Musings on faith and real life
My great granny was awarded a degree by London University in 1905. The man she married (my great-grandfather) became Provost of University College London. Their daughter (my granny) won a scholarship to Girton College Cambridge and studied hard (though she couldn’t get a degree because Cambridge didn’t award them to women in 1932). Her husband, […]
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stars hidden silent snowfall subduing all stirring procrastination visits with this sunrise stirring curtains a shiver of expectation: arrested enchantment transfigures lockdown stupor a doorway opens: childhood relived! squirming with suppressed excitement, restrained – set free! stamping on pristine precipitation a thump of snowball a shriek of retaliation soft war slipping off sledges sussuration of […]
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I stood in the middle of the African hospital compound and howled. I’d just received a message that my fiance could not visit that weekend. A tsunami of distress floored me. We’d endured so much during the last few months. We’d had the frustration of being posted to different hospitals. We’d suffered the lack of […]
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I’ve had odd Christmases before. There was the Christmas day in Uganda when we emerged from a morning church service to the sight of a young man parading down the street. As he turned his head towards me, four eyes caught mine, not two. Slowly I realised he had an inverted cow’s head balanced on […]
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When I was a medical student, our teachers asked us asked to have a discussion about whether we were responsible for caring for our parents in their old age. To my shock, fully half of those present said they wouldn’t care for their parents when they were older. Some didn’t see why they should; others […]
Read MoreOriginally posted on Don't Lose Hope :
“So often we try to make other people feel better by minimizing their pain, by telling them that it will get better, or that there are worse things in the world. But that’s not what I actually needed. What I actually needed was for someone to tell me…
Let’s imagine what happens if we try to help someone suffering from shame by using our usual method of explaining Jesus’s death. Rebecca: Oh hi Sarah – how brilliant to see you! How long is it since I last saw you? About a year? It was last Easter wasn’t it? Sarah: Yes, and it’s been a pretty rubbish year, too. Rebecca: Oh no, what’s happened? Sarah: […]
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So many times at the drop-in we run in the church where I volunteer I have been talking to someone who is caught in an impossible cycle. They were abused as children, which continues to give them mental health problems. Because of the mental health problems they can’t get work. Because they can’t get work […]
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A shiver runs through me when I recall you, street preacher: you stand there, politely dressed, in a neat space between market stalls, a small black book in hand externally polite, respectable, friendly even but with a stream of horror pouring out of your mouth. ‘Aren’t you afraid?’ you ask the passers-by. ‘If you […]
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I let out an involuntary gasp as I turned over the price tag. This child’s ski jacket was unbelievably expensive. But of course it was. If someone needed to buy a ski jacket in this village high in the Austrian mountains, the shop owners could charge what they liked. A ski jacket when skiing was hardly an […]
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A candle in my treehouse 