Sharing some thoughts

I want to begin on this Mothering Sunday rather cheerfully (!!!) by reading a passage called "The Meanest Mother in the World"!  It was written by a young mother back in 1967. It goes like this: I had the meanest mother in the whole world. While other children ate sweets for breakfast, I had to have cereal, eggs or toast. When others had coke and sweets for lunch, I had to eat a sandwich. As you can guess, my supper was different than the others also. But at least, I wasn't alone in my sufferings. My sister and two brothers had the same mean mother as I did.  We had to wear clean clothes and take a bath. The other children always wore their clothes for days. We reached the height of insults because she made our clothes herself, just to save money. Why, oh why, did we have to have a mother who made us feel different from our friends?            The worst is yet to come. We had to be in bed by nine each night and up at eight the next m...

Well we are well and truly into lent. I always call lent one of our spiritual aerobics times when we are focussing extra hard on our faith. It is one of the great periods in the Church when we are encouraged to take stock. At the beginning of lent I explained the thought of one of my fiends that in lent we don’t sing the alleluias and the Gloria because it is like us taking a deep breath so we can sing extra loud at Easter. I really like the idea of lent as a tIme to take a deep breath.  We are now into lent and we will all have had time to get used to what we have given up or what we have taken up. Lent is about us growing closer to God. It is a time to consider our relationship with God and with others. The problem is, sometimes it becomes a competition as to how well we are doing, what extra things we are doing but this competition comes apart when we forget why we are doing them. There was once an elderly and slightly forgetful Bishop who was traveling by train to ...

John Wooden, the former coach of the UCLA basketball team said, “Be more concerned with your character than with your reputation… Your character is what you really are while your reputation is merely what others think you  are.“  And he’s quite right isn’t he ?  How many people with good reputations have been somehow brought down by some flaw in their character which has suddenly been revealed. And it can work the other way too – I don’t  know  if you’re like me but sometimes, and I try not to, I make judgements of what a person might be like – we judge on all kinds of things, but we shouldn’t ,  and I’m really happy to say that I have been proved wrong on so many occasions when I have doubted someone’s character….  What we often see on the outside isn’t necessarily what that person is like in reality. D L Moody, the American Preacher said that ‘Character is what you are in the dark,’ reminding us that character isn’t what we do when we’re...

One day a boy went out with his friends – before leaving the house his father had warned him not to go and swim in the canal. When the boy returned with a wet bathing suit his father asked where he had been – the son confessed that he had been swimming in the canal - "Didn't I tell you not to swim there?" asked the father.  "Yes" answered the boy.  "Then why did you?" he asked.  "Well, Dad," he explained, "I had my bathing suit with me and I couldn't resist the temptation."  "Why did you take your bathing suit with you?" he questioned.  "Well, so I'd be prepared to swim, in case I was tempted ! " replied the boy. Many people, it seems, often prepare to fail – they prepare to live life expecting something less than God would hope for from them… In fact, perhaps we all do that at times as we settle for less either in our own lives or in the lives of those in our community or the world as a who...