Posts by Steve Oliver

Find a quiet place

Have you ever stopped to think how really busy this time of year is?  For many of us, for differing reasons, time must seem in short supply.  For some there is the harvest, endlessly ensuring you beat the rain, rushing to cut the crop whilst the sun shines.  For Methodist’s, September onwards brings endless meetings,…

Just a thought…

Jill and I love going to Garden Centres; but even after many visits to places as big as The Botanical Gardens in Wales and the Eden project in Cornwall and the less ambitious but just as interesting Garden Centres such as Thetford I am still hopeless at recognising flowers – weeds I seem to have…

What difference does our faith make?

What difference does your faith make to you? A strange question to start perhaps, but I think it is important we ask this question not only of others but ourselves. Why do we need to ask this question? Because people of no faith must think we are strange because we believe as Christians in someone…

Politicians!

I have much respect for politicians and what they try and do for the country and for us individually, but I do have problems with those who offer great promises knowing they cannot carry them out. We can get so easily sucked in because of their verbal skills and an ability to tell us things…

Just a thought…

“Jesus Christ is risen today”, words sung and said throughout the Easter period, but what does it mean? It is hard for us to understand how Jesus rose from the dead.  We know what happened…the stone was rolled away, the burial clothes were left inside, and an angel was awaiting those who searched. We know…

Are we listening?

The story of the Sower (except for the good soil) can seem like a parable about someone else. But when I consider my life in Christ, I too can be the one where His words fall onto rocky ground, thorns, scorched by the sun; but also, glad to say on good soil. I think we…

Advance!

I don’t know whether you have noticed, but there seems to be a poll each month showing the decline in Church attendance, less people having any religious belief, and more Churches closing yearly. It becomes a most depressing picture, which seems to me makes us retreat into our separate denominations. We spend more time on…

Just a thought….

Well Christmas is now over, and we can begin a new season of worship, or do we? In all the taking down of decorations and Christmas trees, recycling our Christmas cards and generally removing any signs of the last few week’s celebrations we tend to forget a very important event in our calendar, and that…

Just a thought…

‘O little town of Bethlehem, how still we see thee lie’, the first line of what I regard as one of my most favourite of carols.  It reminds me very much of the village I grew up in, in mid-Wales called Llanfyllin. On each Christmas eve, my family and I would walk down to church…

I yam what I yam!

Popeye the sailor’s favourite cry was “I yam what I Yam”, and he would not pretend to be anyone else. In that cry there is disappointment, the awful truth that there was nothing else for him; don’t get your hopes up he seems to say, don’t expect too much because “I yam what I yam”.…