Super Noodles & Sushi (Happy birthday to us, happy birthday to us….........)

A year ago tomorrow, which if in fact you are reading this tomorrow, the 17th, it will be a year today. And if you are reading this at some time after the 17th .... well you get the idea. Either way the church plant Redeemer Central will be one year old. Birthdays are odd things. A while ago we celebrated the birth day of our wee boy Jude. That was shortly after I told our seven year old that if the baby was a boy we were going to name him Bubbles. If you have got an seven year old you will know that they take things very literally. She told her school teacher that we were calling the boy Bubbles. A few days after he was born we get a card from her teacher saying 'congratulations on the birth of baby Bubbles'. I hastily had to reach for my broom and begin a quick exercise in sweeping up. As a thirty something grown adult having to explain to a teacher the reasoning behind my faux naming of my first born son ........ lets just say it is a beetroot head kind of experience.

This week our seven year old turned eight.  My Saturday was spent watching 15 mini people dancing to teen pop ‘sensation’ JLS in a local community centre.  Monday, her actual birthday, saw me taking her to a local ‘old fashioned’ sweet shop for a tour of the factory (her choice).  Following which I asked her what she would like for her birthday lunch.  Super Noodles was her response.  Now, it was her birthday, and I did ask her what she wanted, but there is simply nothing super about a packet of dried noodles and powdered flavouring.  Surely a case for inaccurate advertising?  Maybe Average Noodles would be a better name.  Food for astronauts maybe, but for an eight year olds birthday lunch, I began to protest.  My protests were met by a severe counter protest, I seized on an opportunity.  Marks & Spencer, purveyors of fine quality foods, and not a Super Noodle packet in sight. 

‘What do you want for your birthday lunch?’ I try my question again hoping that the context will prompt a different answer.
‘I want sushi’ she boldly replies.
I feel the need for some culinary clarification, ‘have you ever had sushi before?’
‘No’ she says ‘but if I cant have Super Noodles, I would like sushi’. So home we head, me, my eight year old, a big bag of old fashioned sweets and a tray of raw fish. 

So anyway, birthdays are on my mind and as it is the church plants first birthday I have been thinking.  In many ways it has all been a bit of a blur, it really doesn’t feel like a year ago when five people gathered in my front room to worship and pray for Belfast.  Quickly we found ourselves in a room above Pizza Express then on to our current home at The Oh Yeah Music Centre where the five are now nearly fifty.  In reflecting back over the year I am constantly reminded that as Paul writes in his letter/gracious rant to the trendy, urban Corinthians ‘....neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth’.  I am also reminded of every single person who is part of Redeemer Central.  Sure some have come and gone, thats the way church planting rolls, the way we do what we do isn’t for everyone, and that is cool.  But it is those who have made the journey this far,  those who have stuck with it, fought the battles, run the races, cried the tears, persisted and pursued. it is they who are the real heros, the grass roost radicals, the faithful, serving, doing, being, loving, caring, gracing.  These are the people that make up the best community that I have ever been part of.  These are the people who I love to serve.  These are the people who are who we are. Happy birthday Redeemer Central.

Comments

There are no comments for this article yet.

Write Your Comment