In the film ‘Bruce Almighty’, the story starts with a news reporter called Bruce Nolan who is dissatisfied with his life because he feels he’s going nowhere and isn’t getting the big stories he wants to cover. The film starts with a scene showing a typical ‘local’ story: Bruce reporting on a bakery which is going for a record on baking the biggest cookie. No one really cares about this particular record and even the bakers are not particularly good at being enthusiastic about it! It symbolises the pointlessness which is dogging Bruce and how he feels insignificant and worthless.

Making a huge cookie, though, requires a lot of ingredients, and anyone who has done batch cooking or made a meal for a large number of people in one go knows that a lot of ingredients are needed to cook for lots of people. In 1996, Cookie Time Limited[1] took the world record for the biggest cookie, which was:

• 15 m² in area
• 9 m² in diameter
• 5 cm thick

And it contained:

• 13 tonnes of ingredients, including:
• 5 tonnes of chocolate (over 1 million chocolate chips
• 1 tonnes of sugar (enough for 1 spoonful of sugar in 600,000 cups of tea)
• 2 tonnes of butter (enough for over 400,000 slices of toast)
• 24,000 eggs
• 5 tonnes of flour

To take any kind of cooking record like this requires a huge amount of ingredients and it can be very hard to work through the implications such cooking requires. You need bigger pans and ovens if you’re going to do it all at once, for example!

But essentially, batch cooking is not that difficult once you make the adjustment and take into account what you are trying to do. You simply have to multiply the ingredients you’d make for one cookie and make adjustments for timings for cooking.

I feel a bit like a batch cooker when we are looking at the psalms of thanksgiving. There is just so much material in the Psalms alone – let alone the rest of the Bible! – that it is easy to feel overwhelmed, but we need to look at it psalm by psalm, theme by theme, simply working through the many reasons the psalmists give for thanking God. The old joke says: ‘How do you eat an elephant?’ and the answer is ‘one bite at a time.’ In the same way, we study the psalms, theme by theme, and find so much in them which teaches us how to pray.

People often tell me there’s nothing to do in the summer holidays, but I suspect it’s a question of not knowing what’s available! Here’s a list of some of the things that are on in our local communities in August:

• Although we have no midweek meetings in August (though some badminton sessions will still be on in August), weekend activities at GPCC are unchanged. Coffee mornings will be on every Saturday (10 a.m. until 12 noon) and meetings are at 10.30 a.m. and 6 p.m.
• You can learn to knit or just join with the ladies from Furlong Road Methodist Church on Wednesday 2nd August from 2-3.30 p.m.

• The next ‘Churches Together’ prayer meeting will be on Tuesday 15th August at 9.30 a.m. at Houghton Road Centre in Thurnscoe.
• On Tuesday 15, 22 and 29 August from 11 a.m. until 1 p.m. there will be a family fun day at Houghton Road Centre in Thurnscoe, run by ‘Churches Together’. There will be the opportunity to take part in craft activities, play crazy golf, have light refreshments and get to know other local families.In addition, there are activities for children run by Goldthorpe Library (including sand play on 2nd August from 2-3 p.m., rainbow weaving on 9th August from 10-11 a.m., making purses/ pencil cases on 16th August from 2-3 p.m. and paper aeroplane making on 23rd August from 10.30 -11.30 a.m.) and Thurnscoe Library (craft activities on 3rd & 10th August from 2.30-3.30 p.m.)
• Don’t forget also a tile mosaic workshop at Thurnscoe Library on 14th August from 2-4 p.m. (organised by Big Local Thurnscoe to decorate the railway underpass and open to all ages)
• The Big Local Beach Party at Thurnscoe Park will be on Saturday 5th August
• A fun day (‘Bounce into Summer’) will be held in front of the Dearne Playhouse on 23rd August.
• Craft sessions connected to the Dearne Community Arts’ Festival will be at Cherry Tree Court on Monday 7th August and at the Salvation Army on Wednesday 16th August (both sessions 10 a.m. – 12 noon)
• There is a Performing Arts workshop for 10-18 year olds at Dearne Playhouse on Thursday 24th August (10 a.m. – 4 p.m.)

So if you’ve nothing to do this summer, why not go along to some of these events and see what’s happening in your local community?

Electronic gadgets, especially computer software and smartphones, are reportedly meant to be ‘intuitive’, which means we are supposed to be able to fathom them without necessarily having recourse to the instructions’ manual! This may well work for some people, but certainly the danger is that we think life works in the same way! The Bible makes it plain that life is not quite that easy to fathom, and certainly one of the surprises of the Christian life is discovering that God’s ways and kingdom do not operate according to the same principles we have become used to over the years…

Brian Hardin says, ‘If you listen to the words of Jesus given in the Gospels, you become aware that he’s describing a kingdom and worldview that is different (from) the systems and cultures we’re now living in.’ Samuel D. James says ‘there is no safe corner of the Christian story that is completely intuitive or unfailingly neighbourly. Every element of the Gospel can and will grate against our modern sense of “real life”… What we must figure out is how much of real life we will look at through the lens of truth, and how much we will not.’ It’s never easy when we crash into the Gospel; it’s rather like this ‘crash test’ of a Lego Porsche, when the car is smashed to smithereens!

