A Sea of Flowers

We enjoyed the Commonwealth Games - and Captain M-B has been admiring a Commentator - a young blonde ex-diver - called Tonia Couch. 

"Well, yes", I said as he stared dreamily at the screen, "She IS a lovely girl.  In fact, she is nearly as lovely as me wouldn't you say? ... Or you can have a black eye. The choice is yours."

"Er. You are differently lovely." he said, his eyes fixed firmly on the TV screen.

"Phew - got away with that one" came a relieved murmur, while I digested the comment.  Ouch.

I am thankful that he never came across her during her diving career, as I fear what the sight of her in her swimmie would have done to his blood pressure.

We are now in a sea of flowers - our lovely lilies/irises, pictured in yesterday's blog; our African violets; the table orchids which are flowering madly, and on Monday Col bought all our balcony flowers indoors, so I am sitting by a sea of geraniums and nemesia.  It's wonderful, like being in a garden.

The scaffolding was completed on Friday - bang CRASH swear swear CLANK - and in theory the builders could be here today to start the painting and re-pointing. So Col had to clear the balcony.

In theory. They could turn up in two months time.  At least the geraniums will flourish indoors if they have to.

I say we enjoyed the Commonwealth Games - and I thought that we did along with many others - but there was an article in Tuesday's Independent pretty much telling us that we were WORSE THAN HITLER for doing so.  The writer felt that the history of the Commonwealth, its legacy of colonialism and slavery, is not a pretty one.

Well - that is true of course.  Human history has been a tragedy since the loss of Eden.  How could it be otherwise?  Once our first parents made that fatal choice to cut themselves - and us, their unborn children - off from their Creator, their Source of life, their Source of wisdom and guidance, we have been adrift.  And worse that that, we did not even find the freedom to rule ourselves - check out 1 John 5:19 if you wish to. We fell into some very sinister hands.

It says:  "We know that we originate with God, but the whole world is lying in the power of the wicked one."  The wicked one is Satan the devil - the ruler of the present system of things on the earth.

It is only the Kingdom of God that will end the rule of Satan, and end the time during which "man has dominated man to his harm".

In the meantime, it seems better to compete at sports in a reasonably good-natured way, rather than in the frenzied hatred of war.  Though, for sure, it is all far from perfect, far from fair, still so far from the paradise we lost.

The problem for me is that I have to be careful not to take sides in a nationalistic sort of way - which is not always easy. I try to support various athletes from various nationalities in various different disciplines, which I hope meets our Creator's standards of impartiality. And I genuinely do want them all to do well - they work so hard and it means so much to them.