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Thought for the Week
May 2, 2021

The Fifth Sunday of Easter

We sum up people pretty quickly. We have expectations about them depending on how they look, sound, even smell. This activity is part of who we are in terms of safety – flight or fight sort of thing – but once that is assessed, what else we might do can be very varied – and […]

April 25, 2021

The Fourth Sunday of Easter

Knowing what we should do doesn’t mean we do it. We all know that – and whether it is good health advice we accept (but don’t do) or something personal we want to do but find ourselves struggling with again and again – we are very much aware that changing behaviour can be really hard […]

April 18, 2021

The Third Sunday of Easter

The pandemic has shrunk our social circles, interactions, and horizons. The family networks remain unchanged but we miss seeing loved ones – being in the same room – as we used to do so. We miss the hugs – even if on reflection, some of them may have been rather perfunc- tory. And we have […]

April 11, 2021

The Second Sunday of Easter

The death of HRH Prince Philip, The Duke of Edinburgh, has brought the nation to mourning, reflection, comment on social media, and physically distanced acts of remembrance and grieving. Our response has a noticeable public dimension because Prince Philip was such a public person. His death brings mortality more to the fore though, at this […]

August 11, 2019

The Ninth Sunday after Pentecost

Ron looked at the old book in his hand. He’d had it for nearly fifty years and the hard cover was curled and frayed on the corners. The cloth that covered the spine had come away on one side exposing the pages knitted together with glue and thread. He had long suspected that books weren’t […]

August 4, 2019

The Eighth Sunday after Pentecost

Do you trust ‘the system’ or do you expect that things will go awry and plan for it? I am no longer fussed about being caught in traffic as much as I was decades ago. There is little I can do about traffic jams – as I and Good Shepherd found out on Sunday. But […]

December 10, 2017

The Second Sunday of Advent

I had a good time away for numerous reasons but the main one was being with family. It was simply good to get a sense of how everyone is doing – seeing them in their surroundings or hearing about them – and sharing our lives again even for a few days. There is so much […]

October 1, 2017

The Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost

Last week I wrote ‘You don’t come home all jolly and happy from a visit of battlefields …’ and you might be expecting me to begin similarly having just come home the ELCE’s synodical convention! That’s the caricature often isn’t it? That church meetings are long and tedious and synodical conventions – at any level […]

September 24, 2017

The Sixteenth Sunday after Pentacost

You don’t come home all jolly and happy from a visit of battlefields, museums, and cemeteries or walking through towns and country sides that are rebuilt yet have scars for those who look closely. We stayed at Talbot House in Poperinge (Belgium) precisely because its World War 1 links and so we were immersed in […]

September 17, 2017

The Fifteenth Sunday after Pentacost

I recently listened to a podcast about ‘cos play’ where people dress up in the costume of a favourite character from film or TV – often science fiction – and attend conventions and other events in character so to speak. The costumes can be amazingly elaborate. The camaraderie and community infectious. The opportunity to interact […]

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