This time of year brings with it wonderful sunrise skies in my part of the world. If I get the timing right my morning walk is spent gazing into the skies and watching the colour and light change minute by minute. Starting with deep dark purples the colour builds to vibrant reds, settles into golden oranges, finishing with the a combination of cloud and blue that tells me I’m in Lancashire. I start my journey in darkness seeing little more than the outline of people and objects as I pass them by, I finish my walk in full colour with the light bouncing off the morning dew and frost.

My job involves me taking short flights up and down England on quite a regular basis. I love having a window seat and watching the cloud formations. The shapes and structures are fascinating. I wonder at what the conditions were that made a cloud form in a particular shape and why it all looks so solid. Why do they form such straight lines? How far have they travelled? How long will they last?

I’m currently on a train travelling into London, it’s morning. The sky has changed several times already. At the moment the sky is a light yellow, the sun is breaking it’s way through mist and is starting to driving away the frost. The patches of white on blue look like someone has come along with two sponges covered in white and blue paint and splattered them randomly across the sky.

When I walk in the mountains I sometimes get the feeling that I am going up into the sky. Ascending into another realm, stepping out of the day-to-day and into the world above. I want to stay on the top and bath in it.

Sometimes when the sky is blue I like to lie on my back and just soak it in.

The writer of the proverbs said this:

Three things amaze me,
   no, four things I’ll never understand—
      how an eagle flies so high in the sky,
      how a snake glides over a rock,
      how a ship navigates the ocean,
      why adolescents act the way they do.

Proverbs 30

I know what he means.

It has been cold recently. I know that cold is a relative thing and actually it’s not been that cold in global terms, it’s barely been below freezing.

When I am working from home my dress is somewhat dressed-down, especially on my feet. I like the freedom of not having to wear shoes. My circulation isn’t great though and if I wear nothing on my feet they soon get cold. Once they are cold it take hours to warm them up.

Nice warm socks are a real blessing. Once my feet are warm I’m warm.

Socks seem to have come a long way in recent years with new fibres that make your feet warm without making them smelly, for this I am also grateful.

This morning was a walking morning. It ought to have been a gym morning, but my back is rather sore at the moment -  that’s what you get for going to see a physiotherapist.

It all started as a very normal morning as I headed into the woods. This weekend has been a rather wet one in Lancashire so I was fully togged-up with my walking boots, walking trousers and breathable water-proof techno-coat. There were the usual collection of dog walkers looking like their dogs (I’ve often wondered whether dog walkers are afraid of their pooch finding a died body, because that seems to be the way that most of them are found). We exchanged the usual pleasantries as we passed, I was just another walker out for a stroll.

Half way around my walk just as I was trying to decide which way to walk next, all of the normalness changed. There in the middle of the path, in the middle of the woods was an object. In it’s place this would be a normal everyday object, but here it was out of place it was out of context.

As I approached my eyes took a little while to work out what it was that they were seeing in the pre-dawn light. Once I had worked out what it was though, a question came thundering into my head – “well it can’t stay there, someone will have to take it back”.

That is where my dilemma started – “someone will have to take it back” – but who? It’s a bit of a walk to take it back and the person taking it would look daft taking this object through the woods, they’d get all sorts of strange looks from passers by. My conscience was telling me in no uncertain terms that I should take it back. I had found it, so I should take the responsibility. If I didn’t take it back it could just stay there for weeks getting steadily more vandalised. On the other side of my head were all the arguments about how much effort it would take and how silly I would look. I was just out for a normal pleasant walk and hadn’t bargained on this distraction. I had a busy day ahead after all.

My conscience won.

This is how I found myself pushing an ASDA shopping trolley through the woods, through a housing estate, across an empty car park and back to it’s home in consumer land.

People have trolleys in supermarkets, not in woods. The impact of this object on the reactions of other people was remarkable. Without the trolley, everyone would give you a simple “hello” or “good morning”, their faces barely changing as you pass. With a trolley the response was entirely different. People no longer knew how to respond, was I a normal walker with a trolley, or was I something else? Some of them tried to ignore me and not say anything, those that did had a strange questioning look on their face.

Jesus behaved in all sorts of strange ways and many people didn’t know how to respond to him.

He spat on the ground to make mud and then put it in someone’s eyes to make them well.

He spoke to an outcast lady from another race.

He told them stories that they didn’t understand.

Perhaps it’s not surprising that they look at those of us who follow him with similarly strange looks.

In each of these situations Jesus blew apart their context, they had a certain perception of who he should be but he was something entirely other.

I delivered the trolley back to its home where I hope it will stay.