During the week I was at a junket in the Stormont Hotel (yep, the dreary misery of my life continues), along with some of the gang from The Dock, to find out more about the plans for the big Titanic anniversary next year.  Oh my word – the plans are HUGE – MTV concerts on the slipways, lightshows at the new Visitor Centre, a proms concert, commemorations, new plays, re-enactments, festivals… click here to find out more (and especially check out the links to Titanic Belfast Festival and Land Of Giants).

It was great being in a roomful of people who just exuded excitement, hope and confidence for the big year that lies ahead.  The message kept coming through again and again – this is our year.  A once-in-a-lifetime opportunity – a cliché maybe, but now, at this point in our history, it could be genuinely true.  To grasp that opportunity, we need to stop grumbling, worrying, or waiting for someone else to do something, and just go for it.

It’s time to start a movement – a word-of-mouth revolution, changing the way we talk about Belfast.  It sometimes boggles my mind that I still encounter so many people who are default-negative, “it’ll never happen” naysayers about the potential for the TQ and the city.  We need a tribe of people who think that Belfast CAN change, that it can be huge and vibrant and shine brightly at the centre of the Titanic anniversary next year.

Negative people sometimes sound very smart because, hey, it’s a dark world out there and so they often turn out to be right.  But sometimes a default-negative attitude is cynicism disguised as wisdom.  And it frequently becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

So we need to change the conversation.  On the Dock Walk today, standing under Samson and Goliath in beautiful Autumn sunshine, looking back towards Titanic Belfast shimmering in the sunlight, we spoke and prayed hope, life, success, momentum, energy, good over our city with all its potential.  We’re not the only ones – all sorts of people are working, dreaming and preparing for an amazing year for Belfast in 2012.  I think it’s a God-thing, and a good thing.

Are you in?

Check out this vid for a sense of the excitement and vision from the team at NITB:

 

I did something terrible this morning.  I left the house without my trusty iPhone, and didn’t realise my grave error until I was driving down the motorway, running much too late to turn back.  Sad to admit, I gave an actual gasp of horror.  How would I survive?!

It really made me think… have we become a bit too dependant on our little miracle devices?  I felt distinctly uneasy all day long without instant access to my diary, my contacts – without even the means to text someone to tell them I was running late (which I inevitably was, since – like most of us – I usually rely on the phone to tell me the time…)  What if someone was trying to contact me and couldn’t?  WOULD THE WORLD STILL TURN???

Well now that I’m back home and we’re reunited, it seems that somehow, civilisation did survive.  A few people had to wait a few hours for my response to their text or message.  They didn’t burst into tears, hate me or abandon all hope.  It all seems to have worked out OK…

Appropriately enough, listening to the radio on my way home in the car (because, y’know, I couldn’t listen to music on the iPhone) I heard people discussing the recent hardware blip that has left BlackBerry users out of contact for days.  While acknowledging how frustrating it was for those affected, one man told the story of how he lived without a phone for 3 months – and how peaceful life became as a result.  Without the ability to continually check for messages or seek stimulus, he spent more time daydreaming, looking, thinking, just being.  He recommended that all of us try to plan ‘unplugged’ time into our diaries on a regular basis.  A kind of technological Sabbath.

Good advice, I reckon.  So I’m writing this blog to post on the website and Facebook and I’ll write a memo on the iPhone.

We’re sticking with the local boy for the next Dock Book Group…

Among Belfast’s many unsung, under-appreciated claims to fame (alongside the fact that we invented air-conditioning and that we built this boat that seems to have become quite famous), is our connection to Narnia-creator, pipe-smoker, reluctant Christian and masterful theologian C.S.Lewis.  (Dock fact: Susan sourced the pictures for the guys who painted the C.S.Lewis mural.  Claim to fame or what!)

We’ve been rediscovering the joys of Lewis over the last few Dock Book Groups – starting with his theology (Mere Christianity), working back to the story of his early life and conversion (Surprised By Joy) and now jumping forward to his later life, where his immense intellect and brilliantly incisive defence of faith were sorely tried when he lost his wife to cancer.

Confession time: I had presumed from the title of Surprised By Joy that the story of his marriage and bereavement were in that book.  (His wife was called Joy y’see… yes I did feel stupid.)  As it turns out ‘joy’ was an intellectual and spiritual concept which Lewis used to describe the experience of his growing awakening in faith.  (Dock Book Group loved the fact that despite all this talk of joy, he clearly remained a grumpy, miserable swine throughout his spiritual rebirth…)  So it was rather neat that later in life he did fall in love with someone called Joy (who no doubt surprised him, as often as possible, just to compound the irony).  And how much more bitter that this late-blossoming love affair, which turned his stuffy academic existence upside down, should be snatched away from him.

