Following on from yesterday’s bloggage, today is the day when the shed is going to be put up. The nice men from the shed company have just arrived and the heavens have opened! We’re on the lookout for groups of animals moving around in twos.
It has been said that there is no such thing as the wrong weather, just the wrong clothes. That may be true normally but when work needs doing outside the weather can be wrong. Crops require the right weather to grow and then we need the right weather to harvest them. When England play at cricket we need the right weather (sadly sometimes it’s a need for rain to avoid a defeat). Sun dials don’t work well in the rain. And when blokes turn up to put up a shed they need it to be less than torrential: otherwise they may be tempted to build it upside down and turn it into a boat!
But is it the wrong weather? Or is it that our lives are insufficiently flexible to enable us to change in response to the weather? I recognise that events like harvesting crops are relatively fixed but so, on the whole, are the seasons to enable farmers to plant, grow and harvest so there is limited flexibility even there.
You may be wondering where this line of reasoning is going. I wasn’t sure myself when I started. But the thought struck me (given the British obsession with the weather – it gives us something to talk about when we’re stuck for subjects) that perhaps we need to relax our modern lifestyles and obsessions with time and timeliness. Perhaps we need to be more flexible (I can already hear administrators and event organisers screaming) about things. The Bible has the concept of Kairos – God’s timing. And it is clear through the Bible, through history and in my own life that God’s timing is not always what we hope or expect but it’s always good. And wise people will adjust their timing and expectation to fit in with God’s.
The question is whether we will.
Don’t we just love the weather in this country? I’m not talking about any particular type or weather: just weather in general. It’s often the topic of our conversations (especially when we can’t think of anything else to say). And it always seems to provide us with something to complain about. Yesterday I was on a train that was delayed because it was so hot that the rails warped – cue complaints from other passengers about the wrong type of sun (and then reminiscences about the wrong type of snow)! The weather is too wet, too dry, too cold, too hot, too windy, too foggy… It is said that there is never the wrong type of weather when we go out, just the wrong type of clothes. I am not sure that always applies (what’s the right sort of clothing to wear in a tornado?) but I take the general point.
nukelearfishing 