Yesterday, my holiday began.
I didn’t get up early. I didn’t ride my bike to Victoria. I didn’t catch the bus to Oxford.
I lay in bed till 8 o’clock. I had coffee. I watered the pots in the garden, ate some sultana bran, sat at the kitchen table and all was well.
And then the two nice men who are doing up the flat next-door started drilling.
They drilled a lot. They drilled loudly. They drilled the wall adjoining the kitchen where I was enjoying my quiet morning.
And then they started sanding the floor.
They sanded eagerly. They sanded with both vim and vigour.
They sanded with precisely the same level of enthusiasm with which I cursed them.
The thing is, as surely as someone is starting their holiday every day, so too someone is sanding a floor – or waiting at tables, building a road or tending a field. The world is not on holiday with me. It is working and resting every hour of every day.
Fifty years ago today, Apollo 11 was launched, taking humans on the greatest journey anyone had ever made – to the moon. Yet one of the experiences shared by the early astronauts was a new sense not of that bold new horizon but of this earth.
For the first time, they saw our planet as it really is – a single entity, relatively small, its inhabitants living close together; sleeping, waking, on holiday, at work, each of them connected.
Christians believe that God is involved in all of that, making and remaking the world, creating and recreating us, day in, day out.
And for Buzz Aldrin, that vision made him literally pause for thought so that, just before stepping out of the lunar module, he took bread and wine and invited ‘every person listening in, whoever and wherever they may be, to […] give thanks in his or her own way.’
So as I trot off on my holiday I’ll give thanks; for the wholeness of this amazing world, for our mutual reliance, and for the work that makes my rest possible, from the tube driver who takes me to the airport to the cafe owner who makes me my first burrito.
And I’ll give thanks that when I come back, the man with the drill and the man sanding the floor might just have gone on their holidays too.
I was almost 5 when the Apollo 11 mission landed on the moon, and watching it on tv is one of my earliest clear memories. My brother Bill and I complained that the picture wasn’t very good.
Straight after delivering this Pause I went on holiday with Miriam and Silas. We had the best time. My first burrito came from J’s Prairie Rose Cafe at 410 S 2nd St, Laramie WY.