My third child, I’ll call him George, was the only one of my four to be born on his due date.  Even then, he couldn’t wait! Once he went on a school trip and bought me a jar of sweets as a present. When he got off the coach, he proudly offered me the empty…

The idea of being part of something vast is encouraging; the writer to the Hebrews talks about the cloud of witnesses all around giving encouragement to believers to throw off the weight of sin and its entanglements to run the race to Christ. Being entirely unathletic I have never found the ‘race’ an appealing image…

With the world cup well underway, it is impossible to ignore the messed-up priorities of our world, in which the media’s obsession with popularism allows the game of football to take centre stage over human survival.  World leaders at COP27 took an extra day to reach any meaningful conclusion.  We can applaud the signing of…

Many years ago, I heard a Christian stating that “Video recorders were invented for the benefit of Christians who didn’t believe you should watch TV on a Sunday!”  Presumably, this would enable the Christian to watch a Sunday programme on another day without any sense of guilt.  I find the record facility helpful for a…

Do you remember going to the cinema and watching the B movie, or perhaps buying a 4rpm record with a B side song? Sometimes there was a hidden gem amongst these B movies or songs. They were a vehicle for up and coming actors and singers. You got two for the price of one –…

As a little lad growing up in a village in West Yorkshire, you could roughly divide religious people into four categories, Church folk, chapel folk, Roman Catholics and “not religious at all” The vast majority of people would class themselves as “CofE” if they had to align themselves with a denomination of any kind when…

Recently I’ve had cause to travel to and from Cambridge on quite a few occasions. I live in Felixstowe and my husband has been a patient in Royal Papworth. Most days the journey to and from the hospital was reasonable, if perhaps a bit slow on the way home. The one thing all the driving has…

Born in unhygienic conditions, even by the standards of Israel during the Roman Empire, in an unfamiliar region surrounded by strangers, in appearance just an ordinary baby boy, the salvation of the human race centred on Jesus. The prophet Isaiah gave four descriptions of the Messiah who would come, who we now recognise as Jesus:…

It may be almost forty years since my mother died but I can still hear her ranting on about the iniquities of frozen vegetables. If frozen was suspicious, canned was sinister and dried bordering on the demonic. She was wrong of course, but against the background of growing up with some appalling apologies for fruit…

I was born with spina bifida which resulted in me having one leg shorter and smaller than the other and I spent most of my first two years away from home in Great Ormond Street London. I was not expected to live and I am told I had the last rites read over me. But Father…