Tomorrow will be my first preach for six weeks.

Tomorrow will be my first preach with my new congregation.

Tomorrow will be the first time in three and a half years since I preached without using Zoom (so my first non-streamed service in that time).

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Tomorrow I will be welcomed into Covenanted Membership

Tomorrow I will preside at Communion

Tomorrow I will do what I have been doing for half my adult life

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Tomorrow I will preach in the sanctuary of a church I serve for the first time since 2004!

Tomorrow I will preach in the building of a church I serve for the first time since 2016!

Tomorrow I will preach from a lectern on a platform, and thankfully not from a pulpit...

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Tomorrow I will preach... 

New home, new to me oven... new church, new relationships to build... so cake had to be made.

It was a challenge - the oven is extremely fierce  and the new non-stick cakes tins weren't.  But after I had cut off the charcoal, sandwiched it with srawberry jam, smothered it in cream and topped with strawberries, the cake looked okay.

As it turned out, it tasted better than okay, and today's visitors ate half of it, along with some Tunnock's wafers and some fruit cake.

Hospitality isn't about perfect baking, it's about opening homes and hearts  - certainly this is just as well when using a 'new' oven!  It went well, even if relatively small numbers came to visit... I need to ponder some of that... but it was good to open my new home to new people, and to let them eat cake!

In 2007 I walked Hadrian's Wall with my good friend Jean.  We had a great time, an undoubtedly enjoyed passing through Sycamore Gap, as well as visiting various other famous landmarks.  I was really sad today to read the news that someone has cut down the sycamore - why? And even more sad that it was someone so young.

Anyway, here's what I wrote on this blog all those years ago... I was a lot more erudite back then!

My teeny tiny laptop was an emergency purchase to see me through my house move - I never meant it to become my 'go to' working at home/church laptop.

Today a slightly bigger laptop with a lot more memory arrived, and I have spent almost half a day setting it up.  Which is good, because it's done, but never feels like the best use of my time. At the moment it will be my all-purpose laptop!

Once everything eventually settles down all will be well - I have a laptop for each hat I wear, different makes, models and operating systems but for now I will live with the feeling of time not being put to best use as I faff around doing what feels like a million updates on a laptop that was, allegedly, built yesterday...

Oh, the photo is the one I am using for wallpaper on my windows machines!

I am curious... is it a 'thing ' that churches founded in the 1880s wrote a fifty year jubilee 'souvenir' book with a mucky brown/grey-ish cover, and then a centenary booklet with a pale blue cover?

If 'history is a set of stories we tell about ourselves' then congregational histories tell a lot about how local churches see themselves - I could not describe either of these little booklets as exciting, but they do tell a story, an important story, about how this church sees itself.  They help me to create a timeline (I am minister number 16 since 1882, compared to minister number 10 since 1883 at my previous church) and to begin both to see patterns and to uncover precious gems amidst the mundane accounts of Baptist blokes and buildings!!!