WATCHING THE SUN COME UP

I woke up ridiculously early. It wasn't the kind of halfway-up either; I was fully awake, and unable to go back to sleep.

Often that's a pretty good indicator that I'm supposed to pray about something, so naturally, I then spent the next half hour listening to a podcast and playing Tetris on my phone. I'm lousy sometimes.

But I did get up, and I did throw on some clothes and head out to the park. The air was still thick with night. There were some early mists steaming from the grass, but above, the stars twinkled in a purple sky.

There's no real need for 'social distancing' at 5-something-or-other on a Sunday morning. I was a lone figure striding across the grass to the benches. In the East, the morning was already painting a golden band above the town and the silhouetted treeline. It would not be long before my own long shadow would join the trees and fall behind me.

It felt very real that moment. Sometimes, especially now, life seems a bit sort of artificial. But a cold early morning in the park felt as tangible and as earthy as ever. As a teenager, I'd do this often: no thought of my own safety - I'd get up and go to the park to think and pray. It isn't normal teenage behaviour, but I wasn't particularly a normal teenager. I'd race back before school, just in time to cut another memory verse to recite on the way up the road later. This morning, out there in the cold air, waiting for the sun, I found myself wishing I was still a bit more like that.

I want to be real. When all this isolation is over, and we get to choose our culture and our etiquette again, I want to be genuine and real. I don't want to pretend to be anything, or conform to other people's expectations. I don't want to be the 'model' of a leader or an 'example' character for people to look up to and be disappointed - I want to be genuine.

And I think I'm arriving at that point because if there's one thing we're all going to need, it is genuine friends. In the end, nobody really follows the leader just for the sake of it: the best teams are the ones with the best combinations of boundaries and friendships. And I'd pick friends over followers any day; just like Jesus did.

I watched the sun. I love this daily drama. A thin sliver, a semicircle of golden light. A vibrant ball of hot orange emerging into the lightening sky. Already it's too bright to look at. Brilliant and yellow, it burns rays into the purple sky, bursting in every direction, catching glints on aeroplanes, painting clouds with gold, and dropping like silver across the tiny jewelled blades of grass.

The birds erupt with praise. Every beak in every tree sings its own part of the hallelujah chorus: from chaffinches to great tits, and robins to blackbirds. The magpies stutter and the woodpeckers rattle their beaks into the tree; the passerines dart happily from branch to branch, and somewhere an owl hoots a good morning, which may well be a goodnight as hunting time is over. And for some reason, I join in.

Sure my notes are simple, earthy melodies compared to theirs. Even the greatest of our sopranos couldn't match the smallest robin - we are slow and deep, and we've trained our ears to define a tiny window of sounds as 'music'. But real music is a vast, fluid ocean of sound, and the birds know far more of it than we do - not to mention the creatures of the deep, the seas themselves, and the planets spinning in their elegant frequencies. Sun, moon and stars in their courses above. I sang in the early morning anyway.

Walking back for breakfast, I started to think of some of the challenges of being real with people. There are risks, there are offences, there are miscommunications. But I hope there's also real honesty about who we are - what we struggle with, how we're overcoming, and how joy and wisdom, faith and grace all combine to make the journey so beautifully balanced, both for us, and those we walk with.

Well. That's yet to come in some ways. First is Isolation Week 2 - the quest for normal. There's every chance it could develop and evolve just as quickly as Week 1 did, by which I mean, this time next week we'll be locked indoors with tanks and infantrymen patrolling the streets. I sincerely hope it doesn't though. After all, I'd quite like to go out and see the sunrise again.