'Rythm and blues, blacks, white and other colours!' - Weekly Reflection 16th November 2025

If you were to meet me on a Wednesday the chances are I would be wearing black clothes!

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   I have very mild OCD tendencies and like a degree of order and pattern to my life. Therefore, I have my T shirts set out in six piles, two random colours, black, white and then a Church Army pile.  On Wednesday’s it is the black pile!  And invariably this is teamed up with black trousers or joggers and a black top, sometimes that may change to grey or another matching colour.  For a long time now, I have a thing about matching colours and try not to wear more than two colours. This works it way to both hats, coats and bags should I be carrying one that day!
   

   For some people patterns and procedures must follow very strict rules otherwise they can become very upset and struggle to function.  As I said, my own OCD is very mild, although pictures or other items not straight drive to me to distraction.  

   I must add that for me I can change routines if the need arises, this pattern forms the basis.

   Recently our ‘vicars’ Jane and Alan announced their retirement after Easter 2026. I began to ponder on the regular 9am online prayer meeting set up during Covid that continued afterwards. It lasts for about 20 minutes, Monday – Thursday.  I really hope it will continue because it sets up my day and gives me a pattern, especially now that I am retired.  

   Some years ago, we explored as a Church community a book by Ken Shigematsu, ‘God in My Everything: How an Ancient Rhythm Helps Busy People Enjoy God.’

   

   
   

   Through a series of exercises, you are invited to learn how to live with the peace and presence of God amid our hectic, busy lives. Spiritual formation is more than just solitude and contemplative reflections. Spiritual formation happens in the everyday, in every moment of life. For those caught up in the busyness of work, family, and church, it often feels like time with God is just another thing on a crowded to-do list.

   The idea is not to create a slavish straitjacket where we become guilt ridden if we failed to keep with the set pattern and routine, but we have it there as the core, as a daily practise. That practise of course must be flexible to accommodate workdays and weekends or time off and holidays.  

   

   The idea is not to load you with a load of other stuff to do, but to invite you to write up for yourself a simple daily pattern, a rule of life.

   To help with this there is a simple scaffold on which you can build a pattern and a rhythm.

   The challenge for us to reflect on is how balanced does our life seem. Are we always chasing the next deadline, trying to read that book, feeling guilty because we have not read the Bible or said our prayers.

   Back to my T shirts. I remember somewhile ago a nun being asked about her life. She was one that always wore a ‘habit.’  She said the beauty of this was that it was one less thing to think about when she got up in the morning. She knew what she was going to wear.

   Something of that lies behind my organised T shirt piles.  When I was in ministry I took to wearing something of Church Army whenever I was ‘on-duty.’  Depending on the task to be undertaken, that would range from very casual to very formal. The other benefit to this was that on my ‘days off’ the children knew that I was available, out of ‘uniform.’  And now retired I have found a similar helpful pattern with my organised shirt piles.

   Also important to remember is that we will have various seasons in our life and so our rhythms, patterns, rules of life will need to change and adapt and be subject to review.

   Matthew 11.28-30 The Message

    “Are you tired? Worn out? Burned out on religion? Come to me. Get away with me and you’ll recover your life. I’ll show you how to take a real rest. Walk with me and work with me—watch how I do it. Learn the unforced rhythms of grace. I won’t lay anything heavy or ill-fitting on you. Keep company with me and you’ll learn to live freely and lightly.”

   In a world of frenetic activity may it be that we could offer a different way, taking heed of these words from the hymn ‘Dear Lord and Father of Mankind.’

   Drop Thy still dews of quietness,

   Till all our strivings cease;

   Take from our souls the strain and stress,

   And let our ordered lives confess

   The beauty of Thy peace.

   An ordered life will not happen automatically, it requires some work in organising our life, building a framework to help us measure and make sense of our lives and live our best life under God’s guiding hand.   

    Above all we want God to be our everything and in everything...

