Over at Hopeful Imagination, Lucy a minister who is just under half my age (if I am right I 'double' her next year!) posted a wonderful reflection that 'showed' me a delightful image of Jesus as a toddler in a pushchair smiling and reaching out a hand towards me.  This image has stayed with me, I can almost hear him gurgling with gleeful toddler laughter as he reaches out in that open-handed way toddlers do to embrace a world that excites them.

Then a moment when I was very humbled by one of the people I mentioned yesterday who gave me a Christmas card with a jolly robin singing in the snow.  It was almost as if Christ said to me, "you might struggle to see me, but I see you, and, in this frail, wizzened hand and this wobbly writing I reach out to you."

In the soft, warm, pudginess of a little child's hand, in the dried, cold, thinness of an old man's hand, Christ reaches across time and space to reach us all.

The Baptist world is small.  The nuclear industry world is small.  When two small worlds intersect, as these two do remarkably often, I meet people who know people I know.  Some people thought that moving to Glasgow was a long way from people I know... but they failed to allow for the smallness of the worlds I inhabit, that we all inhabit. Without resorting to the blatantly obvious 'people I know who my church also know' because they are well-known figures in Bappy-land, here are some of the connections that exist...

• Someone in church who works with someone I used to work with, albeit briefly, albeit a long time ago
• Someone in church who is, technically, an alumna of the same London college as me, because his medical school merged with my college
• Someone in church whose son used to work for said college, and who knew/knows someone who taught me fluid mechanics and thermodynamics all those years ago
• Someone in church who knows the father of one of my friends because they used to work together for a Christian radio organisation
• Someone in church whose father is a retired Baptist minister who once preached with a view at Dibley (I don't know who declined whom!) and held pastorates in EMBA at churches now served by friends or former colleagues of mine
• Someone who went to university in Leicester and attended a church where I once, pre-Dibley, preached 'with a squint'
• Someone in the coffee shop opposite the church who comes from a village just a few miles from Dibley and who, over Christmas will be down there while I'm up here

Every now and then here, as formerly at Dibley, people ask me when I'm going home.  This grates a bit, though I know it is kindly meant, because no one would ask such a thing of a married minister.  Home is where your heart is, and my heart is here, in this place to which God has brought me, among these people whose lives already intersect with my own in all sorts of weird and wonderful ways.  The world is a small place, and the Christian/Baptist world even smaller.  The interconnectedness, which so delighted one of my former tutors (Brian Howden) whose former church secretary had been one of the engineers who worked for me, is part of what makes us who we are - the Body of Christ.

Oh, and if you are a reader who can give me a few more 'Brian-like' connections I'd love to know them.

By the wonders of advance posting, I am here today even before I wake!