Rest is what I need at the moment, or so I’m told. But what is rest? For so many of us, rest can be elusive or even a little frightening. And often the things we think are restful leave us more drained, more weary. Somewhat counter-intuitively, times of grief and illness can be the seasons…
Category: Reflections
Tied Up with a Bow
Increasingly, I like my blog posts and articles to be as perfectly, poetically structured as I can make them, rounded off with a nice, profound encouragement. I’m not the only one who likes a happy ending. As Ruth Soukup points out in this article for Ann Voskamp’s website, we often want our stories of struggle to…
On Daydreaming
Forget colouring books and yoga. What happened to the practice of good old-fashioned daydreaming? We all remember times at school when the teacher’s voice became no more than background noise to our own imaginings and wonderings, when we doodled idly or gazed out of windows and thought of anything and nothing. Lately, I’ve been re-finding…
Easter
If you’ve read much of my blog, you’ll know that I’m a Christian. But I hope that my posts – even the ones explicitly about my faith – are accessible to everyone, whatever backgrounds and beliefs they have. There are so many things that are universal to us as humans, which cross cultural and religious…
On Post
Don’t you love getting post? Not the kind that pings onto a screen, the real kind, that surprises you as it drops through the letterbox, the kind that you can hold in your hand. I recently had surgery, and suddenly was blessed with a flurry of post: cards, flowers, clothes, books and of course, plenty…
Praise for (Small Things)
Praise for the crescent moon that hung low in the blanket-dark sky. Praise for the first warmth of Spring and a chair on a beach, Praise for the families that clambered across sand and rocks, jumpers and blankets piled up, dogs and children never still, like the breeze. Praise for the abandoned sandcastle, shell on…
My Prayer for this Year
At the beginning of the year, I wrote about my hopes and prayers for it, about what I wanted to learn and how I wanted to live in 2016. You can read the full post here. I wrote: … I’ve been thinking about how there’s always something new going on, inside us and around us. I’ve…
Coffee
The other day I found a great blog on the website of Christian charity, Compassion UK. The blog shows people and communities in some of the countries they work in and some of the issues they face in a very positive, uplifting way. I loved the video (here) of the Ethiopian coffee ritual, and it…
The Grace
I’m working on a book at the moment about how the Bible is relevant and uplifting in my day-to-day modern life. It’s a bit like a journal showing how different Bible verses have impacted me. I shared an extract a while ago, here. Last week I was at home a lot and added several chapters…
All you need is Love…
Happy Valentine’s Day! I don’t hold much value in the consumerist version of Valentine’s Day, but I do love an opportunity to celebrate, whatever the reason. At its best, Valentine’s Day can be a time to celebrate love in all its guises, the gift of family and friends and the uniqueness of each person. At its worst,…
For the Love of Words
For me, there’s something about putting life into words. I love the process of translating the nuances of emotion and experience into language, allowing it all to cover a page or a screen. Writing helps me to live my life with a sense of engagement. We’re all finding ways to tell our stories and make sense of them,…
A Prayer for 2016
One of the things I love about the Psalms in the Bible is the way they help me find the words for my own prayers. The rest of the Bible does, too, but especially the Psalms. They are deep, very human expressions of all kinds of emotions, questions, desires, troubles and joys. In them, the…
Life Lived 