So the week of early-morning-praying is done!  (not by me personally you understand – but by my disembodied voice floating from the radio of all those intellectual souls tuned in to Radio 4 at the crack of dawn.)

They’ll be on iPlayer for a few more days (I think they stay online for a week after broadcast), so if anyone wants to catch up with them the links are below.  They all had to be precisely one minute and fifty seconds long (a real challenge for me – as those of you unlucky enough to have heard me preach will know, it usually takes that long for me to say Hiya! at the start), and to move seamlessly and without ceremony from chatting about life, the universe and everything into praying a short prayer for the day.

You’ll be shocked to learn there was a Titanic theme throughout!
On Saturday, the topic was the transformation of the Titanic Quarter itself
On Monday, I told the story of my “lightbulb moment” about the role of a Chaplain
On Tuesday, we looked at the incredible, dangerous rivet-by-rivet building of Titanic
On Wednesday, we remembered (again) that 62-second Titanic slide down the slipways
On Thursday, we talked about the huge, bold vision of those who conceived of Titanic in the first place
And on Friday we returned to one of my favourite themes and stories – Goliath (in crane and human form) and the challenge to look up to God rather than down at our problems.

And then just to round off each prayer, if you listen on to the end of each iPlayer segment you’ll see that Prayer For The Day is always followed by a farming bulletin, which every day this week was headlined by exciting (OK, rather disturbing) news about a badger cull across the UK.  So, be blessed and encouraged as this prayer leads you throughout the day – now let’s get some badgers!

Since Day One of my odyssey in the Titanic Quarter, there has been a huge billboard standing beside the construction site of the new Belfast Metropolitan College campus, proudly proclaiming, ‘The excitement is building…”  That billboard and slogan have been an appropriate welcome at the gateway to the TQ every day of The Dock’s life – until now…

I know this might be a strange thing to get excited about, but I was irrationally pleased to be there at the exact moment this billboard was finally dismantled – to reveal the gleaming BMC entrance underneath.  A concrete (OK, wooden) example of  the vision and planning and hope of the past few years genuinely becoming glass-and-steel reality.  No more need to cast the vision, to promise and raise expectations – BMC is sitting there, bold as brass, looking ready to open its doors this coming September.

My only regret is that they didn’t do it a week earlier! – for those of you who’ve been getting up at 5:45am to listen to Prayer For The Day this week (hi Mum!), you’ll know that this is exactly what we were thinking about on Saturday morning:

A few years ago, the vision of the Titanic Quarter was launched – a series of artist’s impressions of a new urban village; pictures of gleaming apartment blocks, office complexes, colleges, studios and visitor attractions, thronged with people.  Back then, it was hard to walk the wastelands of the old docks and visualize this dream taking physical form.  Even as foundations were laid three years ago, it was difficult to believe that this building site would ever become a thriving community.

But I now have pictures snapped with my mobile phone camera which look practically identical to those early concept pictures; it takes a close look to tell them apart.  The vision is becoming reality.

It’s easy to become discouraged in the middle of a big undertaking.  Starting a business, completing your education, breaking a habit, raising a family – for these things there is no quick fix; profound change doesn’t happen overnight.  We sometimes feel we are living through the building site, and find it hard to see the day when the artist’s impression becomes the photograph.  Lord God, for all of us who are undertaking a work in progress, and all of us who are ourselves a work in progress, give us patience, and courage, and hope – a sure and certain hope that big dreams can become reality.

(PS more of the PFTDs are now up on iPlayer – here and here.  Hmm, can you spot the running theme?)

So, did you get up at 5:45am to listen to Prayer For The Day on Radio 4?  You didn’t?? Well, I never.

(er…. neither did I).

But lazybones of the world rejoice!  iPlayer to the rescue – you can catch the first two TQ-related Prayers For The Day here and here (they’ll be available for another week).

