So, Who was Mary Jones?

(This post is dedicated - without apology! - to Bible Society, following my recent visit to Mary Jones World in Llanycil, North Wales)

In the churchyard of St Bueno at Llanycil, by the northern shores of Llyn Tegid (Lake Bala) in North Wales, is a family tomb surrounded by iron railings.  The tomb nearest the lake is that of Thomas Charles; nearest the path is the tomb of his grandson-in-law, Lewis Edwards, while a headstone between them records the burial of other members of the family.  The older man is commemorated thus:

Underneath lie the remains of

The Revd. THOMAS CHARLES, B.A. of Bala

who died Octr 5, 1814 aged 59.

By his indefatigable endeavours when in London (A.D. 1804) to

procure a supply of the Holy Scriptures for the use of his

native countrymen he became the means of establishing

The British and Foreign Bible Society.

He was the reviver of the Welsh Circulating Charity Schools,

and a most active promoter of the Sunday schools both for Children

and Adults:- and North Wales (the more immediate field of his

Ministerial labours for 30 years) will probably retain traces of

his various and strenuous exertions to promote the kingdom

of Christ till time shall be no more.

Also of SARAH, relict of the above Thomas Charles

Died Octr 24th 1814. Aged 61.

She was possessed of every natural endowment and

Divine grace, and was an helpmeet indeed to the

Man the Christian and the Minister.

“Cariadus ac annwyl oeddynt yn eu bywyd,

ac yn eu marwolaeth ni wahanwyd hwynt”

[They were loving and affectionate in their lives,

and not divided in their death.]

The inscription on Lewis Edwards’ tomb reads:

In memory of

The Reverend Lewis Edwards M.A. D.D. [Edin].

Founder and principal teacher for fifty years (1837-1887)

of the College of the Calvinistic Methodists in Bala.

Born October 27, 1809 Died July 19, 1887

Also Jane his wife

Born February 9, 1814 Died January 1892

St Bueno's Church (picture: Bible Society)

The inspiration for Thomas Charles’s ‘indefatigable endeavours’ leading to the establishment of the BFBS (later known simply as Bible Society) was a young woman called Mary Jones.  Her life is now the subject of an impressive display inside the church.

[The church is named after St Bueno who, in the sixth century used to travel all over Wales from his monastery in Clynnog Fawr near Caernarfon.  It was probably built in the twelfth century, but was rebuilt in 1881.  It closed for worship in 2003, and now has a new lease of life as ‘Mary Jones World’.] 

The brand new visitor centre

Mary Jones was born to a poor weaving family on 16th Dec. 1784 at Ty’n-y-Ddôl [the house in the meadow] in Llanfihangel-y-Pennant, in the foothills of Cader Idris, and her father died in April 1789.  In 1794, when Mary was 9, Thomas Charles set up a day school in nearby Abergynolwyn.  Mary had become a Christian in 1792 and, possibly inspired by this new development, she made the decision to save up for a Bible of her own.  It took her many years but, in 1800, she took her savings and walked all the way to Bala to obtain a Bible from Thomas Charles.

Many a fifteen-year-old today would find this task challenging, but 200 years ago, there was no public transport, few decent roads, in fact, and Mary had no choice but to walk.  We don’t know exactly which way she went, nor how long it took her.  It’s certain that she didn’t have 21st-century boots and walking aids!  The map tells us that a direct line from Abergynolwyn to Bala is 24 miles; Bible Society has published a five-day, 28-mile walk: a likely route devised for the bi-centenary by Mary Thomas with the help of local people, particularly the late Mrs Margaret Rees of Llanfihangel-y-Pennant.

In 1802 Thomas spoke about Mary and her determination at a meeting of the Religious Tract Society in London, and two years later the British & Foreign Bible Society was established.

