Where Does All The Time Go?
Dear friend,
I’m recently returned from the 7:30 p.m. service at Potter’s House Church, behind Costa Coffee on Tottenham High Road.
I wondered if something might intervene and make it impossible to attend. Maybe I was hoping something would? As the hour approached, I began to feel sleepy and thought about taking a power nap—the couch looked so soft and inviting—but I knew I was going.
That’s the power of accountability.
Seth Godin calls it willingly putting yourself on the hook.
I’m not such a big fan of that metaphor, but it gets the point across.
The day started with a sudden opening up of the ground and a cold, hard shock. If you’ve ever put a foot confidently forward only to find nothing solid, your body plunging into space—
It happened to Santy the first time the water was high in the canal and she couldn’t tell where the land ended and the water began. She strode out onto the water and fell headfirst into the canal.
It was like that this morning.
I was on the phone to a friend, who won’t want to be named. I made a comment about a magnet she has in her kitchen that holds your keys, which is actually a really useful thing—when the ground went, and all I could hear on the other end of the phone were odd animal noises and then laboured breathing.
My friend was having an epileptic seizure, and I couldn’t work out if she’d told me she was home or out in Hainault Forest. I kept calling her name, and could hear her breathing, and didn’t want to hang up, so I ran next door to see if our neighbours, Malik and Flora, were in, but there was no answer.
Standing on their doorstep, I saw a woman walking past and asked her for help, explained the situation, and she called the emergency services. I still thought my friend was lying in the forest someplace between the small car park and the café, but without a precise location, they couldn’t dispatch an ambulance, so we just had to hang up.
Which is when I heard a tap running on my phone and knew where my friend was, and that she’d regained consciousness.
She didn’t recognize my voice or know who I was, but I could get to her in about ten minutes if I went by bike.
The woman who helped, Sam, is a neighbor I only just met today. She was on her way to a job interview, but said it didn’t matter. This was more important.
I cycled past the wetlands. A route I took to my first-ever teaching job at the turn of the century.
Flying along for a different set of reasons.
Where did all that time go?
My friend is okay.
She had a shower and a cup of cardamom tea, and when she felt strong enough, we went for a short walk, and I cycled back home to do some work.
Then, sitting in the warm welcome of the little church in Tottenham. Singing along to the live band on stage, the lyrics for the songs up on a screen, karaoke-style.
Lots of handshakes and smiles and a beautiful moment where people knelt the way they do in Hindu temples, and people prayed out loud in a hum of voices and languages I cannot place, like a warm sea, a symphony of hearts. An internal sun.
I liked the pastor’s sermon. The rhythms and cadences of place and culture rolling off him and into us, weaving a sense of hope and belonging.
It was fun.
Nothing earth-shattering, just good and normal.
It’s one Spirit.
The road you take is the road you take.
Every place where people come together in faith and compassion and love is full of the same divine energy. It’s a great tragedy for people to fight over whose is the true God, but people do, and will continue to do so while God remains a concept in their minds.
Distinctions dissolve when you feel the presence.
Then you recognize how close it has been to you all along.
Every step of the way.
The pastor had turned fifty.
He said we are walking backward into our futures, looking at the past.
What if we turn around and see the future we are walking towards with our hearts?
What then will our eyes notice?
Till tomorrow
Love
Mikey