All by chance?

It's a sure sign of how truly exhausted I was last evening (Tuesday) that I'm writing the blip I would normally have written at midnight a good 24 hours later - and much of the reason can be found in the rather random photo I've used for today's entry. 

I'll try to be succinct... Yesterday was the day on which we were expecting to learn of the election of the next Bishop of Argyll and The Isles - our next bishop. I was at my art class - the first in several weeks - when the message arrived from the newly-created bishop-elect, who just happens to be our current priest, the Revd David Railton. My painting teacher, also a priest, retired, said the same as I did - and it wasn't a word I usually share on here. He'll be wonderful as a bishop, but the thing is: for every bishop that a diocese rejoices to have elected, there is a charge - or as in our case a linked charge of two churches - who will be sharing a sense of loss as they gird their loins to find another priest. And in the case of our churches, this will be the second time in seven years that our rector has left to become a bishop - we seem to be a good springboard, or something. 

However, I couldn't sit around weeping into my water jar - we had a ferry to book for a girlie jaunt, my teacher and I, before I went home for lunch, walking through the hot sunshiny town while the messages pinged onto my watch as the news spread. Then I had a brief afternoon filled with cooking, because I had arranged the first meeting in years of the people from our church who had attended a Cursillo weekend over the past 24 years. This kind of meeting is a sociable affair and involves food as well as singing and listening and talking, and I'd been setting it up for a couple of months. We'd agreed to invite our priest and his wife. We had no idea ...

That's the photo. Time to eat, with all the contributions laid out on the side. Time to drink healths - without discussing it, people had contributed bottles of bubbly, alcoholic and not. Time for laughter and hugs and celebration and resolution. Later we sang and talked in small groups. We prayed together for our future, and for our new bishop. That's him, by the way, in the jeans, with his totally glam wife, my pal Sarah - just to dispel any ideas you might have about gaiters and perennial purple. 

Later, when everyone had left, Himself and I got the keyboard and other gubbins into our car and walked up the garden of the house we'd met in. We stood among the midges with our friends whose house it was, and looked out over the Firth as the dusk closed in and decided we needed to meet more often, especially now. 

Was it all just chance that turned our reunion into a celebration and a consolation? Who knows. *


*Question mark omitted deliberately.