Mary’s life was hard, but perhaps no more so than many poor people of the time.  She married Thomas Jones of Tywyn at Tallyllyn on 27th February 1813, and they moved to Cwrt, in the Dovey valley, roughly midway between Machynlleth and Aberdyfi, and their first child, a son Lewis, was born on Christmas Day.  In the next thirteen years two daughters and three more sons were born to the couple.  They moved to Bryncrug near Tywyn in 1820, but by the mid-1830s five of these children had died. Mary and Thomas were left only with John, the first son born in Bryncrug.  He emigrated to America sometime during the 1840s, and Thomas died in 1849.  Mary died 29th December 1864 after a lifetime’s involvement in the local Methodist Church, and is buried at Bethlehem Chapel in Bryncrug.

Since then - and even during Mary's lifetime - the Bible Society has been working throughout the world to make Bibles available where they are needed.  At present they have people operating in 146 different countries.  To find out more about their work, visit their website.  Who could have known that a long and lonely walk by a fifteen-year-old girl could have had such a far-reaching effect?

Illegally Parked

As a courier driver I am sometimes faced with quite impossible challenges.  A recent example was an urgent mid-afternoon delivery to a shopping precinct, where access is normally permitted only before 10.00 a.m. or after 7.30 p.m.  On such occasions, the only solution is to drive as close as possible, park on yellow lines where there are no kerb markings, and hope that a notice in my windscreen will remind any passing traffic warden of the difference between ‘parked’ and ‘loading’.

Such experiences are surprisingly common.  Sometimes they’re met by an understanding official who realises the dilemma and ignores the offence; sometimes by a ‘jobsworth’ who sees no further than that a vehicle is illegally parked and that he must issue a parking ticket.

One day, I had to deliver a heavy parcel to a building site that was on the far side of a public car park.  I sought advice from the attendant about the best way to get there.  The only way, he said, was to drive through the car park and, yes, that would be quite all right.  I went back to the van and entered the car park.  Having completed my delivery, I made my way to the exit, where I expected the attendant to press a button to lift the barrier for me.  I waited … but nothing happened.  I tooted … still nothing.  I tooted again, and the attendant beckoned me over to his kiosk.

‘He’s going to make me pay a parking fee,’ I thought, angrily. ‘He was the one who said it would be all right to drive straight in.  He didn’t mention a charge!’  Prepared to argue the point, I walked over.  The attendant explained, quite amiably, that he was unable to operate the barrier remotely from the kiosk, but that I would need a ticket to put in the machine.  He gave me a visitors’ pass, the barrier opened as I inserted it, and I was quickly on my way.

As I left, I thought of the parallel between parking and sin.  We all sin; we can’t help it (Romans 3:23).  And just as there is a fixed penalty for parking in the wrong place, so there is a fixed penalty for sin.  St. Paul spelled it out, ‘The wages of sin is death.’ (Romans 6:23).  That penalty has to be paid, in the same way that the machine had to have a ticket to operate the barrier so that I could drive away.  Our release from sin – the only way we can avoid the death penalty – is to accept a gift.  In this case it’s not a tangible gift like the visitors’ pass, but the gift of Jesus’ death on the Cross.  And it has to be accepted as a gift.  It’s not a right, nor something we can earn, or pay for.  That’s where the car park illustration falls down, because we can buy a car park ticket.  When it comes to sin, we have to humble ourselves sufficiently to accept the gift of Jesus’ life, freely given (John 10:17-18; I John 3:16).  It’s the ‘Get out of Jail Free’ card on the Monopoly board of eternity.

Happy motoring – and parking – this summer.

More Little Things

The other day I heard read a gospel passage (John 12:27-33) that sent my mind shooting back some thirty-odd years, to one of the earliest sermons I preached after I became a Reader.  I felt I’d delivered quite a nice talk, but my rector took me to task.  “You have just heard a lesson about Jesus being lifted up,” he said, “but you didn’t lift Him up to those who were looking for Him!”  It was clearly not a memorable sermon, but it lingers in my memory, albeit for the wrong reasons.

