Month: April 2021

There will be a short pause in the blog while I replace the laptop charger.

The weather is quiet this morning. The sheep aren’t.

Another beautiful morning, with some frost, though maybe not quite so much as some previous days. The larches now have some green on them – in a bright shade.

“Number one, the larch … the larch.”

Another sandwiches walk today, this time including the Doctor’s Gate. It’s quite a while since I went that way, and it was easy before. The conditions were good today. But this time it seemed quite hard. I think that’s what happens when your joints start to get old!

Beautiful walk, though – a lovely place to be, and at one point a curlew flew a half-circle round us, calling as it went – then headed off in the general direction of another of its species.

I’ve heard it suggested that the writer of Luke and Acts was antisemitic. After all, it’s written in Sunday’s Lectionary, “But you rejected the Holy and Righteous One and asked to have a murderer given to you, and you killed the Author of life, whom God raised from the dead. To this we are witnesses.” (Acts 3:14-15). From this evidence, anyway, it doesn’t seem to me that Peter’s speech as reported by this writer was antisemitic. Read around those verses, and it seems that Peter was doing what all those Old Testament prophets used to do, and criticising people’s actions and calling them to repentance.

Another beautiful morning today, with the frost sparkling in the rising sun…. that familiar April combination of cold air and heat from the sky.

A proper walk today, with sandwiches, in a Derbyshire dale, with moss and fallen trees, and a lot of rock-hopping. Hard on the moving parts, but worth it.

It seems the pigeons are going around in twos. Maybe it’s a thing they do at this time of the year.

The New Testament is liberally sprinkled with references to the Old Testament (‘the scriptures’ for the Jewish people of the time). But the scriptural connections did not necessarily spring fully-formed into the minds of Jesus’ disciples. They needed a layer of understanding, and they needed a new perspective too, given by their experience of the risen Jesus. So it is that in Sunday’s Lectionary, we read, “Then he [Jesus] opened their minds to understand the scriptures…” No scriptures (Old Testament or New Testament) are self-explanatory. They need to be understood, by the community of believers, in the pain of honest and challenging discussion, in the light of the risen Jesus and under the guidance of the Spirit of God – so, a lot of praying, talking and listening, and reflecting on experience. And then we’ll at least be on the road to understanding.

Please pray for the people of Myanmar,
caught in the wheels of
global power games…
God, give justice and peace.

i was sad to hear that the Duke of Edinburgh had died. He will be much missed by those who knew him, not least the Queen, for whom he was a loyal companion for the whole of her adult life. As someone else pointed out, at some time between the ages of 50 and 70, most of us get the chance to put our feet up and take a rest from work. The royals get no such luck. It’s a serious commitment they make!

A wintry shower has been hanging around for a few hours now. The wind doesn’t seem to want to blow it anywhere. It has provided what the forecasters call a ‘wintry mix’ – which always makes me think of Woolworths pic-n-mix for some reason, and the big floor spaces they used to have with little square island counters in them.