Matthew 4:7 – ‘Do not put the Lord your God to the test’. When I was beginning my career my friends and I were relieved to have work, pleased if we were offered promotion and grateful for a pay rise. I started out at a time of high interest rates, high inflation and when employment…

When I was at school, in my mind I associated Lent with the hymn ‘Lord Jesus, think on me’ (H&Ps 533). I thought it was gloomy and unnecessarily puritanical when I was in my teens. As I have got older I have realised what a wonderful prayer it is and just as I came to…

Luke 4:3-4 The devil said to him, ‘if you are the son of God, tell this stone to become bread.’ Jesus answered, ‘it is written: “Man cannot live by bread alone”.’ We all know what it is to feel a bit peckish, even to suffer from hypoglycaemia because we have an imbalance between the energy…

I am writing this immediately following the return to the UK of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe and Anoosheh Ashoori following their detention in Iran. Most of us will have no idea how it feels to be held without reason and without any idea when or if release will come. Similarly, ordinary people condemn such dreadful treatment of…

To my mind, an essential ingredient of spring is primroses in the ditches and later on cowslips too. I love the snowdrops, crocuses, daffodils and others in the garden but wild primroses are on a different level. They are all muddled up with the remains of the die back from last summer, the still raised…

Three weeks ago this morning Russia invaded Ukraine. Terrible things have happened that people prayed would not happen again in Europe, or anywhere else in the world. We have been reminded of the extreme fragility of peace between nations and that despite all that is enshrined in our hopes for a world of united nations,…

For people of a certain age brought up in a particular world, to sit by an open log fire is to be content. A sense of security and of warmth leads to relaxation that may be entirely unjustified. While I sat beside the fire in the photograph, happily and sleepily reading a book (in hard…

I am writing this in Cornwall just after storm Eunice has passed by on her relentless journey up country. We drove down to Porthcurno beach where we watched huge waves rolling in and producing a mat of surf in the afternoon sunshine. A couple of seals were fishing in the shallow water and seemed unperturbed…

Traditionally people talk about what they ‘give up for Lent’; at work I hear it said by colleagues who may know little more than that about Lent, or what the season is about. If Lent induces a sense of self-discipline, then who are we to criticise. Committed Christians may not find it adequate to ‘go…

We have woken up to the reality of the damage the human population is doing to the environment. Carrying capacity is the limit to the size of population that the planet can sustain; the more the population demands from the environment the smaller the population the environment can support but the population grows anyway. All…