The Stations of the Cross are a series of meditations based on the final journey of Jesus from his sentencing by Pilate to his burial. The original stations are in Jerusalem on the Via Dolorosa, the road along which Jesus carried his cross. The stations normally consist of 14 pictures although in Cookham we plan to use 9 stations. — http://www.goodfriday.org/

I’ve just learned of the death, from meningitis, of Philip Bell, the son of Arkle and Sheila Bell. Arkle used to be one of the Lecturers on Kathy’s course, and Phil used to be in my youth group when I was a young leader at Counterslip Baptist Church in Bristol. He must have been only 23 or 24. Life is so fleeting sometimes — it’s especially hard to take when it’s someone so young and when their death is no fault of their own. Read more...

TrackBack Development

There’s an interesting discussion (well, lots of interesting discussions, actually) going on over at cre8d, particularly about sermons.

Reasons to be cheerful We put on a Fairtrade lunch at church yesterday. It all went very well. My brother, Nick, will be moving into a new job at Reuters, where he works already. My nephew, Mark, has got his first record contract, aged 16! Spring is coming!

On Friday, Kathy and I celebrated four years since we got engaged. Kathy bought me a large white dish (I like white crockery) and Monty Python and the Holy Grail on DVD. It has the Monty Python in Lego as a special feature. It rocks. I bought Kathy some flowers and a copy of Good Housekeeping, cos when I got to Waterstones to buy her a glass painting book, it was closed. Read more...

That’s what my desktop weather applet is telling me anyway. Had trouble sleeping last night — too much on my mind: the impending PCC meeting and the auditing of the church accounts; the messy state of our house; the Fairtrade lunch we’re putting on on Sunday; financial worries. The list goes on. Kathy is such a blessing to me — I’m truly grateful that she is part of my life. My faith and normally-optimistic (“It could be worse”) attitude to life let me down last night. Read more...

A poem which evokes rainy childhood days, days when there was much more fun to be had outside than in. I’m not so bothered about being outside now (except in summer), but since we’d driven nearly 150 miles to spend the weekend in north Devon, we thought it would be, well, nice to be able to enjoy the countryside without the car windows getting in the way. Having decided to eschew the delights of the motorway, we set out across Somerset, crossing it almost entirely from Bath in the North-East corner, beyond Minehead and into Exmoor and out the other side — almost all on the A39. Read more...

Oh, man. My shoulder and neck feel like someone’s in there with a medaeval torture rack, stretching them in directions they’re just not supposed to go. My shoulders have been shot to pieces for a while — probably since I left CompuServe, where in 1999 all staff, including contractors like me, received a weekly back, shoulders, arms and hands massage. I always thought that it was a very enlightened approach to the issue of staff health; I’ve never come across it anywhere else, which is a shame. Read more...

One of my colleagues informed me, while waiting for the kettle to boil, that they had a dream last night in which I was the school cool dude, svengali and drug dealer, which couldn’t be further from the truth, really. I would just like to point out that I was not cool at school. James Hanson once said that I “try too hard to be cool”, but being a ‘try-hard’ and actually being cool are two very different things. Read more...