Christ Church Huntingdon Blog

Audio can be heard  here .    My thought for the day today is entitled “New year’s revolutions ”. Yes you heard me right, not New Year’s resolutions, but “new year’s revolutions ”. You will be familiar with new year’s resolutions. They are all well and good… ·         Lose some weight ·         stop smoking ·         go to the gym The trouble with new year’s resolutions is that they are so hard to keep. Maybe that’s why I found a list of these slightly easier to accomplish new years resolutions on the internet… ·         Go to a Weight watchers group and eat a bag of crisps during the break ·         Give yourself a high five no matter what number you read when you step on the scales. Or these slightly more wacky New year’s resolutions… ·         S...

  (Photo John Lewis & Partners here ) Thankyou Peter. My thought for the day today is entitled “Christmas adverts”. I don’t know about you, but one of the fun things to look out for in your Christmas TV viewing is the adverts. There have been some great ones over the years. - Mrs Claus- M&S 2016. - Monty the Penguin, John Lewis 2018 - Kevin the Carrot from Aldi (most years!) My particular favourite is Excitable Edgar from John Lewis 2019 ( click here for the video) . You might remember that Edgar was a little dragon, and unfortunately he kept ruining Christmas. You see the trouble with Dragons is that they breath fire, and fire and Christmas trees, or ice skaters or snowmen don’t really mix. In fact Edgar is a bit of a liability, and he ends up hiding himself away. Except a little red haired girl called Ava takes pity on him and goes after him. To the tune of “I can’t fight this feeling any longer” Edgar arrives at the banquet, and everyone ducks for cover. Is he going to b...

  Click here for the recording of this thought (3mins) Thankyou Peter. My thought for the day today is entitled “light in the darkness”. Now, I’m sure other Thought for the Day speakers may touch on this familiar theme as well, but Christmas is a time for Christmas lights. You may have been at the turning on of the town lights a few weeks ago, you may have put lights on your tree, and if you drive around the town at night, you’ll see some epic light installations outside people’s homes. We wake up our kids and drive them around the town once a year to see which one wins the prize for the most impressive Christmas lights. There’s the elegant dangly shimmering lights, (we’ve just invested in some of those after our last lot got into a tangled broken mess). There’s the figurines of deer or a lamppost. Best of all was one house we saw in Stukeley Meadows that had actually had a video image projected up against a window with a loop to make it look like Father Christmas arriving into...

  Good morning Peter, and good morning to everyone who’s listening. If you have Disney+ or watch National Geographic channel I wonder if you have ever seen the programme, “ Scrapyard Supercar ”? In this programme two teams battle it out over 4 days to build a car from the debris found at a car scrapyard that will then beat the performance of a top of the range supercar! It’s a classic programme. We love watching it as a family, and I’d recommend it. It does seem very surprising that for example a Ford Ka welded onto a Range Rover chassis, or Citroen 2CV with a motorbike stuck on the back could outperform a Bentley Benteyga or a Jaguar F-type at a specific challenge, but amazingly they do it again and again! It’s great TV, and it’s made all the more fun by the race against time, combined with the banter between the scrapyard teams (who are often car mechanics or rally drivers), and former Boyzone singer Shane Lynch. It’s amazing what these guys can pull off an old scrapyard ...

  Good morning Peter, and good morning to everyone who’s listening. My thought for the day today is entitled, “Have a break”. According to a recent Harvard Business Review, when one business woman recently did a survey, documenting answers to the question “how are you?” 8 out of 10 people replied “busy” [1] . Now I don’t know what sort of circles you move in, but a lot of people today are busy, busy, busy. It’s kind of ironic, because compared to our forebears, we have more labour-saving devices that can do our washing for us, we have technology that in theory could do some of our thinking for us and we have overall better healthcare that should mean we are living longer and are more productive. But everyone is busy. Perhaps even now you are dashing from one thing to the next, or you’ve got a to do list that is growing longer each day, and you’re not sure how to cope. Well can I suggest one practical step. “Have a break”. No this is not an advert for a kitkat! It’s a return t...

