Mood-swings and roundabouts

James Cathcart January 13, 2017 0 0

Playlists

Add to Favourites

Save for later

Hosea 11: 1-2

“When Israel was a child, I loved him

and out of Egypt I called my son.

But the more they were called,

the more they went away from me.

They sacrificed to the Baals

and they burned incense to images.”

If life is a journey then the Foothills are the early parts of our expeditions that stretch us and get us in to shape for the bigger hills up ahead. They are the first lessons, first days and first dates, that make us disproportionately nervous. It’s when we first set out from Basecamp and try something new. This week I’ve been focusing on childhood memories but adolescence, as anyone who has raised a teenager (or has been one) will know, is also full of peaks and troughs to traverse.

Adolescence, like childhood, can feature terrible tragedy and great challenges, but I’m particularly thinking about those Foothills which seem excruciatingly embarrassing and unsurmountable at the time but that become much smaller and funnier after time and distance ‘further along the journey’.

Learning how to be ‘cool’ and try desperately to impress girls were Foothills full of paths that petered out into nothing and sharp unexpected descents that left me scrambling for a foothold. One memory, trivial in retrospect but mortifying at the time, happened on a busy Buchanan street when I was a teenager.

I was walking happily along when I caught the eye of an attractive woman who had her hand outstretched palm up. I thought it was strange she wanted to high five, but I was game, why not? So I reached out and gave her a high five. She looked at me with blank incomprehension and I turned round to see her friend coming towards her - who she must have been signalling. There I was thinking I was so irresistible to women that they couldn’t help but reach out and high five me, and instead I was the lunatic high fiving a mystified stranger. At the time this was hugely embarrassing, but now I look back sharing the expression of that woman - one of perplexed amusement. 

In adolescence we often misread signals and misinterpret the slings and arrows life throws at us. We find ourselves reaching for the wrong things and rejecting the right things. In Hosea we see God looking on at Israel perplexed at the ingratitude and disloyalty like the parent of an adolescent suffering through growing pains. We test the limits and boundaries, scaling the Foothills, craning our necks to see the huge peaks that loom in the distance. Recognising this as a natural process - how can one know what the boundaries are without testing them? - is a relief for the adolescent and for the adults who love them.

Dear God

Help us to keep the spiritedness of adolescence

and to look back on the twists and turns

with humour and grace.

Guide us.

Amen.