Have you ever been overlooked, not chosen for something which you really wanted, something which could have been life affirming? Maybe a fantastic job prospect, or a key member of an important team. It can be quite disheartening, maybe even soul destroying especially if you had set your heart on whatever it might be. I’ll bet the overriding emotion at the time was disappointment, maybe some resentment and maybe even some feeling of a lack of self-worth. It has happened to me

During his time of teaching in the flesh, Christ often expressed his love for, and his desire to be one with people, especially for those who were rejected and unloved. One quite obvious way He did this was to share meals with them. We only need to think of the familiar feeding of the five thousand where he miraculously provided a great meal for a huge crowd of people who came to listen to him and be healed by him. Shared meals were, for the Jews, signs of acceptance and frie

Where are we going and what can I do about it? What can you do about it? Better to ask ‘what can we do about it’. What can Trinity Sunday teach us today? First, in Christ we discover that God is love. It is not just that God loves, but that God is, at the very core of his being, love. When we love, we share in the life of God. If God were alone from all eternity, then God could not be love. There would have been no one and nothing to love until Creation. Love would be acciden

You know how sometimes a word can be used in everyday parlance to effectively replace the word which actually describes an action or a thing? Let me explain…..So for example, when we clean our carpets we often say we are hoovering our carpets. We don’t say we are sharking our carpets, or ewbanking them or even dysoning them. I wonder how many of us actually do say that we are vacuuming them? The act of vacuuming has become so glibly known as the act of hoovering, when of cour

It’s a part – an important part – of the practice of our faith to find peace and stillness. It’s hopefully easy to find, we are open all day just so that people can come in and find peace. As Christians, we associate peace with the presence of God. The still quiet places are where we expect to find God, and the Spirit in particular is associated with peace. We go on pilgrimage to find stillness and peace, and it’s very possible to find it with other people as well, as we shar

Christ tells us in today’s gospel, “There are many rooms in my Father’s house”. We often hear this reading at funerals – and rightly so, for it is comforting and true, and puts into context the promises made to us and for us at our Baptism, that there is a place for us in the world yet to come and that we belong in the heart of God, indeed that there is a place individually prepared by Christ for each one of us, which may seem to bear little relation to the place where we are

I’m sure at some time or another we have all had a beautiful piece of pottery or ceramic or porcelain which has been dropped and broken. Heartbreaking. Devastating, especially if said item was an heirloom or a piece of nostalgia. We try to get the pieces back together, align them just right, use minimal glue, but strong glue, and hope that the join is invisible. That the item looks as it was before the break. I’ve done that, for sure. A number of times, with, I have to say, l

Alleluia. Christ is risen. There is something deeply familiar about Easter morning. The lilies. The music. The brightness of the church after the restraint of Lent. For many of us, Easter carries layers of memory, childhood Easters with Chocolate gifts & Easter eggs, family gatherings, new clothes, perhaps the echo of voices now silent but once singing beside us. Easter connects us not only to an event in Jerusalem, but to our own story, to Easter Sundays of years gone by. An

It is Holy Week, and we are called to be Holy, and over the course of the week there are all sorts of ways to grow in holiness, whether it be the plethora of services that we have on, or anointing with oils on Tuesday and Wednesday evening, or helping with the school easter play on Thursday, or cooking for the weekend and shopping without shouting at people, or avoiding eating your chocolate eggs yet, or just putting up with people in general – all these things can help us to

You may have heard the phrase, “real men don’t cry.” For many years, particularly in this country, emotional restraint was worn almost as a badge of honour. Strength was measured by composure, grief was something to be mastered, hidden away, or carried silently. The so-called British stiff upper lip shaped generations. Thankfully, those assumptions are beginning to soften. Nowadays we understand that the ability to express emotion is not weakness, but honesty. That tears are