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Posts Tagged ‘vicar’

Vicar’s wife job description – Part 9 – Teens and Drunks

Posted in Alcohol, Teenagers, vicar, Vicar's wife job description, Vicarage, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on 8 June, 2009| 1 Comment »

It’s been another busy week at the Vicarage. Not only do we have Polly and the baby still in residence, but we’ve had Voice staying as well. Voice loves to lead singing in church and is on a week’s work experience with another local church. We are just providing accommodation for Voice as she’s spending most of her time with the other church, singing in services and meetings and helping out with their activities.

Voice is only fifteen, so it’s been interesting having her stay. We’ve been trying to get her to give us the inside track on being a teenager so we are better prepared to handle our gang when they hit those challenging years. Her capacity for sleep is enormous, even to the extent of being completely comotose through our jet-engine sounding shower pump going.

Gone has called at our front door three times in the last week, drunk, homeless and very sad. This morning I gave him a cup of coffee and a sandwich as he sat on the front step, waiting to speak to the Vicar. As he added more Frosty Jack to his coffee, he became more restless and abusive.

Frosty Jack

Frosty Jack

I was trying to find out about local hostels for him when he finally left. He couldn’t wait for the Vicar. The booze had made him too jittery. One minute he was weeping and admitting the mess he’s in, the next he was swearing and threatening to throw lighted paraffin over the front door.

I didn’t feel in any danger, though. As spoke to him softly, I could see the self-loathing in his eyes. And the Vicar and his elders were meeting in the study.

He probably won’t find a hostel place, though, cos he’s on the booze. He told me that he’s thinking about doing something to get himself locked up. At least in prison you are fed and given a warm bed. He’s 51, and has been told that he’ll die soon, given the state of his liver. He keeps warm by begging for a day saver ticket and then spending all day on the bus. That way he can cope with being out all night.

He needs too much help to stay with us. I can only pray and feed him sandwiches and gentle answers.

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DIY Holiday Club – A Great Day Out

Posted in Church, Holidays, Kids, tagged , , , , , , on 29 May, 2009| Leave a Comment »

At our previous church, the Vicar and I were involved in regular holiday clubs. We’d have around 25 kids from the church and church school attending and a team of about 10 from church leading and helping. Most of our holiday clubs lasted just a day, although we sometimes did a three day one. They were lots of fun and a great opportunity to teach kids about God and bless parents with some child-free time.

We would have around three clubs a year, depending on other church events and energy levels within the church family. You can do five days of 4 hours without Ofsted having to inspect you (oh the joys of government control). And you can do 2 hours as many times as you like.

The church here has a weekly Kids Club, but hasn’t really run Holiday Clubs before. It’s one of the things on the Vicar’s To-Do List, but not at top priority, as the church family are already really stretched by the regular activities.

But at Coffee, Cake and Chat, the coffee morning I recently started for school gate mums, there was a suggestion that we all get together with our kids in half term. People don’t have lots of space in their houses or gardens round here. If you have a few friends around it gets really squashed. And we mums like to be together as well as the kids, so the Church Hall is a perfect venue.

So I proposed a DIY Holiday Club. I volunteered the Vicar to do games and a talk type thing. We all agreed to bring food for lunch, and noone needed CRB checks as they all came with their own kids.

So yesterday, from 11am-2pm we had nine kids aged 4-9, 3 toddlers and about nine grown-ups (some came and went). It was terrific fun. We learnt a memory verse, we played relay games in the churchyard (thank you Vicar), we sang loud songs, we made bedroom door labels and those folded paper ‘fortune tellers’ (but with kind Christian sentiments…mainly), we ate a wonderful lunch and enjoyed ourselves enormously.

I think the kids were even happier than this

I think the kids were even happier than this. The mums certainly were.

I am so grateful that we’ve landed up here, with such a great and energetic group of mums. And a holiday club sorted with minimal effort. The next one is now high on the To-Do List.