In a recent post, I wrote about little things, and used as an example Jesus’ teaching about great plants that could grow from mustard seeds (Lk. 13:19).  Paul wasn’t referring to mustard plants when he wrote, “I planted, Apollos watered, but God caused it to grow.”  (I Cor. 3:6).  Still less was he thinking of gardening when he asked the Romans, “How are they to believe in one they have not heard of? And how are they to hear without someone preaching to them?” (Rom. 10:14).

It’s staggering how long a shadow a single adverse experience can cast.  If we’ve encountered even a mild rebuke or rejection after talking about our faith – perhaps to a friend or family member – it can make us reluctant, even years afterwards, to be so unguarded again.  It doesn’t seem to matter how much pastoral or biblical encouragement is poured out upon us ... those all-important words just don’t come.  We speak of ‘thinking of’ someone in distress rather than ‘praying for’ them.  And although we know that God hears and answers those prayers, how much more could be the impact if the one whose distress was eased were to know that it might be because of our prayers?

Many years before that sermon, I used to sing in a church choir; consternation was often expressed among the men about teenagers who left the choir when their voices broke, and then never came back as altos, tenors or basses.  Full of prejudice and disapproval, we questioned what value all those years singing in the choir had been to boys who were now playing football or riding motor bikes.  I have often recalled the wise words of our choirmaster from those days who suggested, in line with Paul’s message to the Corinthians, that we could have no idea of the impact of what these boys had sung and heard in those hundreds of hours spent in church during their formative years.  “Maybe they won’t darken the door of a church again until they get married,” he suggested, “or are invited to a baptism or funeral.  But when they do, they won’t be the ones who feel uncomfortable about being there.  Something will strike a chord with them, and who knows what might come of it afterwards?”

He was quite right, of course.  We can have no idea what could grow whether immediately, or after many years, from seeds we might sow simply by talking about our faith.  One thing is certain, however.  If the seed is never planted, NOTHING will grow.

What seeds have you left in the bottom of a packet?

Do You Need a New Clutch?

We are encouraged to review ourselves and our lives from time to time, and make special efforts to re-tune our lifestyle to God’s instructions; two such times are Lent and Advent, but these don’t have to be exclusive.  Nor does such a discipline have to be corporate.  We can as individuals undertake such a review at any time.

There are two kinds of review.  We can compare our life now to what it was like a month, a year or a generation ago.  We can read meaningless statistics like the number of loaves of bread we could buy for the price of a new car or a television, for example, or note that certain aspects of present-day life didn’t even exist in the age we’re comparing to.   From that we can draw our conclusions about the way life has progressed or – depending on our point of view - regressed.

A more searching review comes if we measure what we have, the way of life in our nation now, against some absolute scale of values.  And what better absolute scale than God’s text-book for life itself, the Bible?  As we do so, we may realise that many of the problems in our lives are not the result of cataclysmic events or upheavals, but are the consequence of gradual change, a steady slip from the ideal.

In the same way, the servicing of a motor vehicle is a kind of review, and in this respect I’m undergoing a process of transition.  The van I use for my work, travelling up to 70,000 miles a year, is serviced every couple of months or so, while the motorhome I’ve recently acquired for the retirement I’m gradually phasing into only needs to be serviced once a year.  These are two different attitudes to what is essentially the same task.  In one case, I have a pretty shrewd idea of what will need doing, because I remember fairly clearly what was done at the last service.  In the other, I’m expecting a lot of things will be checked over according to the programme, but I don’t know precisely what will be involved.

If your motor mechanic tells you that your car needs a new clutch, you might well be surprised.  When driving along, you hadn’t noticed anything at all amiss.  The fault – natural wear - had developed gradually and as a result you were accommodating the problem without realising it.  It’s not until he’s fitted the new one and driving the car is so much easier, that you realise just how bad it had been.  Life itself works just the same way.  It’s all too easy to slip into comfortable ways, habits that fit in conveniently with those around us, but which aren’t the way life was intended to be.

There’s a very appropriate phrase in the book of Revelation, “I know … that you are neither cold nor hot. … So, because you are lukewarm … I am about to spit you out of my mouth.”  (Rev. 3:15-16).  It is a reminder of our responsibility to be positive for God, to dispense with lukewarm political correctness, call a spade a spade and denounce sin for what it is.

