Yep, the place with the pier. My friend Chris and I drove right past the burned-out shell on the way to the hotel. It was a wiry cage of blackened timber, a fragile skeleton of a grand old arcade. It looked like it would crumble into cinders at any moment.
We're here on a worship conference, a thing which has so far, oscillated me through disappointment and elation like I'm attached to a bungee rope. More on that in a moment. In the meantime, I'd like to talk about punctuation.
I should give it a rest, this, shouldn't I? It doesn't actually matter does it? I mean just ignore the Inner Pedant and be done with him; he'll only grow stronger if you make him angry... like the Hulk... or maybe Katie Hopkins. Anyway, he could have had a field day today, the old Inner Pedant.
I stood in the queue, behind a guy carrying: a box of sandwiches, a banana, a packet of crisps and a bottle of Coca-Cola. He looked irate.
"No sir," said the frustrated lady behind the sausage rolls, "That's not how the meal deal works."
"But it says..."
I looked up at the chalkboard behind her head. It said this exact thing:
Meal Deal:
Sandwich + drink, crisp, choc or fruit
"It says chocolate or fruit!" he protested. Of course, in these sorts of situations the customer is always wrong - eventually he had to re-evaluate his selection to the requisite three items.
The Inner Pedant was fascinated. In fact, I hung around as the lady, looking exasperated, took out a white pen and tried to work out exactly how she could punctuate the list of items. I nearly interjected when she started turning one of the commas into a semi-colon. I resisted.
"Can I help you, sir?" said one of the other girls behind the counter.
"Oh no, I. It's just that it's... no, I'm fine, thank you," I said and slunk away.
Another favourite moment from today was watching the sea from my hotel room, with a cup of tea. What unbridled joy is found between the smallest walls of a china cup! I have a sea view, and although the frothy ocean was a choppy grey beneath a murky Autumn sky, I felt wealthy beyond my dreams. I watched the tiny white horses racing inland, and I remembered a story from Rupert the Bear. I watched the wind twist and bend the palm trees and saw a lady clutching the hood of her orange anorak around her head. I traced the tiny droplets of rain across the window-pane. It was magnificent.
Yet somehow, the conference is more of a mixed bag. I mentioned disappointment and elation. Let's start with the elation.
The musical content was off-the-scale tonight, I mean really good. The band played with passion, anointing, power and skill and the whole thing was electric. In order to get more leg room, Chris had opted to sit right at the front, which was fine of course, until we realised we were face-to-face with an enormous stack of speakers. Every bass drum kick, every juicy bass guitar lick and every smash of the floor toms reverberated through me. My bones were shaking and I felt my heart thumping in my chest like a ticking bomb. Many times I wondered whether there would be any need for electrical amplification in Heaven, and where to sit when I get there, hoping I wouldn't necessarily have to find out before the end of the song.
The disappointment is harder to measure. I guess it's a kind of conference anxiety - that feeling of being in a room of thousands of people like a nobody in a world of somebodies. We probably all feel like that though, don't we? Then, when you throw in the excellence of the musicians, the quality of their output and their heart and their passion for it, I start wondering why most people's experience of local church is not this. Actually, I start wondering why our experience of our local church is not this - and then I miss having my family around me all over again, and wish that they were here, just like the Big Church Night In.
Well, it's only just started. I'm going to a networking thing tomorrow, where I have to write my name (and what it is I think I do) on a sticker, slap it onto my jumper and go and meet people in a room of strangers. I don't mind saying that this presents the riskiest most nerve-wracking thing I've done in a while... which is exactly why I'm going to psyche myself up and do it. Maybe after I've had another cup of darjeeling, overlooking the English Channel.
The disappointment is harder to measure. I guess it's a kind of conference anxiety - that feeling of being in a room of thousands of people like a nobody in a world of somebodies. We probably all feel like that though, don't we? Then, when you throw in the excellence of the musicians, the quality of their output and their heart and their passion for it, I start wondering why most people's experience of local church is not this. Actually, I start wondering why our experience of our local church is not this - and then I miss having my family around me all over again, and wish that they were here, just like the Big Church Night In.
Well, it's only just started. I'm going to a networking thing tomorrow, where I have to write my name (and what it is I think I do) on a sticker, slap it onto my jumper and go and meet people in a room of strangers. I don't mind saying that this presents the riskiest most nerve-wracking thing I've done in a while... which is exactly why I'm going to psyche myself up and do it. Maybe after I've had another cup of darjeeling, overlooking the English Channel.
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