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Vicar’s wife job description – Part 8 – PS2 Games

Posted in Family, Vicar's wife job description, tagged , , , , , on 22 May, 2009| Leave a Comment »

This picture shows the Vicar's family after being interrupted on the PS2

A picture of the Vicar's family being interrupted during a PS2 game


Why does a Vicar’s wife need to be able to wield a Buzz Junior PS2 buzzer? Well, when the church magazine editor rings and the Vicar is in the middle of an important round of Monster Rumble with the Engineer and the Joker, who has to take his place in the game?

I valiantly took his place twice in yesterday evening’s game. And even won a couple of bouts. But I made sure I was doing badly as soon as the Vicar returned. I don’t like to show him up.

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Vicar’s wife job description – Part 7 – Busy Evenings

Posted in Church, Food, vicar, Vicar's wife job description, tagged , , , , , , on 21 May, 2009| 5 Comments »

One evening this week things got a bit crazier than usual in our house. All was calm at tea time and our next few hours ahead looked like being fairly gentle. I had to take the Queen to her swimming lesson, and the Vicar had offered to help a homeless youngster move into some new accommodation, which was going to take him about an hour. Polly’s baby was beginning to get into a sleeping routine.

When I came back from swimming things were looking more frantic. Polly greeted me on the doorstep rolling her eyes. ‘Just ask the Vicar’ she said.

Keep a stash handy for callers in need

The Vicar now has a stash like this in his study (minus the radishes)

Whilst the homeless teenager was waiting downstairs, the Vicar had been putting the boys to bed. And then another visitor had appeared, asking for money for food. We don’t give money, but we are happy to provide food. The Vicar’s head was spinning so rather than grabbing a few bits from the cupboard, he agreed to take our newest visitor to Sainsbury’s after his homeless teenager rehousing run.

He didn’t get back till after 10pm. But he’d stocked up with supplies to keep in a box in his study. Which came in handy the following evening when SainsburyRunMan returned with another friend in need.

I can’t tell you how much I am looking forward to half term next week.

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Polly and the Baby

Posted in Vicarage, tagged , , , , , on 20 May, 2009| 1 Comment »

Polly and her baby are staying with us. They became homeless the weekend of the Visitors, and moved into council funded emergency accommodation for a week. It was clean but horrible – noisy, rather smelly and insecure (she could open her room by shoving on the door).

Aaah

Aaah

I’d known Polly for a while and get on well with her. She is from Eastern Europe and all her family support is back at home. Her baby is only five months old and she was exhausted. We have a whole floor of the Vicarage which is unoccupied because it’s dilapidated. I don’t think the rooms have been used for at least twenty years.

So I invited her to come and stay in the attic whilst the council sort her out with housing. Since she’s now officially homeless, we’re hoping it’ll not be toooo long. She’s going to paint the attic room and we already have the promise of a bed for her – at the moment she’s in the spare room.

So now we have two extra people to stay. So far it’s been great, but it’s also coincided with a whirlwind of meetings and people in distress calling at the Vicarage.

My head is buzzing and yesterday evening, as we passed each other at the front door, the Vicar said to me ‘See you on Friday’. (He’s not actually going away anywhere.)

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Mrs Beamish – Change in Church

Posted in Fun, tagged , , , , , on 19 May, 2009| 6 Comments »

My friend DoctorMum is a curate’s wife, shortly to be a Vicar’s wife. She posted this video clip on her Facebook profile. It illustrates perfectly how we all feel about change in church.

This one’s expecially for my dad, who is at one with Mrs B on the peace.

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The Inner City Vicar’s Day Off

Posted in vicar, tagged , , , , , , , on 18 May, 2009| 20 Comments »

We’ve all heard the jokes about only working on Sundays, but in reality the Vicar works a 50-60 hour week (he knows that because he keeps a timesheet). So a good day off is essential if we want to keep going at this job in the long term. You need to clear your head and take a breath.

The Vicar takes Fridays off. This works well for us, cos it almost feels like the weekend. Saturdays are too close to sermon time and are often interrupted with church events.

It works for the kids – the big ones have a good evening with Dad after school and the Engineer, who’s still in nursery, gets to see Dad for even longer. The Vicar’s Wife likes having some child free time with her husband too.

