On the gift of a skipping-rope

"Martha, tha's brought me thy wages like a good lass, an' I've got four places to put every penny, but I'm just goin' to take tuppence out of it to buy that child a skippin'-rope."

So says the warm-hearted Mrs Sowerby to her daughter in Frances Hodgson Burnett's classic The Secret Garden. And the gift of a skipping-rope begins a change in Mary Lennox, helping to transform her from a spoilt and sickly orphan to a strong and spirited young lady.

This quote was jiggling around my mind the other day, because life was hectic. "I've got three places to put every minute," I thought. If I wasn't doing this then I could be doing that, and if I wasn't doing that then I could be doing that other thing...

But sometimes, even in those kind of times, there is something that makes you say, "I'm just going to take two minutes out."

Money and time share some characteristics; a certain rigidity and a certain flexibility. They are rigid because there is, incontrovertibly, a fixed amount of each. If you have £100 you cannot spend £101. Even more so, you cannot add even a minute to your day. You can, if you wish, account precisely for every last penny, every last second.

And yet... when I moved into a student house with friends at university, we made a deliberate decision to be generous with this wonderful, characterful property we had found. I don't know how many cheese toasties were consumed that year, how many cups of tea were made, but somehow, the food money in the old jam jar always seemed to be enough.

And yet... when I think I don't have time to pray, but I take ten minutes to sit down and do it anyway, everything else still, somehow, shuffles around to fit into the remaining time.

We can't do everything. Maybe sometimes we don't have money or time for everything we need, never mind everything we want. But even then, just sometimes, we need to take tuppence out to buy someone a skipping-rope.

Comments

Mr White Watson of Bakewell

Once upon a time, back in 1795 or so, lived a man who was always asking questions. The kind of questions like, "Why is glass transparent?" or "Why do fruit trees grow better in that place than in this place?" or "What does the earth look like underneath the surface?" This last question was one that he was particularly interested in, and he went so far as to work out what the rock layers looked like where he lived, and draw little pictures of them. Now he was a marble sculptor by trade (as well as fossil hunter, mineral seller, and a few other things) so he thought it would be even better to make his little pictures in stone. That way he could represent the layers using the actual rocks they were composed of. Over the course of his lifetime he made almost 100 of these tablets, as he called them. Then he died. And no one else was quite as interested in all those rocks and minerals as he was. His collection was sold off, bit by bit, and the table...

Growing things

For those of you who are interested in my attempts at balcony gardening, I thought I'd update you a little. For those who aren't, don't skip this post. You may find something else of interest. Apart from the ever-present herbs, tomatoes and cayenne peppers are on the go this year. The peppers are really on the go - we went away for a week and came back to find them twice the size as when we left. Now they're producing fruit which is growing at a similarly rapid rate, though none has ripened to red yet. I realised I should have given you some kind of scale, so I just went out and measured. They're about 22 cm long, or 8 1/2 inches for you non-metric types. I may have to find out how to dry peppers if they all ripen at once. A couple of tomato plants are looking pretty healthy and beginning to flower. A few died; one, apparently, by being eaten whole by a bird, a trouble I've never had before. I had two seedlings left so used those as replacements, b...

The Imitation of Christ: Spiritual Formation Book 2

"This is my hope, my only consolation, to flee unto thee in every tribulation, to trust in thee, to call upon thee from my heart, and to wait patiently for thy consolation." The second of my four books for spiritual formation is The Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis. The introduction to my copy starts off by saying that 21st century readers may wonder why they are bothering, which hardly seems like a recommendation! I have to admit I finished it with a certain sense of relief, but there were some hidden gems along the way. It's rather like reading the book of Proverbs. There's no story or explanation of a theme, but there are astute observations, honest prayers, the occasional flash of humour, and quite a lot of repetition. Thomas à Kempis was a priest in an Augustinian monastery in the 1400s. Presumably his life conditions favoured the silence and solitude that he advocates for in The Imitation of Christ , but also gave him opp...

Martha's Marvellous Munchies

Search This Blog