Sharing some thoughts

The co mments of children can be  wonderful. We can all probably think of a funny story to do with something  a child has said – I remember a while ago when  a 3 year old told Helen that she looked a mess in the  morning ! ! I, of course, would obviously dispute that (at least until she’s made my breakfast ! ) There’s also the great children’s letters to God – I’m a bit sad perhaps but I never tire of hearing things like, ‘Dear God, Did you mean to make giraffes look like that, or was it an  accident ? ’ or ‘Dear God, I keep waiting for a nice summer day, but it hasn’t come – did you forget ?’ or just one more, ‘Dear God, Maybe Cain and Abel would not kill each other so much if they had their own rooms – it works for me and my brother.’ Asking children questions can be a very dangerous thing because they will generally say exactly what they think, when adults will often skirt around the truth if it is  painful !  Few of us will risk asking wha...

In our readings this morning we have heard of how hard it is to follow God sometimes, how it can make us very unpopular when we have to stand against things other people agree with and how difficult the life of being a follower of God seeking to be more like Him can be.   The prophet Jeremiah was torn, he wanted to be popular, he wanted people to listen to him but what he had been told by God to say did not make him popular, in fact sometimes people laughed at him.   In the gospel reading Jesus warned his followers that it was difficult to follow Him. However, it was worth it because God who loves the sparrows,loves us so much that he would die for us. All he asks of us is that we follow Him through everything.   It is a bit like supporting your favourite sports team, or even like being a sports person yourself.   I am not sure about your house but ours has changed recently. There is a lot more football on the television a chart on the back of the do...

Trinity Sunday is a day often made up of a great deal of confusion – the Trinity is never the easiest doctrine to try and explain to people – there can be lots of complicated explanations and many people will try and use symbols as an explanation – it reminds me a little bit of a football match played one night. As the teams were playing the lights went out, and they called on an electrician to sort out the problem – he tried hard but failed, and then another man came forward who said that he knew what to do. Somehow he managed to communicate to some of the crowd to wave an arm in the air – still nothing happened, so he got some more people to do the same and this time asked them all to wave both arms in the air – as they did this the lights suddenly came back on proving the old Chinese proverb that ‘many hands make lights work’ ! It really isn’t a tremendously relevant joke for today except that it perhaps highlights the fact that we need sometimes to just trust in God. This ...

When I was in Uni I was a member of the Christian Union, and was paying a lot of attention to everything that was going on, so much so that it took me a year of being a member to realise that I recognised the treas urer of the Christian Union Matt .  I thought he seemed familiar but I was not sure and in the end I a sked one of my friends what Matts surname was. It was Davies .  I was surprised I had  been in school with a Matt Davies , whom I would never have expected to be a member of the Christian Union as he had been very wild.   When I got home I checked my schoo l photos to see if the Matt Davies  from sc hool might be the same Matt Davies  as the one in University. Sure enough the facial features looked similar, but the biggest give away … and you may think that something like this would stand out a lot, but as I say I am not always the most observant… Matt  had bright,bright red hair !  He was fairly distinctive, but the last I had he...

There was a Sunday School class where they were learning a creed, and the day came for them to perform it in church with each child taking one line each. The first child began confidently,  ‘ I believe in God the Father ’ , the next continued,  ‘ I believe in God the Son ’ , and then there was a silence until one child said,  ‘ The boy who believes in the Holy Spirit isn ’ t here today ! ’ Today we celebrate Pentecost, the day when the gift of the Holy Spirit was given to the early followers of Jesus, the day often known as the birthday of the church  –  this year of course this church knows all about birthday celebrations as you celebrate your centenary. It is a special celebration  –  a time of thanksgiving, a time of great joy, a time of reminiscing and also a time to think of where we are now and where the future will take us. The day of Pentecost was a day when the full force of God was given to his people to share the gospel message. In ...

William Temple, a former Archbishop of Canterbury wrote that when Jesus was involved in his earthly ministry only people who were in his actual presence could hear him speak or see what he was doing – if you were in Galilee you couldn’t see Jesus in Jerusalem and vice versa ! But he went on to write that by his Ascension he was now available wherever we are – God is everywhere, and we can never be separated from him and his love for us. Ascension Day, which we celebrated on Thursday, marks another turning point in our Church calendar – and it is a hugely important day for the Church today just as it was when Jesus left his followers 2000 years ago. It marked a huge turning point because no longer would the followers of Jesus focus inwardly – meeting together, praying, sharing times of fellowship and learning directly from Jesus himself -   now they were to have an outward focus – they were to look outwards to the needs of the world. In today’s gospel (John 17:1-11), Jesus wa...