    

                               https://youtu.be/0bhJHMoDsdE?si=2Y43f9Q6iO9Lwnte

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'Do you remember when...' - Weekly Reflection 9th November 2025

Remember, remember, the 5th of November,

Gunpowder, treason and plot.

I see no reason

Why gunpowder treason

Should ever be forgot.

Well, at one level I also see no reason that this event should be forgotten. However, I could give you several reasons why I think we should have long ago dropped the ‘celebration’ of oppressed Roman Catholics, terrorist that they may be, being brutally tortured and then executed in about the most barbaric way imaginable.

However, that is not what I want to invite us to reflect upon but rather on the whole concept of remembering which in some ways seems to mark out the month of November.

We have November 1st, All Hallows Day,  November 5^th and very significantly we have November 11^th and although perhaps not so well known we also have Road Peace Sunday on the 16^th November when we are invited to remember all those killed or injured on our roads. (About RoadPeace - RoadPeace)  

Remembering is part of what enables us to function as human beings and helps us to analyse or process information.  Once you being to reflect of the key role ‘remembering’ plays in our life it quickly becomes a huge topic and one well beyond the scope of a short weekly reflection. I only hope to start of your thinking and let you decide where it takes you or how deep you wish to go.

At one level we need to remember all sorts of things, from the mundane to the global level. For example, how to get to the shops, what we have gone there for, and then how to find our way home again. Although with an increase in online shopping that function is becoming less important. A little like satnavs, for the most part we have lost the skill of map reading and navigation and in some cases geographical locations.  As somebody said recently, as technology gets smarter we are becoming dumber!

And for those suffering from certain forms of dementia remembering brings a whole raft of issues into play and can make life very difficult for the person and family and friends.

And then consider what we do when we remember. How that makes us react and act in certain ways. We are currently watching a ‘remembering’ being played out between Israel and the Palestinians in Gaza. That remembering is hate filled and spilling out in violence and retribution.

Of course, our whole justice system is predicated upon remembering. What happened, who was involved, what was said or done.  And for the perpetrator of the any ‘crime’ – are you able to remember why you did this, what was your motive, what was the reason behind your actions or even inactions? For the victims of crime, what does ‘remembering’ do for them? That can be a very long fraught journey.

And today, Remembrance Sunday, just what are we remembering and perhaps the hardest question of all is, are we learning anything in our remembering?

With over one hundred armed conflicts across the world currently, it would seem the answer is no.

And our Scriptures are replete with story after story, command after command, encouragement after encouragement to remember.

At the core of our Christian faith are these words from our Lord, ‘do this in remembrance of me.’

Here I find that if we consider the word re as a prefix it brings something very important to mind. We are invited to ‘re member’ someone – to bring them back into membership, back into memory, back into our thoughts.

However, immediately we follow this line of thought we see that this can be for both good or for ill, there are some people whom we don’t wish to remember. (But why is it those are the ones we seem to more readily remember, we seem to have a way of remembering more of the brickbats than the bouquets life has presented us with)

However, we cannot help but remember, we need to do that to be able to function and navigate our way through life. That being said, what we remember, and what we do with those memories is something we can cultivate and seek to attune more to the will and way of God. To purposefully focus on the bouquets and who offered them rather than the brickbats.

And remembering God’s faithfulness in the past can offer HOPE.  (Holding Onto Past Experience.)

Sadly, too often the way the ‘world’ handles remembering is not always the most healthy or helpful way, leading to bitterness and ongoing violence, seeking retribution.

Romans 12.1-2 helpfully reminds us 'not to let the world around you squeeze you into its own mould, but let God re-mould your minds from within, so that you may prove in practice that the plan of God for you is good, meets all his demands and moves towards the goal of true maturity.’

And then….

‘Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things.’  Philippians 4.8

And as we remember the horrors of the two world wars that engulfed the world amongst the many stories of courage and self-sacrfice surely the story of Maximillian Kolbe stands out as a supreme expample of someone out of love giving their life for another in a selfless act of grace.  This is a truly noble story, excellent, praiseworthy and certainly worth continuing to think about and remember.

