Having a good time?

This is the next in my series looking at ‘purpose’. I suspect that for most of us enjoying ourselves – having a good time – is at least part of what we seek in life. For some it will be the main thing. We have one life, so why not enjoy it? So is maximizing […]

New Year, New … ?

Another new year has started. For many people a new year is a positive time. A time for new beginnings and to reflect on the past year (or years!). A chance to make some changes so that life runs a little more as you want it to. And for this we have the new year’s […]

Solar system or neural network?

Some time ago, I gave the talk for one of our occasional ‘men’s breakfasts’ at church. I spoke on the topic of ‘Connections and Complexity’, looking at how complexity arises in systems of many interconnected elements, even where those individual elements are fairly simple. I looked at a few different complex systems that are of […]

How God has spoken to me about Christian togetherness

In my last blog post I looked at some of what the Bible has to say about Christian unity, or Christian togetherness as I may often now call it for reasons which I also explained in the last blog post. I now want to share something about why this is something I feel strongly about, […]

My Mum – a Tribute

The day after I published my previous blog post I received an early morning phone call to tell me that my Mum had died that morning in her sleep. Although she had been getting more frail over the last few years, her death was still totally unexpected. In a Covid-19 dominated time, we were able […]

Helmets and Statues

I went to visit my Mum (at a suitable social distance) a few days ago . It was my first trip of any distance for several months. Driving back I was struck by some things which I wouldn’t have noticed in the past when such trips were everyday occurrences. One thing that stood out was […]

Rainbow in the fountain

There’s a fountain near my work, and one day – a year or so ago – I saw this beautiful rainbow reflected in it as I walked past. I’ve never seen it since, but last week, as I was passing on a lovely sunny day, I decided to walk carefully around it and try my best […]

Significance

Many, if not most, people want their lives to count for something – they want to be significant. This can be in many spheres. At work we want responsibility, to have a higher profile role in whichever organisation we may work for. We want what we do in our work to last in some way […]

Mea Culpa

There’s a lot of blame around at the moment. At the UK Labour party conference yesterday, the shadow chancellor – while admitting that their party had made mistakes – insisted that Labour wasn’t to blame for the current financial challenges, saying that it wasn’t “public spending on public services here in Britain which caused the global […]

Changing reflections

2011 has arrived, and the start of a new year is often an appropriate time to reflect over the past one. 2010 was a year of change for us as a family. I changed job half way through the year. A few months later we moved house and have been working our way through all the tasks that this entails since then. We’ve […]