Happy Friday evening everyone!

This week has been pretty good and so I am giving it 9/10. Here’s this week in a nutshell.

On Friday we became a 2 car family, and we bought a car for Nathan to drive when he passes his test.

That evening, we had a beautiful meal with the Ministry Team and on Saturday, we went to Liverpool with our Goddaughter and her Dad.

Sunday was a 3 service, 3 sermon day, with a traditional Sunday afternoon nap in between!

I spent Monday morning in the office, and then I paid a visit to a poorly man and his wife. I came home and baked orange chocolate brownies for Alpha the next day.

Because it was raining that evening, I took Nathan to the vicarage and I got to the church council meeting early so that I could pray beforehand. As I was praying, the people using the next door room left and locked me in the building, so the alarm went off! The prayers were somewhat disturbed, but I opened the fire exit, ran around to the front door and used my key to deactivate the alarm. That was definitely the loudest moment of my week!

Tuesday was fairly standard, with our first session of Alpha in the evening. I’m hopeful that this will be good for the people who are coming along and I am super impressed with the quality of the new Alpha videos!

On Wednesday, we had some what of a diary clash in church. 2 services were due to take place in church that morning, one at 10, one at 10.30. In the end, the communion service happened in the church hall which meant that the school could have their harvest service in the main building. Crisis averted! At the harvest service, I preached about learning to share sweets with my cousins as a little girl and I gave all the kids a sweet at the end- it was lots of fun!

That evening, we hosted Deanery Synod at Holy Trinity and I really enjoyed doing some of the behind the scenes stuff, in terms of set up, tea pouring and dish washing (and more baking!), rather than doing lots of speaking at the front.

Yesterday there was a gathering of local clergy in a new coffee shop, which was great. I spent the afternoon writing a sermon in the form of a letter for a little girl who is being baptised on Sunday.

Today, I said Morning Prayer and came home to write my sermon for harvest Evensong on Sunday afternoon.

Something that came up at Alpha was how much negative media there is around at the moment. I don’t know about you, but I dread watching the news! But I know that in my day to day life, lots of people are working to make a difference in the world in small but positive ways. So, I’ve decided to add a new paragraph into my Weekly Check-in called ‘Weekly Star‘. It will just be a brief, pleasant story about someone doing some good.

Weekly Star this week is our church warden, Richard. When I was in a panic on Sunday because I noticed that two services needed to happen at almost the same time, he calmly listened and helped me think through the various options as to how to solve the problem. He came in on Wednesday and made sure that both services went smoothly, including setting up, packing away and sorting out the sound system when I didn’t know how. What a star!

Anyway, that’s about it for this week.

Love & prayers,

Poppy