Musings on faith and real life
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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When people say happily ‘God has never let me down’, I’m tempted to retort ‘Really?’ When you prayed that your relative wouldn’t die from cancer, and they passed away, could you really say it didn’t feel as if God had let you down? When you asked for a new job and your applications bore no […]
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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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March 23rd 2020 2pm. Weekly church staff meeting. How were we doing in the light of the government’s announcement the previous week that we should all be working from home if possible?. We sat round the staff room table trying to begin to think ahead and plan for the possible effects of the epidemic. We […]
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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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The tax return form sat in my Dad’s in-tray month after month, ignored, though the deadline loomed.My mother tried to remind him about it gently, and was brushed off with ‘It’s OK. I’ll do it’. But he didn’t. And she began to wonder if he didn’t because he couldn’t. He already had a diagnosis of […]
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A candle in my treehouse 