Sharing some thoughts

A lot of you may have heard the news this week about the likely death of Cardiff City’s record signing in a plane crash – last week he signed for Cardiff and on Monday whilst flying there his plane seems to have gone down and the search has been abandoned. A friend commented on facebook about how this reminded us of the need to live life to the full… Someone once said that the tragedy of life is not that it ends so soon, but that we take so long to begin it… Many people get so bogged down with existing that they forget to concentrate on the gift of really living. So many of us fail to grasp the fullness of life which Jesus says he came to offer for all. Today in our gospel reading (Luke 4:14-21) we hear of Jesus returning to speak in his home town, Nazareth. I have been back on a number of occasions to speak in Penarth in my home church – and there I am speaking amongst family and some people who’ve known me since I was very young, and it’s not easy. However encouraging people ma...

There is a strange feeling when you go back  to the place where you grew up. There is the nostalgia, there is the, “how things have changed” feeling. I went back to the Church where I grew up. It was the 50 th  Anniversary of the Church and I was in my 20s. I was with my Mum and a woman came up to me and said, “Well you’ve grown, you look so different.” to which my Mum replied, “She is a married woman now, I think you last saw her when she was a child.”  Another woman told me that I had changed a lot, the last time she had seen me was at her wedding, which I don’t remember ,  as I was a baby. There is something strange about seeing people who saw you as a child. It is nice to catch up but imagine if you went back somewhere and everyone was expecting a child and suddenly they saw a fully grown adult. Not just that but people who had seen you grow up now had to listen to what you were saying  as you took a place of authorit y over them.  This is wh...

Today we remember the baptism of Jesus, another of the incredible events in Jesus’ earthly life… Here, the person born to be the Saviour of the world joined us by offering himself to be baptised along with all the other people that were meeting John the Baptist. And in doing so he was aligning himself with us completely, and he was calling us into a relationship where we are active participants with him in his ministry… During the week I read a quote from C S Lewis which said, "Don't shine so others can see you. Shine so that through you, others can see Him."   This is a real challenge I think because very often when we do good things, those things point to us not to God, but we are called to shine as people so that through us people can see Jesus… We are to work for him and with him… The reading from Isaiah (43:1-7) is a great summary of what we mean to God. The previous chapter ends with God’s distress about the way people are behaving, and yet here God is still m...

from Helen In the last two months we have prepared for Jesus’ coming, we have worshipped Him and thought of His birth, last week we celebrated the Epiphany, that is we remembered when the wise men from afar reached the Baby Jesus and so the message of salvation, the birth of Jesus was seen as being for everyone. This Sunday we are remembering the Baptism of Jesus (Luke 3:15-17,21-22). There is a story of a minister in Jamaica   baptising a woman in the sea. The minister said to the women, “do you believe ?,” the woman replied, “yes I believe.” The minster pushed the woman down into the sea by the head holding tight to her hair. He then pulled her back up and asked again, “Do you believe ?” the woman replied, “yes,I believe,” once more the woman was pushed into water pulled back out and again the woman was asked, “do you believe?” the woman once again replied that yes she believed. She was pushed down again and pulled up. The minister asked, “What do you believe?” the wo...