This is the story Maximillian's act of sacrfical love in Auswitch.

https://youtu.be/A8MbKF8YfiU?si=zbvpO_5GfIPA3dGv   

 

 

 

 

'Taking One-Degree' - Weekly Reflection 2nd November 2025

As a child I was fascinated by perspective, or to be specific one aspect of perspective. I was never very good at drawing and yet the concept that you could have two parallel lines that would run on side by side at the same distance apart for infinity. And yet if you introduced just the smallest dot in between the lines and continued with this new trajectory the two lines would begin to get further and further apart.

Emmerdale is currently running a very disturbing story line, and for me I mean that. I know it is a soap and yet the reality of this story line I know is so real it is disturbing me, and that’s not a bad thing.

There are some aspects that are just a tad fanciful like how all the main characters end up living in Emmerdale but that apart it has a real tone of authenticity.  The story line is of two young teenagers, a boy and girl who are in a relationship and are groomed initially to be carriers of ‘soft drugs.’ However, this begins to develop, and the girl is being lined up to offer sex to ‘clients.’  (In the story line she is sixteen)

There is obviously a lot more behind the story but the couple manipulating these young people are a mum and adopted son. Both becoming established as respectable people in the village and as part of their deceit becoming romantically involved with the grandfather of the young girl and the son with another woman in the village.

Gradually as the story line continued the tone of the mother and son changed from being kind and generous to becoming more menacing as they tricked the younger couple into believing they owed them a considerable amount of money because during a drug drop the drugs were stolen. But this too was a deceit to get them hooked and dependent. In the latest episode the woman said with chilling menace, I now own you and Dillon, and you will do as I say, and I will keep you and use you for a long time.

If this be true for following a path of destruction, death and chaos then for certain the opposite must also hold true.

One of my favourite passages of Scripture is the Letter to the Hebrews and chapters 11 and 12. Chapter 11 is a long litany of all those who remained firm to faith and then chapter 12 opens with these words that are so full of encouragement.  

Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles. And let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us, fixing our eyes on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of faith. For the joy set before him he endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.

And we have just celebrated All Saints Day, 1^st November. Not that you would know it as the evening before, All Hallow’s Eve, has morphed into Halloween and confused with Samhain, an ancient Celtic festival celebrating the beginning of winter.  And somewhere in this conflation we have the whole celebration of darkness, ghouls, ghosts and monsters. The most grotesque thing for me is the utter confusion, the Americanisation and all the hype and the cost of it all.

Thankfully the idea of an alternative, Light Parties, and the like have grown exponentially.

And as with the Gallery of the Faithfull in Hebrews 11 we can now add a plethora of all the saints, the notable ones who feast days we celebrate but also all the thousands of ‘saints’ who kept the faith and whose legacy of faithfulness we have inherited.

But I want to draw us back to perspective once again. However, this time thinking of the perspective of becoming more and more like Jesus.

Ephesians 4:11-14

^‘So Christ himself gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the pastors and teachers, to equip his people for works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up  until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ.  Then we will no longer be infants, tossed back and forth by the waves, and blown here and there by every wind of teaching and by the cunning and craftiness of people in their deceitful scheming.’

Mesiah Jesus came to share our humanity so that we can come to share his divinity.

So, here is the challenge. What is the one degree shift we can make in our life, beginning next week, to help us in the task of realigning our lives to be more like Christ like.

Prayer, Bible reading, a Psalm for the Day, developing an attitude of gratitude. It might also be something like a simple act of kindness, or even as I try and do on most days, to pick up at least one piece of litter as I am out and about demonstrating a care and concern for God’s earth and where we live.

What is that one thing we can put in place and allow it to become positively habit forming.

That one-degree shift can help push us back on course as apprentices of Jesus and help us shine more brightly as a lights in the world of darkness. 

 

https://youtu.be/21GTTM2TIYA?si=Tp9QeZdO4QELAMHd

 For all the saints....