When we read the Gospels, we see Jesus reacting in ways that to us seem unnatural. He accepted God’s will with serenity and trust, even when that meant betrayal, hurt and even death (see Jn 13:10, 18-30, 1 Pet 2:23, Luke 4:22-30, Jn 18:2-11). We would have expected Him to instruct the eleven disciples to prevent Judas from leaving the room and therefore avoiding betrayal… or to defend Himself in the Garden of Gethemane… or  to take the opportunity to flee!) Instead, we see Him reacting not with fatalistic resignation but with composure and trust. He was prepared to accept God’s will for His life, even when that meant personal hurt and loss.

When our worldview ‘clashes’ or ‘grates’ with God’s ways, we have a choice. We can either allow this brush with reality to help us to realign our thinking and behaviour with God’s or we can blunder on, thinking we know best. People can spend a lot of time ‘pressing and guessing’ with technology, too proud to read the instructions’ manual. We can be like this with life too, but God has given us guidance and help. Life is not intuitive, but God’s Word gives us guidance on how to live well.

We had two birthdays to celebrate tonight.

In a society dominated by noise and activity, I believe there is no real spiritual growth without learning the secrets of quietness and trust.

Ultimately the words that God speaks are of far more value than our words. Our part has to be to quieten our hearts so that we can hear God speak. Like Job, we do well to put our hands over our mouths (Job 40:4), to ‘hide my eyes with my face to the ground in the presence of Your majesty.’ (‘God Almighty’, Chris Tomlin) When we truly learn that in repentance and rest is our salvation and in quietness and trust is our strength, then we are equipped to face every storm life may bring our way. Don’t run away from quietness and from trust. Don’t run away from taking time out deliberately and determinedly to be with God.

Lamentations 3 in the Message version says:

God’s loyal love couldn’t have run out,
    his merciful love couldn’t have dried up.
They’re created new every morning.
    How great your faithfulness!
I’m sticking with God (I say it over and over).
    He’s all I’ve got left.

^25-27 God proves to be good to the man who passionately waits,
    to the woman who diligently seeks.
It’s a good thing to quietly hope,
    quietly hope for help from God.
It’s a good thing when you’re young
    to stick it out through the hard times.

^28-30 When life is heavy and hard to take,
    go off by yourself. Enter the silence.
Bow in prayer. Don’t ask questions:
    Wait for hope to appear.
Don’t run from trouble. Take it full-face.
    The “worst” is never the worst.

^31-33 Why? Because the Master won’t ever
    walk out and fail to return.
If he works severely, he also works tenderly.
    His stockpiles of loyal love are immense. (Lam 3:22-33)

Quietness enables us to passionately wait for God and to diligently seek Him, confident that hope will appear because the Lord will never abandon us.

It’s one thing to say that it’s essential to be quiet in order to hear God (and Elijah is proof that God does not always speak through the earthquake or fire but comes to us sometimes in a quiet whisper), but quite another thing to learn how to be quiet (see Ps 131:2). If we are to overcome the barriers of quietness in order to know its blessings, we have to learn how to:

1. be determined to seek God. It requires a conscious choice on our parts to quieten our hearts; the old practice of pausing for one minute on the hour helps us to be mindful of God throughout the day and can be the start of allowing our attention to be focussed on God at all times, thus fulfilling the command to ‘pray continually’ (1 Thess 5:17).
2. be deliberate in seeking God. There is a need for us to set aside time for God (often called a ‘quiet time’), and to obey His command to keep the Sabbath, following the pattern God has made for us. So often, we believe we are too busy to do this, but we have to learn to respect God’s order and to be ruthless in ordering our time well (see Matt 6:21, Eph 5:16), giving up perhaps some of the things which fritter away our time.
3. be disciplined in seeking God. Often, we start to seek God with good intentions, but give up because we become distracted or do not hear Him speaking to us. In the spiritual life, as with all things in life, we need patience and perseverance if we want to see things change. Gradually, as we quieten our hearts, we will learn to hear the Shepherd’s voice. Jesus made this very clear: ‘The one who enters by the gate is the shepherd of the sheep. ³ The gatekeeper opens the gate for him, and the sheep listen to his voice. He calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. ⁴ When he has brought out all his own, he goes on ahead of them, and his sheep follow him because they know his voice. ⁵ But they will never follow a stranger; in fact, they will run away from him because they do not recognise a stranger’s voice.”’ (John 10:2-5)