We need to consider: are we enjoying a lukewarm comfortable-ness, or are we fired up with enthusiasm for God and His love?

Stewed Fruit

I’m amazed how things happen together to provide an additional meaning to something.  The other day I was listening to a piece on the radio about a shepherd.  As he told how he had learned from his grandfather, and how his son was now learning from his father, he used the phrase, ‘the seasons have come full circle’, and my eye fell on some plums in my kitchen.

Most fruit – I apologise to banana-lovers – are generally spherical in shape: plums, oranges, apples ... lemons, too, at a stretch of the imagination; and even the banana gets included if you think in just two dimensions and consider the cross-section of them all, which is roughly circular.  So the term ‘coming full circle’ is a fruitful one <groan>.

Just as amazing is the discovery of over 150 references in the Bible to fruit, and it’s worth thinking about the meanings that some of them present to us.

I have already spoken about things being fruitful; in the first chapter of Genesis we read of “trees bearing fruit with seed in it” (vv. 11,12 &29), indicating that the purpose of fruit is to continue the species.  In the next chapters later we find that fruit was good for food (2:16, 3:6).  Further in the Books of the Law, Leviticus chapter 19 explains the concept of ‘first fruits’, by which the first of the crop should be offered to God rather than eaten.  So fruit can be a gift … do you remember the expression, ‘an apple for the teacher’?

Psalms, Proverbs and Ecclesiastes move us into metaphor.  Man is described as “like a tree, yielding its fruit at the proper time” (Ps.1:3); there are references to “the fruit of their labour” (Ps. 78:46 and Eccl. ch.2), and Psalm 127 speaks of sons being “the fruit of the womb” (v.3).  Proverbs give us fruits of the righteous, his words, his speech, and a person’s mouth and tongue (11:30, 12:14, 13:2, 18:20&21).

In the New Testament, Jesus used many of these expressions in His teaching.  He often spoke of fruit in the sense of our behaviour, thus “you will recognise them by their fruit” (Mt. 7:16), and “fruit that proves your repentance” (Lk. 3:8).  Sometimes He referred to the disciples’ evangelistic obligations as in John ch. 15: “every branch that bears fruit”, “the branch cannot bear fruit by itself, unless it remains in the vine” and “bear much fruit and show that you are my disciples” (vv. 2,4 & 8).

Paul also used fruit as a metaphor in many of his letters.  We all know about the fruits of the Spirit (Gal. 5:22), and similarly the fruit of the light (Eph.5:9), to which we can add the reference to “the gospel bearing fruit and growing among you” (Col. 1:10).  James, too, referred to fruit, writing about “the fruit that consists of righteousness, planted in peace among those who make peace.”

I wouldn’t expect any of my readers to learn all these references … indeed, to see that as an objective, though laudable, would be to miss my point.  But there are countless things around us that are circular - quite apart from looking at the fruit stall on the market - so when you see circles try to remember just some of these meanings, and think how they might link something divine to your own lifestyle.

The 'Off' Switch

As we get older, we remember stuff from long ago.  I thought the other day about a certain radio comedian.  “Wireless,” he said (that’s what we called it in those days), “is a wonderful thing; by turning a single knob you can have complete silence!”  The initial surge of enthusiasm for broadcasting had subsided, but the point of his joke was the fact that the wireless was still very popular, and people would stop their conversations when it was turned on, in order to listen to the programme.  This invention was one of many which have contributed to the demise of home-spun entertainment over the last two or three generations.

It occurs to me that this old saw also carries a more obvious truth - in other words that silence can be obtained by switching the radio (or other similar music/noise machine) OFF.  Wherever we go nowadays, it seems, we are bombarded by sound.  Background music is found in many workplaces, shops, motorway service stations and so on.  Quietness can be found only in the depth of the countryside - and that is becoming more and more scarce!

