Another day in seclusion. My self-introductory video is now on the Chaplaincy website. Dave also reminded me that an article from me for the Chaplaincy monthly magazine is due, so I had to set about writing that straight away. Thankfully, it came together fairly easily. Thankfully, I haven't hit writer's block yet! It took up a slice of the day. There were showers again on and off, but I managed my 10k walk in bits and pieces, even if I did end up walking in the dark just after sunset.
Churchwarden Jayne WhatsApped me this morning and kindly asked if she could get me some shopping. This was very timely, as I have decided to self isolate properly, so I sent her a list, and in the afternoon she delivered a box of groceries to the gate, including a net of huge deliciously juicy oranges. That'll set me up for the best part of a week. Heavens, I now that I can't just potter up the road every day to shop for myself, have to plan ahead for what I need, breaking the habit of many years fending for myself on locum trips. Will this do me good? We'll see.
From another time of national crisis three years before I was born, yet the things he is hoping will come out of it, to my mind, resonate with the need today to regain much of what we have lost with the decline of religious values and family life. 'An enemy has done this', is it says in Jesus' Parable of the Wheat and Tares.
I thought my draft of a Sunday sermon was a bit long, considering also the length of the Valley of dry bones reading from Ezekiel and the forty four verses of the John's Gospel reading of the raising of Lazarus, but there were vital things to speak about in these terrible times. So I decided to deliver it in two halves, one after each reading, and asked Sarah if she'd be willing to read and record these on her phone and email them to me, to edit into the audio address I'll record and edit tomorrow. This was a 'first' for both of us. I wonder who else we can get to contribute to readings this way?
In the afternoon, I heard the sound of a tractor out on the road, unexpected in this time of movement restrictions, though we are a bit off the beaten track here. Then I heard the machine at work nearby and when looked across the road to the finca where there were bonfires the other night, I realised it had been ploughing the field next to the orchard, breaking up the hardened soul, ploughing back into the ground all the surface vegetation, loosening the surface to make it more rain absorbent. Heavy rain in Spain leads to terrible soil erosion and even flooding if the water just bounces off hardened ground. So as well as clearing away dead vegetation and brushwood, breaking up the ground surface is essential springtime maintenance for farmers.
During a brighter spell in the day's weather, I made another little camera phone video of my walk around the house in daylight to send to the family, so that they can see how fortunate I am not to be penned up in an urban apartment, like Roy in Alicante, or me if I'd been in Malaga, hit very hard by covid-19. Numbers there, with an urban population of a million are up in their thousands. Here it's only just over fifty. So far.
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