I have the gift of simplification, do you have it too? It’s a double edged sword, and often a keyboard with a worn down delete key. I love simplifying things, even when I don’t do it well. I’ve recently been editing and a couple of friends’ essays and cover letters, and my favourite part is pressing ‘delete’ on a huge chunk of information and then seeing that word count drop.

Well I had a day at home and although I had work to do I had agreed that it would be my turn to make Dinner. The day before we had a Turkey thigh, which I had slow cooked for 8 hours, so we had a big bowl of stock to use and it made perfect sense to me to make a soup. I will leave it to you to guess what was added to the soup but I can assure you the result was well worth the effort

There is a story about a man who had parked his motorhome at a campsite near Newquay. One night, someone was trying to steal fuel from his motorhome. He put the hose in and sucked hard. At this point, the motorhome owner heard a noise and went outside to see a man throwing up. Turns out, the thief had put the hose in the waste tank instead of the fuel tank. Gross!

Have you ever seen the film the Lord of the Rings? We are watching it for the first time with the kids. I had forgotten how much I love the films and it is a joy to be able to introduce them to somebody else. My brother and sister and I used to spend hours fighting imaginary orcs with our bows and arrows and now Jamie and I can watch the boys, Noah and Eli, do the same.

One thing that keeps cropping up, is the encouragement to submit, whether to authorities, masters, or husbands – it is a fairly inclusive instruction for us to live in harmony with each other, in order to show those outside the church, how good God is. It culminates with the plea to ‘to be of one mind’.

Milk in glass bottles, warm, with a thick layer of cream at the top that you were keen to drink, even though it had been in a warm classroom for half a day? School dinners where there were always seconds and your friends were happy to give you the tapioca and prunes that they weren’t keen on?

“What are you grateful for today?” I often ask my husband and he often asks me this question at the end of the day. When I ask him this question I think about what happened on that day that blessed me, something that made me smile or made me glad. Basically a good thing that happened over the day that just ended. We started this little game

Perhaps it feels strange to hear this coming out of the Bible. Ecclesiastes is a weird book. To put it bluntly, it is very ‘earth centred’. If you’ve ever heard someone say that Christianity is a ‘pie in the sky’ religion that only cares about stuff that happens after you die, then Ecclesiastes busts the myth.

The phrase often used when businesses close is “Gone to the wall”. We have heard this many times recently but where does this rather odd phrase come from? Well before a business goes to the wall, and it can be seen beforehand that this is going to happen we say that “The writing is on the wall” for that business.

Doing right is a personal matter. doing what is right lies squarely on the shoulder of us, as individuals. No matter what others do, you know what you have to do. If you know the difference between right and wrong, then you know what you need to do to please God. And God makes this personal; the Bible says, And as for you, brothers, (or sisters), never tire of doing what is right. He puts it firmly in our lap.