But why should we seek silence?  Are we simply yearning for the impossible, trying to turn back the clock to a past age?  Quite apart from the potential for harm to our ears, constant sound around us has the further property of exclusion - it cuts us off from the distraction of our surroundings.  Students claim that this is a useful way to facilitate concentration on revision.  

It is said, however, that listening to music involves every part of the human brain.  Therefore, isn’t it the case that incessant music can shield us from other things, too: things that could be really important in life?  It becomes the simplest way to shut out unwelcome thoughts, challenges we aren’t yet ready to face, and so on.  Ultimately, it can separate us from God.

In the latter part of the nineteenth century, the American Quaker, John Greenleaf Whittier, penned a lengthy poem “The Brewing of Soma”.  It was inspired by a particularly noisy sect which was active near his New England home, and whose constantly intrusive celebrations were becoming a source of general annoyance to the community.  

The final verses of this poem have come down to us as the well-known hymn, “Dear Lord and Father of mankind”, and in it we find mention of ‘a still, small, voice of calm’.  This is a reference to Elijah, of whom we read in I Kings ch. 19.  He had been told to stand on the mountain because the Lord was about to pass by.  He looked for the Lord in a wind, then in an earthquake, and finally in fire - all without success.  Only then did he hear God’s voice in a gentle whisper, and so receive His instructions.

If you would listen to God’s purpose for you, it is important - some would say essential - to shut out the distractions of the world.  But don’t fall into the danger of exchanging one distraction for another: remember the off switch!

Little Things Mean a Lot

I was putting away some cutlery the other day, when the teaspoon in my hand brought to mind my mother.  To some readers that might seem strange, so let me explain.  My mother was a widow for eighteen years before she died, and for the last two of them she was not only housebound, but couldn’t go upstairs.  This meant that she lived for all of that time in just three rooms and – apart from my occasional visits – the only people she saw were thrice-daily visits from various care workers, perhaps only for ten or fifteen minutes at a time.  Little wonder, then, that this had some effect on her mind.  Cabin fever, do they call it?

When we cleared out her house after her demise, one of the things we found in the kitchen, along with the cup and saucer that she used every day, was a teaspoon.  To our amazement, one side was worn away for about a third of its length.  Instead of the usual oval shape, the bowl had lost a fifth, or perhaps a quarter of its size, and the expression ‘a teaspoonful’ would have taken on an entirely different meaning with this particular example.

A teaspoon is a very small item when contrasted to the whole range of furniture and equipment in even a modest sized house, or when the stirring of a cup is compared to the lifetime of an individual.  Who can remember every single teaspoon they have used in, say, the last two years.  My mother had always used the same one, for very many years.  She must have done, to have worn it down so.  And how many times must she have stirred each cup of tea?

OK, it’s not every time I touch one, but frequently I see a teaspoon and think of mother in her isolation, wondering what were her thoughts as she mindlessly stirred ... and stirred.  And yes, there are feelings of guilt that, however distressing or boring for me, I ought to have visited her more.

This week I thought of other little things, in particular mustard seeds, rudders and whips.  Jesus spoke about mustard seeds, the smallest seeds imaginable, and of the great plants that could grow from them (Luke 13:19).  He also used their size as an illustration, in speaking of people’s faith (Luke 17:6).

James warned about careless use of our tongues.  He indicated how powerful they were for their size, and compared them to the rudder, a small component of a boat, but whose use could determine where even a great ship would sail (James 3:4-5)

And the whip?  John writes in his Gospel about Jesus’ act of cleansing the temple of the traders and money changers, who were defiling its purpose as a house of prayer.  Unlike the other Gospels, he provides a detail about what Jesus used.  He made ‘a whip out of cords’ (John 2:15).  Such a whip would not have been swung like a great bullwhip or cracked in the air like a ringmaster of a circus might.  It had been quickly fashioned from cords that might have been used in this ‘market’ that He found in the temple.  He used what came to hand, not to hurt or to maim, but to demonstrate his anger.

Little things: things that have much to teach us, if we let them.  What little things do you use daily that might have something to teach you ... if only to remind you of Jesus?