So, we’re going to plunge in and read the book which definitely is the story of his struggle with doubt, anger and grief – it’s called A Grief Observed.  By all accounts, it’s short (100 or so pages) but it’s brutal – no stone unturned in the honest account of an anguished soul.  But as the story of an incredible man (yep, he’s become a bit of a Dock hero) facing life’s biggest question (Why, God?), we thought we had to read it.

We’ll be gathering to chat about the book, Lewis and life in general at the Premier Inn, 9:30am on Saturday 22nd October.  Anyone who has an opinion on any of those topics is more than welcome!

A great night of brainstorming last night, as the entire team of Walking Tour guides and staff from the Pump House Cafe got together over pizza and beer to talk about the hopes, worries and plans for the next year.

It’s hard to believe that April 2012 and the big Titanic anniversary are just around the corner.  As we chatted, brainstormed and dreamed, it struck me again just what a huge year this will be for Belfast and for the Titanic Quarter.  EVERYTHING will change next year.  This little corner of the world will be the focus for remembering the ship which is now (they say) the second-best-known name in the world (after Coca-Cola).

For those working in the TQ, April ’12 hangs in the air like a promise and a threat.  It’s hard to know whether to worry that no-one will bother to make the trip to Belfast for the anniversary, or that so many people will make the trip that we aren’t able to cope with them!  It’s hard to imagine how the existing balance of the TQ will adapt to the opening of Titanic Belfast and the SS Nomadic as well as the Dock and Pump House. It could all be triumph or disaster.  Only one thing is for sure – a fabulous, committed, passionate, creative team are working their hearts out to make sure that it’s superb.

So I’ve said this on The Dock blog before  – GO ON A TITANIC WALKING TOUR NOW!  You honestly won’t regret it – it’s the perfect time.  The tours are still running twice daily (11am and 2pm at the Premier Inn) until the end of October, when they switch to Winter Mode and happen less often.  The Titanic Quarter is gloriously, tantalisingly poised between the past and the future – and there’s something wonderful about being there at this stage, when it’s all still a work in progress.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m unbelievably excited about next year; I can’t wait for my first visit to Titanic Belfast, to see the refurbished Nomadic emerge from underneath the tarpaulins, to have to fight my way through crowds of tourists with LOUD shirts and huge cameras.  But there’s something authentic about seeing the docks in their current state; an atmosphere of history that you can’t put your finger on and that money can’t buy.  It’s all going to change before we’ve had a chance to catch our breath.  So what are you waiting for?

It’s been a busy first week back in Dock-world.  There have been days of trying to catch up with the email & missed-call mountain from the few weeks away – I still don’t feel as if I’ve crested that summit yet!  There have been days discussing HUGELY exciting new projects and directions for Dock-World which, to my great agony, I can’t tell you about until a few more things have been confirmed… but don’t worry, you’ll be the first to know!

(Well I suppose to be strictly honest, I’ll be the first to know – but you’ll be next!)

And today (and tomorrow) the leetle grey cells are being stretched and challenged by my annual pilgrimage to the Willow Creek global leadership conference.  If you haven’t come across it, Willow Creek is a massive megachurch based in Chicago, which uses a huge amount of its resources to offer top-quality training and leadership development to church leaders throughout the world.  You’ve maybe heard of their senior pastor, Bill Hybels, and his famous axiom that “there is nothing like the local church, when the local church is working well”.  To enable that “working well”, Willow gather an unprecedented roster of authors, leaders, analysts and inspirational speakers together for their yearly summit – and then broadcast the highlights to locations around the world.

Among countless rich pickings from today’s sessions, I loved the idea that our culture can now be best understood as a series of ‘tribes’.  Rather than the old 20th-century distinctions of home, work and church, our social and relational lives are focused around ‘tribes’, groups of people who like what we like.  If you’ve been part of a conversation between two Apple fanatics, or seen the knitting club in action in the Victoria Square Starbucks, or watched the goths hang out at Custom House Square, you’ll get the idea.  In some ways it’s a new phenomenon, enabled by modern communications technology and social networking; in some ways it’s a reflection of a human impulse as old as the hills: the need to connect and belong.

It’s a great insight for The Dock and the Titanic Quarter, with its tribes and connections and emerging community.  It’s what I love about Meet The Neighbours and the Dock Walks.  It gets me really excited and motivated about the years that lie ahead.  Anything and everything we can do to connect people to tribes, to connect tribes to one another, to transform lonely people into thriving community, will be a huge blessing to the TQ.   And that’s why The Dock, as the Titanic Quarter’s first church, exists – to be a blessing and a beacon of life.  There’s nothing like the local church when the local church is working well.