Life in the city

I love my city, but life in the centre of it can be tough. last week, Sunday morning, I was awakened by the noise of workmen outside. It was unusually early - i looked over an it was 5.30am. I went to the window and watched as a white van drove the wrong way down the one way system at Ashgrove. It was only later in the morning that my wife realised that the van was full of the cap stones from our front wall!

A week earlier we had to deal with a smashed ground floor window, and it all felt a little fragile. Expecting them to come back for the rest of the flagstones, I was jumpy all week, waking at the slightest sound. On Street Angeling duty last night, our patrol witnessed quite mindless violence. One young lad getting smashed in the face. It would have been so much worse had we not been around to calm it all down a bit.

So life is tough in the city, and I'm ready to try and get my family out of it, out to somewhere hopefully safer, with a bit of green. In the meantime, we have to do what we can.

Filling a raised bed with manure from the city farm is the only act of resistance to the violence of the city that I know. Watching Cat (my wife) filling it with herbs and plants for the fairtrade cafe fills me with hope anew. Preparing for a street Lunch as part of the Eden Projects 'The Big Lunch' is an arduous task - but we must build up the communities that others would knock down. This is our fundamental Christian task, to do what we can while we can, because we know that God cares intimately for each person, each street, each town, each city.