Today we took our lunch club on an outing to Cambridge, and had lunch at the church where I preached with a view unsuccessfully four years ago.

It was a good day out, even if the coach driver seemed incapable of grasping that the best way from Dibley to the A14 is via the M1.  Ah well.  Some interesting leafy lanes made a pleasant, if over-long journey.

It was good to see the folk in Cambridge, and I was touched that one former deacon made a special trip in to see me.  They did us proud with lunch, making the room very welcoming and accommodating the countless foibles my people have - including one or two that turned out to be fictitious.  Slightly odd to think that that might have been my church had things worked out differently but an awful lot of water has flowed down the Cam since then.

I spent the afternoon wandering around Cambridge with the lunch club co-ordinator and two folk who had come alone and had not been gathered up by any of the friendship groups.  Walking at dead slow and stop is not my greatest gift, but I managed it, and we were able to give these folk an enjoyable afternoon - which was what it was all about.

Cambridge is a beautiful city, and I will always believe that I was called to minister there, but I have no regrets that I ended up where I am.  The unlovely folk on the margins of anywhere need our love and support, and in some small measure we are able to do that here.

As I walked home fom the coach drop off point, a man (not part of the club) who can be abusive and rude called me over and told me he wanted to join our church.  Part of my heart sank, he is a very difficult person to deal with, yet this is what we are called to do.  There are some of our unlovely people I find it quite easy to love, and I'd spent the afternoon with one of them.  Now I need to find it within me to see this other man as Jesus sees him, a man who perhaps is lost and desperately seeking to be found.

I got told off by one woman because I didn't say grace after the meal as well as before it; some of our church folk don't really see that me spending a day on an outing is 'work;' the niggles are always there.  But this is what we do, and with God's help, we go on doing it.