Sunday's coming!

  Luke 13: 10-17 To be in pain is a terrible thing.  To be unable to move freely is a real impediment to a full and happy life.  People who are wheelchair users describe how hard it is to be taken seriously when everyone else towers above you. So imagine how hard life was for the woman Jesus meets in the synagogue who is bent double and has been for 18 years, experiencing all of those things.   What do you think you would find most difficult if you were bent right over?   In fact we don’t have to just imagine it, because in 2019 there was a story on the news of Li Huan – a Chinese man, nicknamed “the folded man” because he had been bent right over for more than 20 years by an extreme version of ankylosing spondylitis. His chin was on his chest and his face against his thigh bone.   His mother cared for him, helped him to wash, to eat, to get around and about; but at the age of 71 she was beginning to worry about what would happen to him when ...

  Luke 12: 49-56,   Jeremiah 23: 23-29.   Susan and I are just back from a week camping. Life is more simple : go to bed when it gets dark and hope the milk would be ok for breakfast without a fridge to put it in. The biggest worry was the weather, and there was no electricity on site to charge the phones & use them to find a forecast - so the best plan was to wake up & look.  What sort of day does it look like today?   But I realised that the other worries of life were not very far away. If you haven’t heard the news for a few days you can start to wonder how things are going in the search for peace in Ukraine.. or ceasefire in Gaza, or whether some power-mad leader will have done something provocative and stupid and we’ll find the world is in chaos. And how’s the dog doing in kennels? And did the milkman remember to stop delivering, or is the doorstop full of bottles? And is my body really coping with the activity of camping as well as it did...