Rhythms, neighbours and food…

Living in TH naturally means that I have Muslim neighbours. It is part of the reason that our family moved to Tower Hamlets: to live our lives alongside people of different faiths, cultures and backgrounds to us. I love that my children will grow up with children from such different places and cultures than their own.

However, I am challenged by the fact that although I have many neighbours who are Muslims, I can’t count any one of these neighbours among my friends – in the sense that we share our lives in any meaningful way. Considering that I have lived in Shadwell for coming up to 4 years now, I think that my life is poorer for that fact. And it is not even that I have not been invited to people’s homes to see them – I have been invited on a number of occasions but some way or another it has not happened as often as I would like it to. I think that I need do to something about this – and its not going to happen without some courage and organisation!

RevW and I have been talking about rhythms and patterns for our lives – both personally and in terms of church life – and we have come up with a few to try to build into our everyday weeks and months. We had in mind the Renovare spiritual formation idea of a ‘balanced spiritual life’ (6 streams: prayer-filled, virtuous, spirit-filled, compassionate, word-centred and sacramental) and also Mike Frost’s inspiration from Celtic Christians of the cell and coracle. I’m only just beginning to work out what some of these are but I want to build habits into my life that sustain our family’s life here. And they need to be realistic! 🙂 Some of the rhythms I’m working on are making sure I have time off with Phil and the kids at the weekend,  fasting once a month, having a day a month for reading/retreat, and spending planned time each week with neighbours and people from church.

Hopefully having some habits should help me to make time for my Muslim neighbours, get to know them better and hopefully begin to build closer relationships and friendships with these people that God has called us to live alongside. This is definitely a work in progress though, and I think that having people walking this with us is really important too… more on that one later.