We spend a lot of our lives regretting what we have done in the past and wishing we had behaved better and done things differently. Everyone makes mistakes and it is very easy to dwell on them to the point where they interfere with you living a carefree, peaceful life.

God is always listening and when we ask for forgiveness, he does so immediately. He doesn’t hold onto the things he has forgiven, they are instantly forgotten. We are harder on ourselves than he is on us. We find it much harder to forgive ourselves and can’t accept that God is much easier on us. We sometimes can’t quite believe that these sins can be forgiven and as a result, we hold onto them and they affect our daily lives.

It was St Julian of Norwich (a 14th century mystic and hermit) who said: “All shall be well, and all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well.” Just repeating that makes me feel better about life. Her theology is so optimistic and encouraging. She also said that God is compassionate: ‘do not blame yourself too much…when we begin to hate sin and to amend ourselves…there still persists a fear which hinders us, by looking at ourselves and our sins … and the perception of this makes us so woebegone and depressed that we cannot see any consolation.’

Thinking about past sins can lead us into a feeling of negativity and hopelessness. Let’s go easier on ourselves and know that we are loved and forgiven by God. Put the past behind and honour God by accepting his love and compassion.

God bless you and may you feel him enfolding you in his love,

We live in the most incredible world. The diversity of flora and fauna, of landscapes and seascapes, coasts and mountains is incredible. Wherever you live, you are probably a short journey away from somewhere lovely to relax and take in the beauty around you. Plants seem to fight to grow everywhere (along with weeds unfortunately) and if you have a patch of ground you can grow a lovely display which is a joy to look at and nurture.

How can anyone think that our planet, our ability to live on it, and the beautiful environment that has been created has all occurred as some kind of happy accident? Ancient peoples knew instinctively that there must be something/someone behind the happenings in their world and invented gods so that they could understand the world around them.

God is the most wondrous architect – even looking at a single flower and seeing the intricacy of its design and pattern and how it manages to grow and flourish is an education in the vast genius of God. We should give glory and thanks to him for all that he has given us and stop trying to explain it away on some Big Bang idea.

I say all of this because I think that Spring is the most wonderful season of the year – so many blossoms and a feeling of new life all around. Also the promise of Summer following on closely. I am thankful for the beauty that surrounds me and it is a pleasure to go on a walk or a drive to look at all of the new leaves and flowers bursting through every day.

May God bless you and help you to cherish all that he has given us,

One bible passage I like to quote to myself when I am going through difficult times for any reason, be it worrying about my family, my health, our society etc – we could spend our whole life worrying about many things! – is:

1 Corinthians 10:13

….You can trust God not to let you be tried beyond your strength, and with any trial he will give you a way out of it and the strength to bear it.

It is good to know that no matter what we go through, it will never be more than we can bear as we can trust God to help us with these trials. I don’t think being a christian protects us from anything bad happening and sometimes that is hard to understand. Our lives are mixed up with others and we all have free will. What others do can hurt us and also what we do ourselves can affect our lives, our health, our wellbeing.

I always take comfort in the fact I am not going through anything alone. I like the poem about the footprints in the sand as the best expression of God’s love for us:

God bless you and help you to seek his comforting presence in all you go through,

We tend to generalise about our children. Boys act in a certain way and girls in another. This may be a trend but it isn’t a definite. My sons are very different from each other; one is an extrovert and the other the opposite.

I was talking to another parent the other day about how they behave once they have left home. Daughters tend to be in touch more and sons less. One of my sons is still with me, but when he lived abroad in America for a year, he was in touch daily. My other son rarely instigates contact. He will reply to me (not necessarily on the same day) when I message him, but I have to phrase it as a question.

I think we have to let them set up this way of keeping in touch to a certain extent as we need to let them go and get on with their lives. In a way, if they don’t feel the need to contact you constantly, that could just be a good sign that they are confident people and you have given them that confidence to lead their lives independently. In the same way, however, if they do contact you more, that is good too as long as it is just to share their day and not to burden you too much as they do need to work out their issues and we can’t lead their lives for them.

In Mothers’ Prayers, we pray together for our children and grandchildren and this is one of my favourite Bible passages:

Jer 31:16,17

Stop your crying and wipe away your tears. All that you have done for your children will not go unrewarded. They will return from the enemy’s land. There is hope for your future. Your children will come back home. I, the Lord, have spoken.

