This week I was having a wee look at the statistics for who was coming to visit my blog. For the most part it would seem to be those who pop in for a visit from those blogs where people have been kind enough to list me as one of the blogs they read. So thank you to them for adding me to their lists, and thank you to those who pop in to read the waffle that explodes from my head at varying intervals.

Then there a small number of people, who appear to visit because they have searched for random words that correspond to some of what has been said within and entry. So some have visited because of “Unitary Constitution” or “Friendship Cake”, and so on. Perhaps the most amusing search though was for “where do tigers live”.

Now I realise that by naming my entry with this question I’m going to probably haul in a whole lot more people who have googled that question, and instead find my nonsense. So to make life a little easier for them, these websites will answer that question without you having to head back out onto a search engine:-

WWF on Tigers

Garden of Eaden on tigers

I did a little bit of searching through the things I had said to work out why that question might bring you here, and then realised that it is because “tigers” is what I call the family pets. We have two neutered male cats, and they are enormous.

For most of my married life we had two neutered female cats, and they never seemed to be particularly big. They occasionally thought they might like to go out, but for the most part they were content to be in the house as long as they could stay away from each other. As old ladies they survived the arrival of two children. Then 3 years ago, at intervals from each other they developed a blood condition that meant we had to have them put to sleep. So within months we became a cat-less home.

Two years ago we welcomed the boys, and have watched them grow at an exponential rate. Each sunny day they try to persuade us that they would be out tormenting the neighbourhood. They are enormous. So I have named them tigers.

Beyond the strange naming of my cats though is the realisation that even searching for an answer on the internet may not always take you to the answer you want.

That’s life and faith though! So often we think we are looking for one answer and find we end up with an answer to an entirely different question. The congregation I’m called to serve set off looking at the question of how to make a set of buildings respect the environment, people of all abilities and health and safety. Now they find their answer is around a different building and how our service and mission thrives in the combining of spaces. People become part of church communities because they think they have found an answer to the spiritual search within themselves, only to find that the spiritual answer opens up more questions, and even that they might become the answer to a question that had remained unresolved within the life of the community until they arrived.

With that kind of experience it can be terrifying to ask questions within our lives. Our human nature wants to hang onto the familiar answer, and our desire to be and do what it is we think we should do. Christian faith invites us to ask questions, and to allow ourselves to be open to the answer the Holy Spirit might offer – sometimes radically different from what we expected.

Living with the unexpected can be challenging, and occasionally can turn more that one life upside down.