It's mid-afternoon when I'm typing this - so it clearly isn't a greeting; in fact it is my response to how today's all age worship went.

There are always, always visitors at the Gathering Place, it is one of the delights of being where we are (and the fact that the most central Baptist church in Glasgow doesn't call itself a Baptist church so we pop up first in Google).  Today we had more than usual, which just happened to coincide with a day two of our African students were on the reader rota.  There were seven Dutch people, two Australians, two Germans and two Devonians that I was aware of.  Is Devon a nation state?  Hmm.  Anyway, they all seeemd to enjoy being with us and the feedback we had was fantastic.

The instant herb garden took us about 3 minutes to create (so there Persil!) and everyone seemed pleased with their mustard seed fridge magnets (see left; the 'speck' is a cress seed).  I enjoyed playing around with the three plant parables from Matthew 13 with these three angles to ponder...

• the sower/soils: "bloom where you are planted" - the sower just got on and sowed his seed in some rather unpromising ground, not spending months preparing it first.  Waiting until everything is 'just so' before we start might mean we miss the planting season.
• the wheat & weeds: the difficulty of distinquishing 'good' and 'bad' and the way that all of us is a mixture of 'good' and 'bad'.  Maybe God is more tolerant than we are about leaving things alone; maybe what we think is a weed is actually wheat and vice versa.
• the mustard seed: is this a parody of the might cedar of Lebanon?  We used the start of Ezekiel 17 as our opening scirptures today and the image of the cedar as being a mighty Kingdom.  What is it about God's Kingdom that is so subverisve, comical and unexpected?

Anyway, I had fun, people seemed to enjoy and engage with what was offered, so all in all a good morning.