Naturally, we will always worry about our children and hope all is well with them. We should be there for them when they need us, but they need to be responsible for their own lives once they leave and we must let them go. We can however be comforted by placing them in God’s hands and praying for them constantly to make the right choices in life, stay close to God and be safe.

Our children will always ‘come back to us’ – it might be for a short while, but how joyful that we have done our job well, given them all of the love and help we could and they are responsible, confident people who know they can turn to us for advice and help if they need it.

God bless you and help you to have trust in him that he will look after your children,

It isn’t easy living on your own although I can’t say I have had much experience of this so far. My two sons have been moving in and out of my home since leaving for university and at the moment my eldest son is living with me until he moves into a place of his own. Covid has rather put that on hold as it was meant to be last year. I have to say that I am glad I didn’t have to spend this last year in various lockdowns on my own and feel for those who have had to do this.

I know it is going to happen soon and pray that I will cope. The house always feels so empty when there’s just me and I get a very negative, oppressive feeling that stops me making the most of it. I do feel bad about this as really we are never alone. God is always at our side and I want to try to sense his presence more when I go through the lonely times. I feel guilty when I have thoughts about how depressing life will be when my sons have finally moved on and it is as if I am betraying the trust I should have in God to help me through this stage in my life.

I want to empathise with everyone out there who lives alone and pray for them. Although you might feel that no-one is thinking about you or caring for you, that isn’t true and so you should fight those negative feelings. Ask God to help you with them and I am sure that all will be well and you will find a way to cope that is more than just living: it will be a fulfilling, enjoyable life.

God bless you and keep you positive,

Joshua 1:9

Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be you dismayed: for the LORD your God is with you wherever you go.

It’s so much easier to feel a connection with God when we are going through something that is difficult. We involve him, we ask for his help and we are constantly focused on prayer and intercession if it is for someone else. I feel much closer when I suffer than when life goes on as normal and I rush through another busy day, fitting in prayer when I can.

I believe that God wants to share the good times too, just as a friend would. He wants us to involve him in our happy times and celebrations, our holidays and special events in our lives. He isn’t just waiting in a corner for us to turn to him when things aren’t going so well. If we do that to him then we aren’t treating him as a companion he longs to be. It isn’t easy, but do try to let God into your joyous times and thank him for the benefits he gives you.

Another thing we sometimes do is make a request and later, when this request is answered in some way, we forget to thank him. We might almost think that it happened without his help as usually when God intervenes at our request, he does it in a non-intrusive way.

God is our companion in life, our Good Shepherd, our counsellor, our guide and our protector so let’s make sure we thank him for that by constantly including him in our lives.

God bless,

Sorry to go on about things medical, but it occurred to me today that what we say is so important and we must be careful to be encouraging rather than judgemental or negative. I have had some experience of this lately in some of the treatments I have had to undergo.

I was happy to accept that what the doctors had asked for me to have was necessary and just getting on with it. I don’t like medicines at all as they often have both positive and negative affects on the body, but sometimes it is essential that we take them to get better. I was about to have a course of intravenous antibiotics when a nurse said to me that someone had had a negative reaction to this particular drug the day before. She had no real reason to tell me that as I had just asked how long the drip would take and all I wanted was the timing. This upset me because then I started to think about whether I would also have a negative reaction. I said to the nurse that I had received the same drug the day before but it all went well and instead of reassuring me, she said that although sometimes they go well you can still get a reaction from them! The encouragement and reassurance I wanted wasn’t given and I ended up being nervous about the whole process.

We all need encouragement sometimes. We can seem brave and confident but under the surface, many of us may feel completely differently to how we appear. We worry and fret about some things and it is always best to treat someone as if they do need to be reassured even if they seem okay, whatever the situation. Be encouraging as a matter of course even if you feel a bit discouraged about a situation yourself. By being positive, you can turn an unpleasant situation into a more than bearable one.

There are many passages in the Bible about us encouraging each other, and I have copied one below.

God bless, and always look to God when you feel anxious or alone,

Proverbs 12:21

Anxiety in a man’s heart weighs him down, but a good word makes him glad.

I have just been to the Accident and Emergency department of our local hospital on recommendation from a doctor. I was worried because it is the last place you want to visit when Covid is around and so I reluctantly did as I was told. I masked up, registered at reception and sat down in a Covid ‘safe’ seating area to wait my turn.

