Curtains

Last week was a busy one for contractors in the church. Lots of cleaning, maintenance and decorating going on. The decorating wasn’t to be finished until Saturday morning. Which was fine, except there was an event in the Rainbow Lounge in the evening which I was helping to set up. That meant I had to come into the church, after the decorating was finished, to put the room back to rights for the event in the evening. One of my tasks then, was to put the curtains back up in the Rainbow Lounge. You’d think that was easy, right? Well, first of all I had to figure out which poles went where. Although I discovered there was step before that: which poles went with which poles? Trying to figure that out, I realised the poles didn’t even fit together in any way! So how do they hold the curtains up? This was becoming far more complicated than I had imagined. Gradually I was able to figure it out, until I was left with only was problem. There needed to be eight curtains to cover the four windows. So why were there only seven curtains? I checked and checked again. Maybe I had this wrong somewhere. But all the poles were in the correct place (you have to trust me on that, but they all had “their place”). I couldn’t work it out. I checked to see if I’d put two curtains together. Nope. I began to search everywhere I could think of to find the missing curtain. Couldn’t find it. I contacted Clare to ask if it had been taken away to be cleaned - maybe some paint got on it. No, it hadn’t been taken for cleaning. Others were contacted and asked if they knew where it was. No, they didn’t. On Sunday morning, while I was at Sheddingdean BC, others looked for the missing curtain. Nobody found it. On Monday people looked. On Tuesday they looked. Nobody found it. On Wednesday, we found it. It was on the curtain rail where it was supposed to be, only on the wrong side of the middle! It had been there all the time. I had put all the curtains up correctly, apart from one thing: one curtain was the wrong side of the middle, so it looked like there was only one curtain. But I had checked that. And so had others. And yet, there it was. And it had been here all along! Sometimes, we can’t see for looking. Sometimes, however hard we look, we don’t look correctly. Perhaps, sometimes, we’re looking for the wrong thing in the wrong place. The curtain, it turns out, was on the rail al the time. I just didn’t see it. And neither did others. I wonder where else we might do that? Lots of places perhaps. We get entrenched in views and opinions and hold to them because, well, that’s all we see. I wonder too, if we do that with God. And the Bible. We have our views, our opinions, our beliefs and we can’t see anything else. It seems to me, that over the many centuries of faith and the Bible, many things have changed. Even over my short lifetime, my faith has changed. And, dare I say, the way we understand God and the Bible has changed. And by “we” I mean people of faith rather than any one individual. Although it can mean that, too. Some might think that’s a bad thing. I’m not sure about that. I think it’s a good thing. And more and more I hope that I can come to the Bible and to my faith and not always be stuck in “what I know” or “what believe” or “the way I’ve always seen it”. And maybe then, God can meet me (and I would add, us), in new and better ways. I don’t see that as curtains for faith or the Bible. I rather think it might be drawing back the curtains to see new things about God.