Back in August, I picked my son up from Stansted Airport and we stopped to buy some food from the McDonalds store that adjoins the airport. This meant visiting a place called Southgate Park and if you do the same thing yourself, BEWARE! It was nearly midnight, we had never been there before and all…

Today is the day the clocks change so, if you haven’t yet reset yours, pause and go do it now. I always enjoy this change back to GMT because it means getting an extra hour in bed. The downside, of course, is that the sun sets an hour earlier and this day is a very…

Joseph, a Levite from Cyprus, whom the apostles called Barnabas (which means “son of encouragement”), sold a field he owned and brought the money and put it at the apostles’ feet.      (Acts 4:36-37) What do we learn here about Barnabas? Firstly, his real name was Joseph. Secondly, he was a Levite, that is that he…

My last thought was a fourth one based in the world of bags and containers and I fully expected it to be the last of a short series. You may recall that we were thinking about leather wineskins and a saying of Jesus:                                                                                                                               “And no one pours new wine into old wineskins. Otherwise, the wine…

I’m old enough to recall the battlelines drawn in the 1980s over church worship. The church that Karen and I attended back then was still using the 1936 Methodist Hymn Book together with the original edition of Songs of Fellowship. I remember vividly those people who would enter the church; approach the table stacked with…

Welcome to a third thought emanating from the world of bags and containers. In the first, we looked at baggage and luggage. In the second, we encountered portmanteaus and portmanteau words. Today we’re thinking about pokes and what’s inside them. I suspect you’re now wondering what exactly a poke is. You might have dredged up…

Pictured here is a very old example of a Portmanteau. This particular example was made for George Washington and is held by the Museum of the American Revolution. What makes it a portmanteau is that it’s a bag or case with two separate parts joined together. This Thought is a Part 2 and in an…

One thing you’ve probably discovered about me is that words and the origins of words fascinate me. In particular, I can use an everyday phrase or word and suddenly wonder about it. Take the other day, for example, I was putting a suitcase into my boot and it prompted a realisation that I had no…

As the Gospel writers tell the Easter story, they differ in the names given to those women who are first to visit the empty tomb. One name though, appears on everyone’s list – that of Mary Magdalene. It points to the significance of Mary among Jesus’ followers so it therefore feels sad that many people…

Last Sunday I was preaching from Luke 13 where Jesus speaks of his compassionate love for the people of Jerusalem:  “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you were…