Family fun: some local kids, with help from their parents, burst a water main. Fun for now, but not so great when you don't have any water pressure later that night!

A sunny day in Glasgow produces some strange behaviour. I have a theory that a day of strong sunlight after a month of interminable grey causes an overdose of vitamin D and sun-related endorphins in Glaswegian physiology (I admit that have no scientific basis for this). It wasn’t even that hot -– just verging on “t-shirt weather” according to this Californian -– but 9 out of 10 men seemed to be walking around area bare-chested, like it was a beach in Majorca.

It’s easy to poke fun at people in Springburn on days like this, even experience some of the worst aspects of the local culture… Groups of young men were already drunk and making a nuisance of themselves. The local hards were showcasing their illegal-breed dogs, letting them fight and chase other dogs. A couple were rowing on the street. A man was selling drugs in the rock garden.

It's a shame when these aspects of Springburn culture become the centre of my focus; I’ve felt quite challenged about this lately. While the problems are obvious, I need to remember some very positive experiences we’ve had in North Glasgow. On Friday, I had good conversations with other young parents at the swings, their kids pulling great faces at Niamh and making her giggle. The neighbours in our building are lovely and have been so hospitable to us as outsiders moving into the community. On the final day of the football season, I saw two friends –- one in a Celtic top, the other in Rangers gear -– who weren't fighting but sitting together, joking, and enjoying each other’s company after the SPL title had been decided. The people who run the dry cleaners (Pakistani, Iranian and Scottish) come out to greet me when I walk by the shop. In other words, it's not all bad and some of it is very good indeed.

“To practice stability is to learn to love both a place and its people.”

“No longer free to do what everything he wants… he is free to love a particular people whose needs he knows. To be sure, that circle of people is limited, circumscribed by the drip line of his life. But as he established roots of love [he] can see that he is now able to grow. The boundary line of his life and love expand as his roots grow deeper... we cannot become the gift to others we are called to be until we embrace the limits that are necessary to our vocation… to embrace the limits of a place is to learn to look at the people around us with fresh expectation.”

“Stability as the revolutionary tactic of exiles is a gift from Israel’s story to those of us who practice our faith amid the fragments of tradition in a world indelibly marked by mobility... the practice of stability can so easily become a strategy for resisting change. But the words of the prophet Jeremiah to God’s people in exile remind us how subversive true stability is. Rather than admit defeat, daydream of a lost stability, or rise up in rebellion, Jeremiah exhorts God’s people to embrace a practice of revolutionary stability in the place where they are. ‘Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat what they produce. Take wives and have sons and daughters… But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare.’ Simply making a life where you are may not seem radical to us, but for God’s people in exile, Jeremiah’s instructions could not have been more unexpected.”

I would say that there is a introspective aspect to stability as well. For example, I may live in Springburn, but if foster a deep dislike for the place and cannot nurture any love for it, I will become disengaged. The fruit of disengagement is never transformation. Rather, embracing a place while realistically acknowledging its problems and strengths, fosters an impetus for transformation as we too have a stake in the community and its future. It encourages me even more to seek God's will, to try to see His kingdom come in the place he has placed us (trusting this as an act of His wisdom and grace).

As with Jeremiah's challenge to the exiles in Babylon (Jer. 29), how might God be calling us to put down roots, to find our welfare in the welfare of our community?

Niamh loving the Springburn Park pond, shouting 'Waak waak!" at the ducks (the ducks swim away, scared).

On the swings; even more fun when there are other kids to shout at.