanian.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/elizaphanian.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4048"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/elizaphanian.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4048\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6589,"href":"https:\/\/elizaphanian.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4048\/revisions\/6589"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/elizaphanian.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4048"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/elizaphanian.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4048"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/elizaphanian.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4048"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}