At first, I found myself more concerned about social distancing than what anyone else was going through, or indeed, how much pain I was in. When someone sat near me, I looked at his plastic face mask and worried that he was too close. People passed by to get drinks from the machine – no 2m distancing here!

I kept myself to myself and started to overhear the reason for people’s visits there. You couldn’t help it – when you spoke, everyone could hear you because most of us sat silently. Someone had swallowed deadly hemlock and his wife was torn between being very cross with him and scared she might lose him at the same time; a student had fallen downstairs at college and was waiting for her leg to be x-rayed; someone else had issues that I won’t go into here, but it did make me laugh when I heard her say her reason for being there – thank goodness for masks!

After a while and feeling a little bit sorry for myself, I decided to invite God to join me in this situation. I felt that I was going through it on my own up to then and I also felt guilty that all I wanted was to go home and had no interest in anyone or anything else. I started to look at everyone and pray for them, asking the Holy Spirit to help them with whatever was wrong with them, to comfort them and their families and I began to feel that I was more in a community with them. They might not have known that I was praying for them, but it certainly made me feel closer to them. The result also was that I felt more comfortable and less ‘why me?’ For those hours, they were my community and I cared about their wellbeing.

Do try this the next time you feel frightened and are in an environment that you feel unhappy to be in and you will start to feel that you can cope better by being part of the emotional wellbeing of those in your temporary community.

God bless and keep you well!

I’m writing this today as I sit with my leg propped up and an ice brick on it, attempting to reduce the swelling of some really nasty insect bites. They can cause unbelievable pain and I find it hard to do anything at the moment which is very frustrating.

This and reading about St Catherine of Siena made me think about the idea of suffering. She is one amongst many saints who didn’t have an easy life. Born in a family of 25 children (she was 24th), when she decided she didn’t want to get married, her family treated her like a servant. Despite this, she went about helping the poor and sick and became a Doctor of the Church. Her parents didn’t seem to be very kind and so I wonder how it was that she developed the life she had; could it be the suffering at an early age that directed her thoughts and emotions towards God instead of worldly things?

This isn’t the case with every saint, but many did have very difficult, poor childhoods and yet somehow managed to find that connection with God that was so strong their whole lives were spent in living out that love for God.

When we live in wealthy countries and have had comfortable, loving upbringings, perhaps it is more difficult to put worldly desires and pleasures away and focus on living a good christian life. Some saints who did have luxurious lives managed to break free of this and adopt a more austere way of living, but it can’t have been easy.

Who knows why we suffer especially when we ask God to take pain and illness away, but perhaps we are being led to a deeper faith and trust in God for comfort and support and it can help us to empathise with others who suffer.

God bless you and may he alleviate any suffering you are going through and may youeel his divine love and presence in your life,

2 Corinthians 1:3

Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves receive from God.

I remembered something once said during a French class by one of the older students (it was an evening class). We were asked ‘Can you tell us about something that has made you really happy in your life’. William – I remember his name due to the extraordinary thing he said – answered: ‘I moved the cooker 6 inches’. The teacher checked that he had used the right vocabulary and tried not to laugh, unlike the rest of us who found it very funny as it sounded a little crazy. He meant it.

Over the years I have thought about this in terms of the measurement of happiness. For some it takes very little to make them happy, but for others it is an insatiable need. They find momentary happiness when they buy new clothes, jewellery, move to a bigger house, upgrade their cars etc. But it can never be enough, the happiness of buying the next thing lasts for a small amount of time before they crave more. Having too much money and time can be very destructive.

This insatiable need to feel happy through consumerism leads to behaviour that can affect the wellbeing of not only their families and friends but also our environment. Little regard has been paid to the effect this is having on our planet.

We have been given so much by God to be delighted by. Spring blossoms, birdsong, trees, the beautiful animals that populate our world, the mountains, the coasts, you could go on forever about how lovely our world is and how we can feel happy by just stopping to truly appreciate it. Nature is so important to us and does have healing properties.

I don’t know how we can curb this consumerist religion; how we can stop people destroying our planet through greed. There are no easy answers. It is so good to see that we are becoming more and more aware of the need to protect what we have.

William’s life may have been very narrow and sheltered perhaps, but I envy him now that something so mundane could make him so happy. We all need to reduce our idea of what can make us happy and appreciate everyday things, taking joy in the world around us.

God bless,