Running to Stand Still - Pastor's Pen for 3rd August 2025

View from the Exercycle on a wet and windy day

I thought of the U2 song Running to Stand Still the other day as I was sitting on my exercycle on the porch as the rain and wind came down. I rode for an hour and went nowhere. Apparently, Bono, the lead singer of U2, heard the phrase from his brother whose business was struggling. He was 'running to stand still.'

In chapter two of Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass, Alice has a conversation with the Red Queen;

"Well, in our country," said Alice, still panting a little, "you'd generally get to somewhere else—if you run very fast for a long time, as we've been doing."

"A slow sort of country!" said the Queen. "Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!"

In the church, it sometimes feels like we are running just to stand still. Human and financial resources are slim. Like Alice, we generally expect to get somewhere for all the effort, but sometimes we don't seem to.

But we are not to lose heart. We turn to prayer. It was Leonard Ravenhill who wrote; "Let the fires go out in the boiler room of the church and the place will still look smart and clean, but it will be cold. The prayer room is the boiler room for its spiritual life." God is always faithful. Shalom