Last night I stayed over with a minister friend in London. We chatted long and laughed and shared all manner of stuff. And it was good. And I think in the sharing each of us made new connections or discovered new truth.

Today on my train ride home I read a book my friend recommended and started to prepare thoughts for a sermon.

Sometimes it is only in sharing the mundane and ordinary that the spiritual or divine breaks through.

Last morning in Massy was spent at the Baptist Church meeting the Pastor. His English and my French were roughly of equal standard, so our Link Missionary did a fair bit of translation.

At the end of the meeting we prayed with and for each other and for our churches. No miraculous comprehension but we each got the gist of what the others were praying   It was very beautiful and, for me, a foretaste of heaven.

Yesterday afternoon I visited the French Baptist headquarters, a delightful suite of rooms a climb of some seventy odd steps from ground level. Here I met lovely people who are colleagues of our link missionary and picked up a few leaflets to look at. To my surprise, I could understand at least 90% of what I was reading. But the cover of the magazine momentarily threw me... an edition devoted to fishing? Well, OK, kind of Biblical I guess, maybe a bit if fun in the titling? No, it was about sin... Same letters, same order, different accents.

Peach, fish or sin... it all depends on the accents.

Made me smile and made me think about the ability of the tiniest punctuation mark to radically change meaning or reception.

Plenty of English words that are way more confusing because we don't use accents in writing... Which also made me think.

Apologies for typos, doing this on my phone from a platform that's not entirely mobile friendly is a good challenge!