Sharing some thoughts

One day, a little girl was sitting and watching her mother do the dishes at the kitchen sink. She suddenly noticed that her mother had several strands of white hair sticking out in contrast to her brunette hair. She looked at her mother and asked, "Why are some of your hairs white, Mum?" Her mother replied "Well, every time that you do something wrong and make me cry or unhappy, one of my hairs turns white." The little girl thought about this revelation for a while and then asked, "Mum, how come all of grandma's hairs are white?" We all know that sometimes love can be a very painful thing – it doesn’t mean that we would ever swap it or prefer not to have it, but it can be difficult. In the part of John’s gospel (13:31-35) that we just heard Jesus issues a new commandment, ‘Just as I have loved you, you should also love one another.’ In a sense it wasn’t a new command at all – it went right back to the scriptures we know as the Old Testament (Levitic...

I don't know how good you are at imagining things - Helen's really good at it, but I'm not ! But today I want you to imagine something - and  this one is  not too difficult really - I want you to imagine its winter - in other words skies are grey, it's dark and miserable outside, the rain is coming down and it's cold... See I told you it wasn't too difficult to imagine ! The subject of weather is always a popular topic, but r ather unusually  today  the subject of winter comes up in our gospel reading (John 10:22-30). We are told it was the Feast of Dedication in Jerusalem, a feast that happens in winter time, celebrating the rededication of the Temple by Judas Maccabeus in 165BC. And so it was probably cold and maybe that's why John, the gospel writer, tells us Jesus was walking in the Portico of Solomon, a covered area in the Temple. Or perhaps it's rather more likely that John was referring to the fact that the spiritual temperature seemed...