(A post from a Christian perspective.) There is a lot in the Bible about joy. “The joy of the Lord is your strength”, “happy is the people whose God is the Lord”, and so on. Many churches today emphasise these “happy messages” and sometimes equate spirituality and faith with being happy and positive. But this…
A friend offered me a gift for my birthday. I accepted. I was offered some work. I accepted. I was offered a new phone contract. I didn’t accept. It seems to me, that whenever we talk about “accepting” there is an element of choice. We accept if we want it; we don’t accept if we…
(A personal commentary about the challenges of being a bereaved parent, mother, father) Another day, another loch. We are almost at the end of our two week summer break in Scotland. It has been a lazy “be kind to yourself” time, with the simplest of meals and the simplest of pleasures – amazing scenery, long…
(A post for those interested in Christian perspectives) It’s been a long cold winter in the UK. The frozen snow in our back garden just about melted in time for the Spring equinox, although the pond was still covered with a thin layer of ice the other morning and there are frozen heaps of snow…
I always think it takes quite a bit of courage to attend a retreat. You don’t know what to expect and it is natural to be nervous. So I thought it might be helpful to describe a retreat in a bit more detail. The first thing to say is that I don’t believe anybody has…
I love watching birds. We can just see the hills of the Staffordshire Moorlands from our upstairs windows, and there’s a big country park across the road, plus we are literally on the edge of the town and the countryside then leads into the Peak District National Park. So there should be lots of birds…
Grief, like the love that underlies it, is so often the inspiration for poems. Poetry is art in words. Just a few words can say so very much. Poetry may come from our own soul, or we might find someone else’s poem expresses our thoughts and feelings better than we can. I wrote a lot…
