D is for DIARY

It was my first taste of being in a real studio. We had spent that Thursday, recording vocals and listening to a steel guitarist as he overdubbed a few tracks late into the evening, then it was a quick bite to eat at a pizza cafe, a cup of coffee followed by a jaunt in an old Ford Transit van back across country from Chester to Liverpool and a few hours kip on a sofa, before getting up in the early hours for a flight back to Belfast.

How different things had been a year earlier. I was still at school, arriving home on the late bus after a gruelling rugby training session on a muddy pitch to find the local village in the middle of a bomb scare, mum just having returned from the hairdresser and dad home with a few cattle from the market. The whole family was together for tea and I spent the evening watching Scotland scramble a draw in Spain.

Move on just a couple of years and I'm entering the final stages of my university life and the day is mostly uninteresting apart from an evening of studying and a phone call to my then girlfriend before catching an episode of Monty Python just before bedtime.

Almost thirty years later and part of my evening would be occupied waiting for youngest son to have his weekly music lesson after I'd just finished a long day teaching and attending to some basic caretaking duties in the absence of the school janitor.

Today couldn't have been more different, apart from the long day at school bit, but after a lengthy and exhausting afternoon of parental interviews and a morning brightened only by an over indulgence in our cook's delicious pancakes, I returned home with wife, of 'my then girlfriend' fame above and we enjoyed some more home made versions of the cooked batter with a dollop of ice cream. And that was the fifth of February in my life , just over thirty years in the making. I know, for I have the diary to remind me.

How things change for now it's the boys who spend their evenings at university, play rugby, study, give music lessons and record in studios, admire girls and drink coffee in cafes. Yet some things haven't changed at all for we still have meals as a family when they're home, school days are just as long, Scotland still struggle to beat Spain and Monty Python is just as popular!

I kept my first diary in 1974. It was one of those small ones that fit into a trouser pocket but didn't allow any elaborate recording of the day's events. Then somebody bought me a five year diary that Christmas and for the next half decade I became a diligent scribe, daily noting down important moments and trivial happenings and of course, being a student, I had all the time in the world to keep it up to date. It had a red cover and lock and key though some time during 1977, the locking flap broke off and I lost the key but since it didn't contain any classified information, I reckoned I was OK if it fell into the wrong hands. Mind you, it's funny looking through the window of your past life and seeing Christian names without surnames, who were important friends in days gone by and now not having a clue whom they might be.

After that my desire to maintain a yearly account remained but usually by February, the recordings had petered out and though many years I've tried to revive my scribblings, I just don't seem to have the drive to keep it going into the springtime. Until last year. A good friend bought me a diary when I'd reached the half century not out and at the start of 2007 I began to keep a daily account, but this was a diary with a difference for it was titled a 'spiritual journey diary.' Now there were no football results, no Six Nations scores, no records of phone calls or visits to town, just a simple account of where I was with God each day and what He was trying to teach me. And you know, every day, there was always something to write, probably more than I'd ever written in a normal diary but the greatest thing of all was that it helped me to focus on Him each day and realise the blessings that He was bringing into my life, many of which I might have allowed to go unnoticed if I hadn't been keeping a record. I suppose it's a bit like writing this blog every day, for even if nobody else ever reads it, I am able to focus more clearly on my own life and in particular, be able to see the way God has been working in so many areas that I never even considered. That's why, when wife of 'my then girlfriend' fame, wanted to be used more by God and we talked about her starting a blog called '365 blessings' I don't think she realised that six months later, she would be able to find that God had blessed her every single day. I couldn't put it any better than Paul in Ephesians, when he says, 'Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ.'