After our experiences at the hands of a bunch of angry ministers a couple of weeks ago, this past week has been the exact opposite. So there is some justice in the world, after all 
On Tuesday, we led a whole day of prayer at International Christian College in Glasgow, when students and staff met together to – well, explore prayer. The invitation asked us to help them discover new ways to pray, and the principal (Tony Sargent) assured us in advance that they were open to anything prayerful – and they really were! Among modes too numerous to mention, we prayed with paint, with nails, with fabrics, with music, in solitude and silence, with traditional liturgies – and, yes, one or two words. Session 1 took us to prayer on holy ground, nurturing our personal spirituality; session 2 invited us to explore prayer as vision, as some went on a city walk while others checked out the papers; and session 3 focused on prayer as community building. We knew we’d put a huge amount of energy into our preparations for the day, but we were still taken aback by the warmth of the response. Everybody absolutely loved it. Considering that the entire spectrum of theological and ecclesiastical opinions from conservative Reformed to edgy Charismatic must be represented among the staff, quite apart from the students, we felt pretty pleased about that. One person greeted us at the start of the day with ‘All this touchy-feely stuff freaks me out’ – and by the end of the day was giving Olive a big hug and saying something like ‘This experience has changed my life’. Which for us made the whole thing worthwhile. We’ve always aspired to be all things to all people, and this day reminded us again that when we look at God rather than ourselves, then a whole lot of other things are less important than we sometimes make them seem to be.
And why did we title this post ’sensory overload’? Well, just over a year ago we led a service at Fuller Seminary on the theme of harvest/Feast of Tabernacles and, not surprisingly given the ritual of what happened in Bible times, we wanted to do things with a lot of water. We did – and if you search for it you can find a record of the event at the i-tunes shop. But not before we’d been assured that the good folks of California could only deal with one sense at a time, and if we followed the rabbis (who not only poured out large quantities of water but also danced all night and juggled with flaming torches) – then that would be ’sensory overload’. So it was natural that in the context of this week we would recall the person who coined that phrase, not least because he was a Presbyterian, and of course ICC in Glasgow is right in the heart of the only fully Presbyterian country in the world. And some people think that God has no sense of humour! And in case you’re wondering, the community of Fuller Seminary also loved that particular service.
