I have been back to the oesteopath today and am hoping that things have now been clicked and manipulated enough to allow muscles and things to work properly.

After all the manipulation the oesteopath advised going straight home and putting an ice pack on the area that she had been working on to calm it down. I’m sitting here with an ice pack now, but the concept does seem strange. She spent 30 mins moving everything around and the my response to allow the manipulations to work properly is to soon afterwards cool things down to releive the pain.

I wonder if there is a metaphor here for change within the church. If it’s not working (and we know that in some areas it it not) we are good at trying to stoke things up a bit with some manipulation here, a little massage there, cracking here and rotating there. This process understandbly generates a lot of heat and pain and I wonder whether allowing the heat to continue with the aim ‘to get through it’ is the correct response or whether we should think about applying an ice pack for a while to allow the true effects of the massage and manipulation to shw themselves.

Maybe the process, idea, I am looking for is to wake things up, apply an ice pack and then quietly observe what true change occurs?