What a lovely day! Blue skies and 25 degrees! BBC Sunday morning worship celebrated Salisbury Cathedral's 800th anniversary in the unexpected situation of the Cathedral being closed because of covid-19! It was a superb prayerful exercise in putting things in perspective and taking them in their stride. There's nothing like the Long View to keep us on track.
Official permission is granted today to leave the chaplaincy and walk out freely, though opinion differs as to whether this means for most of the day or hours specified, 10h00-12h00 and 19h00-20h00. In the countryside it hardly matters, as there is space a-plenty except for near the sea and the beaches. In highly populated areas it's a management issue, less so here however. Anyway, after spending time in worship and eating breakfast, I walked for over an hour along familiar byways within a couple of kilometres of home, rejoicing as I did so.
A few couples were out wheeling their infants, a few more riding bikes or jogging. Plenty of time is allowed for those in sport training. Solveig thinks I can count myself in this number. She may be right, given my daily 10k fitness schedule. I can say if quizzed that I'm training for un camino de larga distancia. Which could be true in real life if I set my mind to it. More than anything else the sense of freedom rather than constraint was expressed in the way people walked.
It's funny, but after lunch I felt unusually tired, lay down on the bed and slept for an hour. It's ages since I last did that, reacting to, I guess, the relief of tension imposed by the strictness of measures due to the estadio de alarma. Everyone must keep behaving carefully and observe rules on social distancing to avoid a recurrent outbreak of contagion. This, takes getting used to and balancing with the responsible exercise of freedom as well. It's a long journey with many possible setbacks.
I took advantage of the opportunity to walk out again in the evening to complete my daily 10k walk an on orchard side road. In between times, ideas for the coming week's Acts bible study came to me, so now I have less work to complete tomorrow. I have enjoyed work on producing a commentary on the stories told in Acts, giving a cross cultural perspective on the events reported on. I think we need a more three dimensional perspective on the way things were in near middle eastern society two millennia ago, to make proper sense of it in today's diverse cosmopolitan world.
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