For the last couple of days I have been involved in a pretty mundane task. I have been going through all my files on the YFC server and deciding whether it is useful to keep or needs deleting. I’ve been instructed to only keep stuff that will be useful for the next person.

I am amazed and how many files I have accumulated over 4 years. I am doubly amazed by how important those files felt at the time and now they are clearly irrelevant and do not need to be kept. I am going through 4 years of work, reading and saving or deleting as appropriate. A lot more is being deleted than saved.

Makes me think a bit about baggage we carry in our lives – but that is not what has struck me through the 4 (so far!) days of this task. What has struck me is how incredibly close to God I feel throughout the mundaneness of this task.

It has reminded me a lot of the week I spent a few years back with the Northumbria Community on retreat. My guide for the week gave me the task of planting potatoes and a psalm to think about. This was my first real experience of mulling over one or two thoughts over and over again as I did a pretty mundane task.

As I embarked on this I thought I was going to get bored in a couple of hours – but as I went through the routine so that things became automatic, I found God that God revealed deeper things and took my mind on little journey’s which I would not have considered from the psalm originally.

The last few days have been a bit like that. As I have been working on automatic I have been unconsciously sucked into the presence of God which has been pretty amazing.

In particular God seems to have been gently poking fun at my current secret fear. The fear that says, come September when I leave the busy-ness of YFC to find time for the community by just being myself in dog-collar in places that says ‘you are going to be soooo bored come the end of the day!’

The fear has not gone – but God is laughing, I can almost hear it, as I hear the Spirit saying ‘you really have no idea how deep I go, or how much you still need to learn. You are playing in the shallows, venturing as far as knee depth now and again … but you need to walk further out, to experience my depth, the real coolness, to be submersed in me and understand that I am deep … very deep … real deep!’