Judgement?

I've just noticed an odd thing: as the screen for posting blogs comes up, the time-setting boxes appear briefly and then vanish - so it looks as if I've been posting at very odd times because I can't set the times at all. Anyone any ideas as to why this is happening? [Actually I've had to save all this - blogger had a wee cardiac arrest an hour or so ago and had to be resuscitated by these clever gnomes who do such things ....]

Navel-gazing apart - though there are those who say bloggers do little else - I must admit that my springish feelings were short-lived. In fact, out walking this afternoon I realised that the ungloved hand holding my walking pole had become like one large chilblain - blue and sore, then red, blotchy and itchy as the circulation returned. Two hours after thawing it was still visibly redder than the hand which had been safely in my pocket. And it snowed in a sort of idle, teasing way for a couple of hours.

During that time I was well out of my comfort zone previewing with my supervising group the sermon I shall give on Sunday. Quite apart from the challenge of getting to grips with the concepts of judgement and eternal life, there is the challenge of conveying all the thoughts I've put together without sending my listeners to sleep. Now this was never a problem in my teaching days - I knew my stuff inside out and mixed entertainment with education and interaction without a thought. I could engage with any of the audiences who trundled into my classroom on a daily basis, and I rarely used teaching notes - just the text under consideration. Why can't I do that on Sunday?

It's not the audience, for a start. They may be adults, but this doesn't bother me. No, it's the feeling of responsibility, the need to get it right - combined with the fact that the ideas I'm presenting, though I've arrived at them in such a way as to feel I *own* them, are relatively new to me. They're also at once complex and simple. So now I have to beat my notes into some form which will let me be the teacher I enjoyed being, rather than the lecturer whose delivery I scorned.

And I guess there's a lesson in that too.