  Good morning and welcome to Thought for the Day and a big thank you to Peter for hosting us at the new time. I wonder you have ever listened to a TED talk… No, nothing to do with cuddly toys, TED stands for “Technology, Entertainment, Design”, and online you’ll find hundreds of experts give a TED talk on anything from “my dream of a flying car” to “why bees are disappearing”. Well a friend shared a fascinating TED talk last week entitled “ My year of living biblically ”. In it, Esquire magazine journalist A.J. Jacobs reports back on trying to do everything that the Bible commands for a whole year. He spent a year paying minute detail to every one of the 700 “rules” as he saw them, that he found in the Bible. And his talk is quite irreverent but at times quite amusing. So he takes seriously the commands in the Old Testament not to wear clothing made of mixed fibres, he grows his beard long, so that he’s not disobeying a command in Leviticus to not shave the corner of your b...

  I wonder if you have ever been back to your old school? Perhaps you live nearby, or your kids or grandkids now go there, so it’s a regular thing. Perhaps you wanted to forget school as quickly as possible, and haven’t set foot in the grounds since. When I got an invite from my old sports team saying they were getting together, I plucked up the courage to get to a school reunion last Saturday. It was fun to see the old dining room, the massive tree that my friend Mark had climbed up, the sports pitches, and there were even a few butterflies when I saw the old sports hall where I did my GCSEs. Much had changed of course- a few new buildings, better school food, and now the kids have mobiles and their own laptops rather than sharing one payphone and one BBC Micro computer (that dates me!). But it was the friends that I was glad to see. For some of them it had been 30 years since I’d seen them. Some of us had a few less hairs than when we last saw one another, but apart from that...

Good morning and welcome to today’s thought for the day. This week hundreds of local kids are wearing their new school shoes, their school bags are packed with exciting new stationary, and tears are being shed (mainly by the parents) as pupils head off to school for a new academic year. Some of them will have had a holiday out of the Huntingdon area, perhaps if they were lucky, with a sunshine destination… though we didn’t see much of the sun around here before this week. Well a couple of weeks ago on BBC’s 2 “Amazing hotels” programme, I learned about a holiday destination with a difference. Joali Being Resort , is a luxury island paradise in the Maldives centred around “harnessing the natural flow of energy from coast to coast”. This island is not only a luxury hotel, but it also bills itself as an immersive wellness experience where you can awaken your inner light with the healing wisdom of nature through biophilic design, ceremonial rituals and pure cuisine. On arrival through ...

  I wonder if you’ve ever heard of the Flat Stanley children’s books. Written back in the 90s by Jeff Brown, they are the quirky story of an American boy called Stanley Lambchop who had the misfortune of being squashed to being only an inch in thickness when a heavy pinboard fell on him in the night. Miraculously he survives, and lives the rest of his life as “Flat Stanley” and carries out all sorts of adventures. I’m currently reading “Stanley in Space” to my youngest daughter. Flat Stanley, due to his previous experiences, gets asked by the President of the United States to go with his mum and dad on a special mission into space to meet a group of aliens. All is going well, until they lose radio contact with earth, and it turns out that this alien race, called the Tyrrans, far from being friendly are out to capture Stanley and his spaceship, making them prisoners of their planet Tyrra. Most scary of all is when they see an extremely large alien with a big moustac...

  Who is Samson you may be asking? An 1831 locomotive of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, a software platform for computational nanoscience, a Lockheed Martin military transport plane, a character from the Bible with legendary strength and long hair! Well Samson is all those things but he is also a cat. Samson is a cat that belongs to friends of ours from church in Huntingdon. And sadly Samson went missing for 48 hours. What would you do if you lost your cat? Search around the garden ask around the neighbours. Our friends did all the normal things but they did something else that is a bit more unusual. They asked their church to pray. Here’s the whatsapp message that went around Christ Church Huntingdon “Would love prayers that our missing cat would turn up- he hasn’t come home the past couple of nights… so worried that he might be trapped in someone’s shed/garage”. Then there are 5 emojis of praying hands as people got to work praying. What happened next? 2 ...

