Deeper, underground

I was getting things ready in my new classroom yesterday, painting a blackboard on the wall (like you do in an old Victorian schoolroom) and as I moved some stuff out of the way of the drips, I picked up a children's history book I'd not seen before. It wasn't particulary good, not a patch on the Ladybird histories of my childrhood, but I flicked through it anyway.

Back at home for teatime, Kate and the children had been to the library. They got books on Parkour, a Doctor Seuss, and a book about Harriet Tubman. It had a bronze statue of her on the front.

Kate said, sort of anticipating my bemused look, "Yeh, I don't know who she is." Not exactly bemused, but strangely warmed, I replied: "Actually, I'd never heard of her... before today. But she was in this history book at school, and she helped free slaves on the Underground Railroad." Felt a nudge from God to find out a bit more about her. She was known as the Moses of her people (which resonated with this morning's bible study notes on Luke, Tom Wright making the connection with Jesus' new kind of Exodus.)

Slavery, freedom, safe houses, the everyday heroic...

Watch the full episode. See more History Detectives.

The Meerkat anointing

I just keep coming back to Dutch Sheets' book Intercessory Prayer again and again. It's shaped my praying life in lots of different ways these past six years or so. I was a bit sluggish though, in response to the riots. Maybe I was still on a I'm-just-back-from-a-week's-camping-at-New-Wine-and-not-really-following-the-news thing. Then things kicked off in Manchester too. And we're off to Manchester this weekend (and London next week). So it was clearly time to pray. So we set aside the best chunk of the evening to pray for our cities and all the strands we could discern within that mess.


In his book, Dutch Sheets uses a few animal images to illustrate the different aspects of intercession in the Old and New Testaments - the she-bear anointing, the butterfly anointing etc. And I was really focusing on the chapter about Watchmen, and how that's connected with cities, and so the next day I thought I'd try to unpack that a bit in a way my children could understand. And we got researching meerkats, because they seem to encapsulate the watchmen characteristics of alertness, watchfulness, urgent communication.

Gotta dash - just spotted a Martial Eagle.

p.s. Praise God that it was a quieter night. I just loved turning on the news to hear that, err, nothing had happened. And that it had rained (there had been loads of specific prayer about that.)