Tuesday 10th May 2011

-4 days and counting.

I did a lot of sorting and reviewing, consolidating and collating today, but no packing.

Moving house again (for the 30th time ) is still not easy, I have not yet perfected the art. I guess I need more practice.

I really feel the need to have a place of my own . This is the 3rd house in a row that I have been forced out of, the previous two were through having to leave a job and the ending of my marriage. All is confusion at the moment, I really feel that the church could do more to help me, I feel as if I'm yesterday's man eventhough at the age of 51 I am still in late youth.

A sense of purposelessness is beginning to pervade and with it the dull-clawed dragon of despond. The longer I feel disconnected from the Church the less certain I feel that I will go back to it, and that is quite a prospect after having given the whole of my adult life to it. When I left University, I answered a call made by John Vincent at a conference to go and live in the inner city alongside those who were unemployed. It was the early 1980's and I went to live in inner city Leeds and deliberately chose to lead a life of faith in a poor multicultural area. I set up a series of self-help projects and worked principally with the Vietnamese, Bangladeshi and Pakistani communities. 'Christians Aware' was my inspiration and a life of faith charged up by the Taize and Iona communities was the real life. Seeing Christ in the face of the poor was a real and non-supernatural experience. So where has it all gone? In the words of Dante,

"In the middle of the journey of (my) life I found myself within a dark wood where the straight way was lost."

In the afternoon, I lit a fire to burn scrap bits of wood and garden waste. The fire was burning well, but for some reason I decided to throw a considerable length of asphalt from a roof on to it. Not only did the sticky, gloopy bitumen seep across the patio, but great thick clouds of smoke were released into the upper atmosphere. I knew the neighbours were out but still kept nervously looking out of the window for signs of their return. If any of them suffer from asthma I'm for the chop!