Photo taken by Carolyn
I hope you are feeling blessed and inspired today. I know I am! As you are already aware (because I keep mentioning it) we at Sunday@thepub are involved in a weekly litter pick focusing around the coast of North Tyneside. This last Sunday night we went to Cullercoats Bay. It was once again a lovely evening. The tide was out so we had a huge expanse of beach to comb through. As part of this exercise I’m asking those who join us to pick up and collect bottle tops; our hope is to make and create something out of them!
While we were out on Sunday night it was really interesting to look closely amongst the shale and stones to discover small fragments of glass. So I thought why not pick them up! We could collect them and, like the plastic bottle tops, make something out of them.
What was interesting was to look closely at the sand and see just how many tiny fragments of glass and plastic which were too small even to pick up. There is certainly an issue with how clean we think our beaches are… So much of it is has been bashed about by the sea and sand that it’s so small to even work out what to do with it. So if you do go to the beach… or if you go anywhere PICK UP YOUR RUBBISH! And why not think about taking an extra carrier bag to remove other bits of rubbish you see lying around. Lets be Wombles!
So where is all this going? Well I gave you a clue in the title to this blog but left you hanging! ‘The closer you look’… and the second part of it is this… ‘the more you will find’. I think this could be true for a lot of the things that life throws at us. It’s certainly true for the wonder and beauty of all that we see around us. I think it’s also true for those who call themselves followers of Jesus – the more you look at who Jesus is and what he was about the more intriguing He gets!
I wonder how much we really look? How much do we really take in when we look at the beauty of the earth? How much do we really look in to those things and experiences that come our way? How much do we look into the person of Jesus? How much do we look at other ways of being or to other opinions that differ from our own?
In our modern ‘Googling’ generation it’s easy not to look particularly closely at that which we see and experience as we have instant answers… or opinions…
The experience of looking closely at the sand and seeing the mixture of sand, glass, pebbles, plastic and other tiny bits of rubbish and shell, is that it was actually very beautiful, but you needed to look closely to see it. But also in the midst of that beauty were objects that harm and damage the environment.
Photo taken by Carolyn
It seems to me that we have an opportunity in this world to look at that which is within us and around us whether its nature, theories, science, people we encounter… to look closely and see what else we can discover… for there may be profound beauty… and even the odd bit of rubbish.
This week at Sunday@thepub we will be meeting at 7.00 for our litter pick, we shall meet at the slope leading down to Cullercoats Bay. We will then meet at the Crescent Club from 8.00pm for our usual discussion. I hope to see you there.
sunday@thepub 