For Kirwan Uniting Church Keep in Touch pew sheet 25 August 2019

In a synthesis of the Middle Ages and the 21st Century, I’m typing this on my iPad but with a pair of candles illuminating the keyboard, which isn’t backlit. Those poor monk scribes didn’t only wreck their eyesight when they produced gorgeous illuminated manuscripts, they also worked themselves to an earlier than necessary death by not getting enough sleep. (If you haven’t already seen the Book of Kells in Dublin’s Trinity College, and you have a European trip in mind, include it in your itinerary. Evensong in Trinity Chapel is pretty special, too).
I don’t get many colds, at least I haven’t since I moved to Australia, but when I do, they’re stonkers. Classic man-flu. And nurse Leisa (have I told you this in a previous Rambling? Sounds familiar) fixes it with her patent hot whisky toddy (formula available upon request). That toddy is so good that I feign illness for another night just so that I can have an extra dispensed. Its efficacy (remember Scaffold’s Lily the Pink? “Most efficacious, in every case”) lies in its soporific quality, a bit like some people’s sermons, it sends you to sleep and it’s the ensuing good night’s sleep which fixes you up as your body does its God-given restorative thing while you snore away.
It’s not only (untreated by whisky toddy) colds which keep you awake, or painstakingly creating mediaeval manuscripts, it’s also often almost unbearable worries about something which you or someone very dear to you is facing. There isn’t, in the words of Scaffold, a medicinal compound for that. Psalm 127, “He grants sleep to those He loves”. God loves you, my sleepless reader, and I’m praying tonight that His peace which passes pharmaceutical understanding will fill your heart and mind and bring you restoring rest.

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