Posts by Rev. Derek Grimshaw

Accessibility

The Disability Discrimination Act of 1995 made it unlawful to discriminate against people living with disabilities. 30 years on we have made great strides, but we are still not quite there. As somebody who regularly pushes a wheelchair, I have come to be a bit of an expert on just how inaccessible some “accessible” toilets…

Small acts of kindness

It’s amazing how quickly we forget. One of the churches I worked with in 2020 decided to distribute daffodils to church folk as a small gesture to show that the church family remembered them. I thought that this was a lovely idea, so each time we went to the supermarket, we bought some small pot…

Theological Reflection

A friend of mine gave me this little chap as gift; I believe that he comes from Zimbabwe and he sits on the book shelf over my desk. I was told when I received the gift that the piece it titled “The Thinker” and I love him, whenever I sit pondering over how to word…

The land of big skies

Moving from West Yorkshire to Norfolk in 2005, I was met with the unsolicited comment repeatedly “Norfolk isn’t flat” I never suggested it was, and 20+ years ago as I enjoyed cycling around the lanes, I very quickly learned they were right. That said, we tend not to have the fells and mountains I grew…

Living in a fair society

My brother and I always used to love baking with our mum and one of the highlight of every baking session was licking out the bowl, I guess that there are some that will see all kinds of issues around health and safety, but this was the sixties and we didn’t bother about things like…

The Joy of Nurturing

I have never been a gardener; I love seeing the fruits of other people’s labours and admire gardens while out and about. I would love to have the kind of skills to plant and grow and appreciate the fruits of my labours, but I was not blessed in that way. A few weeks ago we…

A baffling world

I had to attend a meeting in London on Tuesday, I haven’t been to London for several years and on the last occasion I had been with two colleagues who knew their way around train travel and negotiating the London Underground and I just chugged along following them.  This time was different, I was travelling…

The last gift

From the outset, I will apologise for starting what I hope is a bright and sunny Sunday morning with morbid thoughts, but just recently I have seen a string of adverts on the television for simple cremations and if I’m being honest they irritate me. When I first started working in the full time ministry,…

The passion of Christ

Way back in the early 1980’s we organised a trip from our Church to Blackpool for the young people and we learned in the process of preparation that when you take young people to Blackpool an important feature of the day had to include a visit to the pleasure beach.  All these years on, I…