The eagle-eyed will have spotted the "just giving button" underneath the celtic cross on my sidebar.  I have just signed up to take part in a 20 mile walk for Breast Cancer Care at Scone Palace in June.  I totally understand that some readers are bored to the back teeth with this whole topic, but I have signed up because this is a genuine challenge for me... Before cancer I could have walked 20 miles without blinking, doing Ben Nevis two years ago showed me how much that has changed, and put me off trying anything substantial until now.

I'm not looking for huge sums of money, it is just as much about proving to myself I can actually walk 20 miles.  Borrowing an idea from someone else,  I am inviting people to nominate a track for my MP3 training playlist and sponsor me 1p per music-second.  I will then purchase the downloads and add them to my MP3 thingy.  So what do you fancy?  Classical?  Pop?  Sacred?  Something else?  The choice is yours!

One of the challenges I set myself for Lent was to post pictures that in some way symbolised or suggested 'hope'.  This one was taken three years ago when I was starting to get out and about after my cancer surgery and was enjoying the heralds of spring that are crocuses/croci (either is correct, all depends which etymology you favour).  If I'm brutally honest, I was far from convinced that I'd be here three years later, but that thought no longer filled me with terror, I simply learned to enjoy the 'here and now'  in a far more immediate way.

I am told by one of my neighbours that the crocus bulbs were planted to commemorate the Women's Suffrage Movement (centenary was 2008, which sounds about right) and the colours of purple, white and green were highly symbolic within that movement.

Whatever the back story, and whatever else this planting signifies or symbolises, the way these seemingly fragile plants burst into a carpet of colour, lenten violet mixed with festal gold and white on a green ground of ordinariness, shouts 'hope' and 'life' more eloqently than I ever could.

Today's PAYG is one of the best reflections on prayer I've ever listened to.  Unhurried and uncomplicated, it simply asks the right questions and opens avenues of thought...

Listen to it here