Christ Church Huntingdon Blog

  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...