I came across this poem... I think it's worth a ponder...

Each lifetime is the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.
For some there are more pieces.
For others the puzzle is more difficult to assemble.

Some seem to be born with a nearly completed puzzle.
And so it goes.
Souls go this way and that.
Trying to assemble the myriad parts.

But know this. No one has within themselves
All the pieces to their puzzle.
Everyone carries with them at least one and probably
many pieces to someone else's puzzle.
Sometimes they know it.
Sometimes they don't.

And when you present your piece
to another, whether you know it or not,
whether they know it or not,
you are a messenger from the Most High

by Rabbi  Lawrence Kuschner

.CW... cancer/death as well as life/joy

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Today I assembled an afternoon tea as a treat for myself... because it is twelve years today since my cancer diagnosis, and that seems worth marking.

Curiously, one of the sandwiches I bought was egg and cress... the same flavour as I bought for lunch on 23rd August 2010, except that one was from Tescos and this one from Sainsbury's!!

I enjoyed my treat, but I also found myself recalling the feelings and words of that, now long ago, day.

This evening, scrolling through a social media feed, I saw the sad news that someone I 'met' online all those years ago died today of secondary breast cancer.  That's the ugly, unpallatable, inconvenient, truth... around a third of the women I've come to know along the way have died of their cancer.

Which means it is all the more important to celebrate life - afternoon tea for one is just a small part of doing just that.

If you are kind enough to read this stuff, pleaase look after yourself.  Take any screening offered; check  your cheackable bits; and see your doctor about anything that doesn't seem right.  It could save your life.

I was looking through books for prayers and poems for this coming Sunday, when I came across this, which doesn't fit the service, but is worth a share...

Hold onto your faith

Kindle it with your questions

Test it with your doubts

And you will have two faiths

A resting faith

A wrestling faith

Remember that they can live together

They are not mutually exclusive

From Wrestling and Resting CTBI 1999, page 227

To my shame, it is now three months since I last posted on this blog.  Life has been hugely busy.  I have been keeping up to date with the church social media presence, and, with others, working hard to ensure that hybrid church goes as well as it can.  There have been times when I meant to post here, only to realise that another week had drifted past.  It has even taken me about three weeks to find a moment (or make a moment?) for this post.

My current subscription runs to the end of 2022, so I'll make a final decision then, but it does feel that this blog has almost certainly run its course, and that it is, or very soon will be, time to shut up shop.

I doubt very much anyone still drops by here, but it you do, thank you for your loyalty and interest.  It's been fun, and I've 'met' some wonderful people along the way, but the not-quite-post pandemic world is very different from the  one in which this blog began, and different media are now needed.  Roughly as the oft quoted saying goes, for all that has been 'thanks' for what is still to be 'yes.'

This morning is Palm Sunday on Zoom for the third time... DV next year we will be hybrid, and I won't be frantically pinning plastic palm leaves to purple fabric, though if it is either, that will be fine, I am sure.

After a bit of a late panic, when the hard drive on my laptop died, and it spent 24 hours at the laptop hospital, followed by about three hours of installing essential software, it's quite pleasing to be set up and, broadband or Zoom glitches permitting, good to. go.

Looking forward to a multi-voiced amble through Luke's version of events... which has no palms and no anointing, but does have all the essential elements to lead us to Gethsemane.