  I wonder if you’ve heard of the song “Tie a yellow ribbon round the ole oak tree” sung by Tony Orlando and Dawn. We mentioned it at our new church service on the Oxmoor on Sunday, the Carpenters Arms. Mark is kindly going to play the song at the end of this thought for the day. It’s quite an old song- 1973, so it wouldn’t quite count for in with the sixties out with the sixties, and it was released before some of us were born, but it’s quite a nice song, and it has been mentioned before on a Thought for the Day by Kath Pawlett. It tells the story of a guy who has just done his time, perhaps in prison or a military establishment, but he has fallen out with his missus. Not knowing whether she will have him back or not, he writes to her and says, that he’s coming back home on the bus on such and such a day, and if she will have him home to restart the relationship then she should tie a yellow ribbon around the old oak tree near their house. If he doesn’t see a yellow...

I wonder if any of you have been watching the TV show “ Race across the World ” in the last few weeks. It’s a fascinating show. It features 5 couples from the UK racing (in this season across Canada) for £20,000 worth of prize money. Except what makes this race special is the competitors aren’t allowed any phones or any plane flights, and their budget is limited to cost of the equivalent airfare, and of course they have TV cameras following their every move. What I like about it is that not only do you travel with the couples across the beautiful scenery of Canada, but also you travel on a bit of their life story as well. There’s a pair of brothers who never got on as kids, who lost their dad and are trying to pick up the pieces of their relationship. There’s two dad-daughter couples battling through the highs and lows of a race together. But the couple whose story was perhaps the most moving was married couple Zeinib and Mobeen, medics from Manchester who for years have b...

Beth Lindon: I have recently been watching The Mandalorian on Disney +. This hit Star Wars spin off series follows Din Djarin on his various adventures across the galaxy. The Mandalorian is full of religious language. The way of the Mandalore is a religion followed by the main character. There are rules to be followed, character traits to be admired and creeds to be spoken. There is much to admire about the way of the Mandalore. They prize honour and loyalty; they protect one another and take in foundlings. However, to me the way seems fairly empty. It is unclear where this way is taking them or where it comes from. It mostly seems to be an arbitrary set of rules and traditions. Interestingly early followers of Jesus called themselves followers of the way. In fact Jesus says in the Bible that he is the way.  John 14:6 says “I am the way the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” Like the way of the mandalore this is exclusive – there is ...

  2868 diamonds, 269 pearls, 17 sapphires, 11 emeralds and 4 rubies. Those are the precious gemstones that we will see on Saturday, when King Charles exits Westminster Abbey wearing the Imperial State Crown, which is estimated to be worth between £3bn and £5bn. Weighing in at 1.06kilograms it is actually only half the weight of the other crown that will be used on Saturday, the St Edward’s Crown that is only ever worn at the moment of coronation, and that comes in at a hefty 2.23kg (that’s almost 5lbs). The word Coronation means to crown someone. It comes from the latin word corona which means crown, (you’ll remember corona-virus was a named after the crown like image when seen under a powerful microscope). While King Charles took over from his mother Queen Elizabeth the moment that she died on 8 th September, the symbolic high point of recognising him as the monarch will be when the archbishop of Canterbury puts the crown on his head. No pressure! Christians beli...

  It’s been described as the “spiritual national anthem of America” [1] , the hymn Amazing Grace is probably one of the most beloved religious songs ever written, and this year marks the 250 th anniversary of origin of the song back in 1773. The song actually nearly disappeared into obscurity. It was one of a number of hymns written by church of England minister, John Newton with a friend of his, William Cowper when they lived in Olney in Northamptonshire. (William Cowper by the way once lived in Huntingdon and after which Cowper Road is named). But after slow beginnings the hymn grew in popularity in the US and indeed around the world, and has been sung at weddings, funerals, and special occasions ever since, including at memorials for the NASA astronauts in 1986 and at Ground Zero in New York in 2001. It is one of only a few Christian songs to have made it into the UK singles charts, and has been sung by artists as diverse as Rod Stewart, Mahalia Jackson, Aretha F...

