Mind Matters One of our son’s passions in life is climbing and, so, I found myself accompanying him recently to a big competition in Leeds. It pitted the best climbers from various regions of the UK and Ireland over two days, and the standards were high. It’s not an easy thing as a parent to […]

Ordinary People The Irish singer-songwriter, Christy Moore, wrote a beautiful song in 1985 called ‘Ordinary Man.’ It’s set against the backdrop of economic struggle and high unemployment, which was the reality for so many in Ireland in the early 1980’s. It spoke of being let go from a factory after many years of faithful service, […]

The Importance of Remembering As we get a bit older we tend to look back on certain periods of our lives for different reasons. I look back on my twenties as a decade of travel and with great fondness. I lived abroad for a couple of years and that allowed me to travel to neighbouring […]

Learning to Go Slow I recently had some days of leave over half term and, as we drifted around not doing very much, I caught a wonderful series of documentaries I had recorded over the summer. It was called ‘Europe by Train’ and it was made by a journalist and environmentalist called Manchan Magan. I […]

Learning from the Masters It’s always a joy to watch people who are really good at what they do. I spent a few hours recently in the Waterfront Hall in Belfast watching some of the best snooker players in the world battling it out to become the Northern Ireland Open Champion. It’s amazing to get […]

Shining a Light on World Mental Health Day Last Thursday was World Mental Health Day. It’s a day that could have slipped our attention. There were some items on the radio I heard as I was driving in the car. Many people are much more open these days in discussing our mental health, but there’s […]

Something Went Wrong! This week’s blog is coming your way somewhat later than expected. I had hoped to write it when I normally do but, when I switched on my computer to do so, the following message came up. Apart from telling me something went wrong, it gave an error code and, the bottom line […]

Praying for Overwhelming Events Sometimes the scale of the world’s needs can seem rather overwhelming. We hear of catastrophic storms, wars, floods, droughts and famines. We read terrible human stories of accidents and criminal activity. We hear of racially motivated attacks, and these stories make us wonder how to respond as a Christian, or if […]

Making Big Announcements One of the aspects of Church life that can be quite challenging is how to make big or important announcements. Very often, at the start of a service, we rattle through the events of the week, or we let people know about forthcoming events. The same announcements may also appear on a […]

Extending the Hand of Friendship A great hero of mine died earlier this year back in March. His name was Charlie Bird, and he spent his working life as a journalist with RTE, the Irish broadcasting network. He became their chief news correspondent and his was the face and voice that accompanied major global and […]