Just back from a lovely, wild, blustery Dock Walk in the windswept Titanic Quarter.  Our search for a sheltered place to listen to our Wordlive reading today led us to discover a whole new previously-unexplored part of the TQ! – a path out to the very edge of the Musgrave Channel, directly under the towering Samson and Goliath cranes.  Walking in their shadow, sheltered from the elements by a crumbling old wall, we shared insights and questions from our readings in the book of Job in the past week – and listened together to one passage, which appropriately enough began with the words “The Lord spoke to Job out of the storm…”

The book of Job is a huge, profound, difficult, deep grapple with that eternal question: why does God let bad things happen?  After 38 chapters where different characters (Job’s comforters, and Job himself) struggle with that question, God finally speaks in the last chapter.  His answer is surprising and uncomfortable – he doesn’t give the “why”, he doesn’t explain Job’s suffering away by revealing the reasons and rhythms that made it necessary.  He instead asks a series of questions – in breathtaking, poetic language – that remind Job (and us) of his power and majesty.

It’s not an answer that’s going to satisfy everyone – but it satisfies Job.  He doesn’t know Why, but he knows God, and that is enough.  Out in that windswept Titanic Quarter beneath the massive cranes, I know we were all thinking about the times we’ve asked the same questions as Job – and as we talked, prayed, listened to the incredible old hymn How Great Thou Art and stood in the midst of soft showers, turbulent sky, warm wind full of the scents of rock and rain – I think we were all reaching for that same answer.  Here’s just some of that awe-inspiring passage – the questions that God asks of Job:

How did I lay the foundation for the earth?  Were you there?  What supports the foundation?  Who placed the cornerstone, while morning stars sang, and angels rejoiced?…
Did you ever tell the sun to rise?  And did it obey?…
Job, have you ever walked on the ocean floor?  Have you seen the gate to the world of the dead?  And how large is the earth?  Tell me, if you know!…
Where is the home of light, and where does darkness live?  Can you lead them home?…
From where does lightning leap, or the east wind blow?  Who carves out a path for thunderstorms?…
Who sends torrents of rain on empty deserts where no one lives?  Rain that changes barren land to meadows green with grass…

(Job 38)

Another great time at the Beeb today – once again my dulcet tones will be sounding sonorously from your radio in the near future.  No crack-of-dawn start for the recording this time – all comfortably pre-recorded at a nice sensible daylight hour – but for the actual broadcast, you’ll have to be listening at 5:45am on Radio 4  (I know! – who’s going to hear that?!).  I am your one-minute-and-fifty-second Prayer For The Day this Saturday (16th) and then every day next week (18th-22nd).

Thank goodness for being able to catch up on iPlayer, eh?

For those of you for whom Radio is just a high-tech modern gadget and you can’t see what’s wrong with a good old proper book (hi Susan!), the Dock Book Group is meeting again on Saturday 30th July at 9:30am in the Premier Inn coffee lounge.

We’ve been getting our teeth into some fascinating books over the last couple of meetings – Rob Bell’s Love Wins and Tim Keller’s Reason For God both provoked passionate discussion and much debate, and both had their admirers and detractors.  Another thing both books shared in common (weirdly, since they are poles apart in so many ways) was a propensity to quote Belfast’s own C.S.Lewis at great length – especially his masterwork Mere Christianity.  So we thought it was high time that Book Group went back to the source and read this classic, which has been foundational for so many people.

Mere Christianity is nice and short (though don’t be fooled – it’s short but it’s deep!) and has been around long enough that you’re quite likely to find a second-hand copy without too much trouble.  If not, any good book shop should be able to point you in the right direction – or tread the well-worn path to Amazon, where you can get it as a book, an audiobook, a journal, a Kindle edition, or as a second-hand paperback for 1p!

And so to TV… every year we try to resist it, but is anyone else helplessly addicted to The Apprentice as the final approaches on Sunday night?  And just to add to the nail-bitingness, there’s a vague Titanic Quarter connection – Jim’s sister works in the TQ!  (Told you it was vague…)  Although I have to confess that I’m putting patriotism aside and rooting for Tom, the slightly mad inventor.  He has somehow managed the unique trick of surviving the last 11 weeks of cut-throat competition while remaining friendly, approachable, funny and decent.  I’m not sure if that counts for much in Alan Sugar’s world, but – whether he survives the final cull or not – Tom gets the Dock thumbs-up for keeping his integrity in a dog-eat-dog world.  (And for inventing the ‘Emergency Biscuit’.)

Chris