  I was very moved by the documentary last week on Channel 4 showing Bear Grylls, the scout ambassador, survival expert and TV presenter going into Ukraine to meet with and interview President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. It was a striking interview for a whole number of reasons: the courage of the individuals he met, many of whom had lost loved ones. The perseverance of the Ukrainian people through the challenges of winter and winter, and the resilience and leadership of Zelenskyy himself. At one point in the programme Bear Grylls met a Ukrainian family. The mother and young son had returned to Kiev from exile to live with the dad, seeking to carry on with normal life despite the considerable risks and threat of shelling. They gave Bear a pack of tea. They called it Victory tea, and they said that he needed to keep it until the war was over. At that point he could drink it to celebrate the victory. I found that very moving. Here was a normal family, like the ones known t...

Last Saturday if you walking in the Riverside Park in Huntingdon you may noticed a rather strange sight. The River Ouse had broken its banks and was flooding over the fields on both sides. That’s nothing new, and probably most of us have seen that before. But the field on the Godmanchester side is home to a flock of sheep at the moment, and as the floodwaters rose around 30 of them had become cut off on a slightly raised piece of land opposite the boathouse with the fast flowing river on one side and a massive lake on the other. Take a look at the Christ Church Huntingdon blogspot to see a photo, or there may still be one on the Huntingdon Living facebook page. When I saw them, they were beginning to start fighting and butting each other! Well a flurry of social media posts and photos later and the illustrious whatsapp group of our neighbourhood received a message that eventually a land rover had been spotted and rescue was on the way, though it sounds like it took a ...

 As you listen to this, I will hopefully have finished the Cambridge half-marathon, Sunday 5 th March (as I record this I haven’t done it yet). I’m currently a little apprehensive about the weather, but we’ll see how it goes. One thing that they’re planning on doing at the race is having pacers, people who try and run the race at a specific pace so if you’re going for a time of, say, 2 hours, all you have to do is keep up with them and you’ll do it in that time. Now, I’m not actually going to make use of a pacer on Sunday, because they run at a constant speed, and when I run I tend to set out quite quickly when I’m excited and then gradually slow down until at the end I’m hobbling along to the finish line. But I think it’s a really great idea! A pacer needs to be experienced, they need to know what they’re doing, and to set an example for you – so all you need to do is fix your eyes on them and you’ll get through just fine. Now, Jesus is a little bit like a pacer ...

Can I tell you what our family did on half term? On a sunny Wednesday a few weeks ago we drove down to Finsbury Park where there’s a shop called “Sylvanian Families” that was having a closing down sale. Now if you don’t have young kids you may not know what Sylvanian Families are, though some of you may have played with them as young children, they have been going since 1985. They are small plastic figurines shaped like all sorts of animals: rabbits, cats, dogs, penguins, kangaroos. Each animal has a name and is part of a family. Our kids love them, and spend much of their pocket money on them! Well we got chatting to friendly shopkeeper Rocky at the Sylvanian Families shop and business was booming. I said it must be a great job because everyone loves coming to your shop. He said it was indeed a very happy place to work, though occasionally some children have a meltdown. When this happens, interestingly in his mind, it’s usually the “parents’ fault”, not the kids! If the...

  I’m sure you are aware of the Cadbury’s Creme Egg. It was ranked as the most famous confectionary in a poll in 2019. A Cadbury’s milk chocolate egg (the size of a normal chicken’s egg) with a white and yellow fondant filling. The company makes a staggering 1.5 million crème eggs a day, up to 200million a year. No yoke! Well I don’t know if you spotted the news earlier in the week, but 200,000 of the tasty little beauties were stolen in a raid from an industrial unit in Telford last Saturday. But wonderfully the West Mercia police force managed to track down the criminal, a 32 year old man of no fixed abode, when they stopped a vehicle on the M42 just a short while later. The news feeds had some great headlines: ·         ITV “Police go on Easter Egg Hunt” ·         The Shropshire Star “Police save Easter after theft of almost 200,000 crème eggs in Telford. ·      ...