Pause for Thought – 27 January 2021

Genesis 45:4-8 Romans 8:26-28 I’m, sure we’ve all encountered the story of Joseph and his brothers. It’s a family story, so it’s about misunderstanding, envy, and violence. Young Joseph antagonized his older brothers, and was daddy’s favourite. And those dreams! To cut a long story short, the brother’s faked Joseph’s death, and sold him into…

Pause for Thought for 27 November 2020 is now available:

What’s your name?  Why were you given that name?  What does it mean? Maybe you have several names.  Why were you given those?  What do they mean? Maybe you have children.  What did you call them?  Why?  What do their names mean? There’s a long tradition of giving people names which mean something.  We see…

John 2:1-11 1 Kings 17:8-16 I’ve trained my dog to bring me a glass of red wine. It’s a Bordeaux collie. Of course, not everyone knows very much about wine. As Basil Fawlty said, “the kind of people who come in here don’t know the difference between a Bordeaux and a claret”. Martin Luther, one…

Any decent decorator will tell you that 90% of the work is the preparation, and actually putting the coat of paint on is but the culmination of all the work. It’s the preparation that matters. Looking at it from a very different angle, the idea for the Basingstoke Canal began as an economical means of…

Mark 13:32-37 Isaiah 9:2,6-7 The bells of waiting Advent ring, the tortoise stove is lit again, begins John Betjeman’s famous poem. If you go into our Church Hall, you can still see the stone slab where the tortoise stove once stood. If you think our church is too modern, at least we kept the slab….