We have developed a bit of a pattern for our days off, which worked very well in Wolverhampton, and we are now trying to replicate in our new parish. Long trips out are a bit of a no-no for us as we only have 2 1/2 hours in the morning until we have to fetch the Engineer from nursery.

So what we like to do is to go into the town. This may not seem very exciting to you, but let me explain how we manage to enjoy a morning out in a deprived and delapidated town centre.

First stop is usually the library to change books and pooch about in the quiet and elegant Carnegie library we have. Then we gae the messages in our local shopping centre (built in 1971 and partly funded by the National Mineworkers Pension Fund, with shopping opportunities that are cheap and cheerful rather than expensive and elegant – just what you need for vicars and their cash-strapped families).

Day Off treats...

Day Off treats...

The best bit of our day off, though, is the next bit: sitting down in a local caff for strong tea and a bacon sandwich. Sometimes we’ll chat and sometimes read our new library books or the paper. The key is not to talk about church. Last Friday we did this bit at lunch time. There were three of us (since we’d already picked the Engineer up) and we all ate at the Cosy Corner in the indoor market for less than £10.

What do you do on your days off?

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Accents

Posted in Black Country, Family, Fun, Kids, tagged , , , , , on 29 April, 2009| Leave a Comment »

I have a terrible confession to make (shhhhh): I prayed that God would not send me and the Vicar to work in a church in Birmingham.

When he was still training, the Vicar had suggested that Birmingham would be a good place to go and work – lots of multi-cultural areas, close to many athletics meets (the Vicar was helping out with some ministry for Christians in Sport at the time) and well located between our families in London and Scotland.

But I knew better. We didn’t want our kids growing up with those nasal Birmingham accents. So the Lord was kind to us and sent us to the Black Country instead.

We love it here – it’s multicultural, close to athletics meets, well located between our families and people are friendly and wonderful. But today the Engineer said:

See the whistle I got from the boo-kit*.

The accents are here to stay. And I’m glad to be here. Who’d have thought it?

*The boo-kit is full of small plastic toys that the nursery children can choose as a prize for getting lots of ‘good tidying up’ and ‘good listening’ stickers at school.

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Vicar’s wife job description – Part 4 – Trees

Posted in Vicar's wife job description, tagged , , , , on 22 April, 2009| 1 Comment »

Where we live most people have small gardens, often concreted over, or live in flats. And not many can afford to have play equipment in their garden. Our church was recently given a generous grant towards having a playground installed in our grounds. It will mainly be used by the young children who attend our toddler group.Tree

As part of the project, some trees in the churchyard had to be trimmed back. As I came back from the school run yesterday, the tree surgeons were hard at work. And they were shredding lots of the wood. We have wood burning stoves in the vicarage and we’d been promised the logs. So I went to check that they weren’t chipping all the lovely holly wood. They assured me they weren’t but then started asking about which other trees needed pruning. This was definitely outside my field of knowledge.

The Vicar was out at a prayer meeting, so it was back to the vicarage to “phone a friend”. I got it right first time by calling the churchwarden who then came over to talk trees whilst I made tea for the workers.

The logs came over our wall later on. And the Vicar spent a lovely hour after tea chopping and splitting them with some local teenagers who thought they’d come over to use our trampoline.

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TVWLB – A confession and a good link

Posted in Faith, Lent book, tagged , , , , , , , , on 9 April, 2009| 1 Comment »

Well, I have rather failed in my spiritual discipline of blogging The Cross Centered Life this Lent. I’m about half way through reading though and am going to go and snuggle in front of the fire and finish it just now.

Despite not blogging, I have been chewing over what I’ve learnt from the book. I think I’ve been encouraged to direct my thoughts to the cross more – to the suffering of Jesus and the sovereignty of God. This has really helped me as I’ve thought about people I love who are in difficult situations. I always feel that I should be able to do something, but I know I need to trust more in God’s power and control.

Cross

If you are wanting to think more about C J Mahaney’s book, the Vicar has put all his course materials up on his blog.

Happy Easter to all my readers. I’m praying that I will be more cross centred in my life this coming year. And you too.

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