This week the focus is on Peace and Reconciliation:

Adults

At the end of 2011, an estimated 42.5 million people were living in a place to which they had been forcibly displaced due to conflict or persecution.

Give 10p for every year you have lived in your current home.

"My father was a wandering Aramean"... a verse out of context I cite more often than enough.  I have moved house more times in my life than most people, some of them before I can remember.

I was born in London and my parents were forced to move house because their landlord had a 'no children, no pets' rule.  They moved locally, and almost a year later twins arrived.  Sadly one of them died, and is buried in north London.  We moved then to Buckinghamshire, where we lived in one of a pair of farmers cottages, which my parents rented, and my other two siblings arrived.  The farmer decided to sell the houses and our neighbours gazumped us, buying both (and later converting them into one large house) so we moved to Northamptonshire, to a council flat in the upper part of what had been a Victorian rectory.  By age five, then, I had lived in at least four homes.  A huge old rectory, partially demolished so that an internal wall became an external wall was bound to have problems with damp, and we were forced to move again, albeit just a few miles, to the place that would be home for the remainder of my childhood.  A well built four-bedroomed council house in a large plot - so large that when the council eventually took some of it away to build bungalows my parents were paid £200 compensation - was home for nine years until I left for university and never really returned.

As an adult I have lived in various places, for various lengths of time, and was fortunate enough to own property for some of that time.  Now I am blessed to live in a beautiful third floor flat, safe, comfortable and well equipped.  I can sleep easy at night knowing that no-one will come and turf me out for having a pet cat, that no-one will sell it over my head, that any structural issues will be addressed should they arise.  I wil never again be in a position to own property, but I think that puts me more in the 'new normal' given how stupid house prices are, but it is not the name on the deeds that make a house a home, it is the love and life therein.  As I wont to say from time to time, in blatant plagiarism,  'wherever I park my car, that's my home'

I have now lived here for three years (all bar a few days) so I get off cheaply today!

My Pledge

Today 30p

Total £8.30 plus one prayer of thanksgiving.