A surprise service!
23rd July Rydal
Intro to spiritual hieroglyphics....or....talking in pictures.
The way Rydal works is to think in pictures then add the words later. But she can only read a couple of lines at a time, so they need to be broken up with spaces and blank lines.
She puts the notes from her teaching into pictures on strips of wallpaper lining paper, which is laid on the floor where she can see it as she talks. It's in coloured blocks, she's memorised what the colours mean. She talks about one coloured block at a time, not remembering what comes before or after, but following the colours.
She got to wondering how kosher or 'normal' is a language of pictures. There are more people than we think who work this way.
In the British Museum there are records of visual languages going back 5000 years.
Rydal had drawn onto large strips of paper some hieroglyphics of the Sumerian language. We had to get into small groups and guess what they mean. Each picture represented one word. Most groups guessed 2 correctly out of the 5.
Another strip of hieroglyphicsis was about King Tutenkamun, representing what he was. Eg one pic was a plant which grew in Upper Egypt, this represented that he ruled the area around Upper Egypt.
The next strip ofhieroglyphics was very complicated, it was actually written onto clay tablets. It comprised dots and lines rather than pictures. It represented names, and accounting, such as how much people owed.
What relevance does this all have to today because we speak and write in words, don't we? Road signs are pictures, we all know what they mean at a glance. There are also signs for toilets, the train station etc. In airports where there are lots of people of all languages, more and more pictures are used to direct and guide travellers.
What about spiritual pictures. Eg Trevor's picture a year ago of a canal boat going up in the lock. It represented the church being taken up to a higher level by the Holy Spirit. Several people remembered what the picture meant but could not remember any other teaching from Trevor from more than a few weeks ago. Pictures help us remember.
A while ago Tim had a word when the children were drawing, it was about it doesn't matter if you go over the lines which had been pre-drawn for them to fill in. It was about breaking boundaries. Only one person remembered this word but Rydal had drawn a picture of it to help her remember.
Each group had to draw 'walking by faith' or 'wasting time with God'. We put our pictures at the front of the hall.
We're a church which is breaking boundaries. It's helpful to put things into pictures, it's easier to remember things and pray over them. A picture represents a lot of words.
Rydal showed us a strip from her prayer diary representing 3 years.
Allow God to let us see what he wants us to see, in different and yet straightforward ways. | 
