Happy Sunday (early hours of Monday because it was midnight by the time I remembered!)

This week has been good, but full! I’ve been to a trustees meeting, spoken to St Giles Women’s Fellowship about knitting, had lunch with the Golden Girls, and done a funeral meeting, a retreat morning, admin, service writing, pastoral visits and sermonating.

Highlights include:

The coronation concert at St Giles.

Fish and chips on the beach with Mum, Nathan and Sophia.

An absolutely fantastic day out in Liverpool for Eurovision on Saturday which involved drumming, a go on the carousel and a boat trip!

And the launch of our new family service yesterday (no picture as the tech failed us somewhat!).

God moment: I walked into church this morning and there were lots of fires to put out. Not literal fires. But the screen wouldn’t come down, so we had no words, so we had to print 40 copies of the order of service. The microphones didn’t play ball, we had to organise hymn books, the laptop didn’t seem to be speaking to the office computer or the photocopier. We ran out of staples, we ran out of paper, all with less than fifteen minutes to go… It could have felt like a big stress mess. And in some ways, it was.

But I’ve been at this long enough to know that when you’re trying to do something new and exciting, when you’ve prayed and thought and talked about it for ages, when you’ve stepped out in faith… stuff goes wrong. It just does. It’s as if you’re being tempted to doubt that you should have bothered in the first place. So, I recognised this and refused to let it take over. I prayed, hands out, over the space, over the screen, over the photocopier. Do you know what? In the end, it was beautiful and God was absolutely present.

Would I liked it to have been slicker? Yes. Would I rather have been greeting the good number of new people who came at the door as they arrived? Yes. Have I got a list of notes to make sure we’re even better prepared next time? Absolutely. But it was still great because God was there. What more could I ask for?

Challenge: I lost my coat with my church keys in. After searching the house and church, contacting school, the coffee shop and the Feelgood Factory in Netherton, where were they? In Nathan’s car.

Ta-Dah Moment: not going to lie, it’s very boring but I am proud that I managed to clean both bathrooms this week.

My Mum Moment is more of a clergy parents moment. Tonight we went to the Open Table Service at ASSF. I was leading the communion bit with the bread and wine. You might remember me saying last week that Sophia likes to eat communion wafers. Well, in the absence of prawn cocktail crisps (my bad, clearly Texas BBQ pringles will not do!), she wanted wafers again. I handed the packet to Nathan to slip a couple to Soph as I was saying the prayer. He gave her one and she toddled off to the dolly she had been playing with and tried to feed it the wafer. It’s a good job I didn’t see it at the time because I think I might have cried!

Sophia’s new words: Mia (Sophia), ory (story), ellow (other). Don’t ask me why! But when she says ‘ellow’ she wants another version of the thing she’s currently got, like ‘ellow let it go’ means she wants the Broadway version rather than Disney version of Let It Go, and ‘ellow duce’ means she wants the juice from the other bottle, rather than the one she’s got.

That’s it from me. To finish, here’s a picture of Nathan’s glittery beard for Eurovision. Enjoy!