Hello and happy Friday! It’s time for another weekly check-in, and this time I’m rating the week 8/10.

Highlights include:

Going pram shopping this afternoon!

Our Sunday service was fab at the weekend. There were several new people including a toddler and two young people! I was walking on cloud 9!

The beautiful weather at the beginning of the week.

And finally… getting installed as Vicar on Wednesday night! When we did the licensing over zoom nearly a year ago, I did officially become vicar, but there was still a bit of liturgy to be done when circumstances allowed, because there’s one bit that needed to be done in the church itself. Churches often have a Vicar’s stall where the incumbent will sit during services. An installation is where a person gets put in their stall, and that’s what happened on Wednesday!

It was so nice because Archdeacon Mike came to lead the service, Nathan read and Mark, my former vicar boss, preached! Mum, Dad and Isabelle came over from Retford, Granny and Grandpa were there too, Polly and Martin came and supported me as well as old friends from Formby and new ones from Liverpool! It was so special.

A challenge for me this week was having two separate nightmares about the same unresolved situation. But, as unpleasant as that was, the God moment was that both times within a few hours, people arrived to make me feel better and calmer about it all.

The drain this week was the bad weather over the last couple of days. It’s felt more like October than May!

Ta-Dah moment was getting organised with all the preparation for the Living in Love and Faith course that we are starting at church on Sunday. This is a course which all churches are being asked to engage with, and it will help us explore more deeply what we think about topics like identity, sexuality and faith. We don’t have to do the course until the autumn, but I wanted to lead it before I go on maternity leave, so we are starting this week. I’m a bit nervous about it but I know I’ve got a good group attending.

Foodbank: I am doing less and less at Foodbank each week in preparation for starting my leave. So I had very little to do with the effort this week, but the team fed 17 people.

Mum moment: picking a pram and watching Nathan learning how to put on a wrap sling! I’m thirty weeks now, so 3/4 of the way through!

More next time.