Christ Church Huntingdon Blog

 For audio, click here .  Picture Wikipedia CC-by-SA 4.0 here .   Welcome to Thought for the Day. I had the privilege with my family last week to go to the Huntingdon Gymnastics Gym last Thursday evening to see Jake Jarman the Olympic gymnast come back to his club with his Bronze medal to be interviewed by BBC news. There were cameras, satellite dishes, and a massive crowd of supporters all waving their Union Jacks. Thank you Huntingdon Gymnastics Club. I wonder whether you saw any of Jake’s gymnastic routines in the Olympics? Now I’m no athlete, my kids can do the splits and cartwheels and various gymnastics moves (they too are members of the club) but I would snap if I sat cross legged and can’t even pull off a pull up, and the only double pike I’ve got close to was the fish I saw in a river once. So it’s been impressive to see Jake’s moves on the screen- floor routines, pommel horse, high bars and the rings. We are so proud to have a Huntingdon hero representi...

 Click here for audio.  I love it when local news becomes national news. A problem with wheelie bins in a sleepy Cornish fishing village shouldn’t really be breaking news on our web feeds and newspaper columns, but that’s what happened a couple of days ago. The wonderfully named village of Mousehole hit the national news [1] when the local Cornwall Council changed the wheelie bins for new ones. But the trouble is that they didn’t take the old ones away. Apparently there have been 10,000 requests to the council to get them taken away, but it still hasn’t happened. So what was described by poet Dylan Thomas as one of England’s prettiest villages, “Mousehole” has become dubbed “Binhole” due to the rather unattractive wheelie bins that are accumulating in the streets and getting covered in seagull poo. Photos show them in clusters down the street, or stacked on top of each other waiting for the council to come and take them away. Somehow in the summer months between the Tru...

  Click here for audio.  "There is only one thing I can say - I'm sorry”. These are the words of Conservative MP Suella Braverman after the general election results last week. “I'm sorry that my party didn't listen to you. The Conservative Party has let you down. You voted for us over 14 years and we did not keep our promises. We have acted and we need to learn our lesson because, if we don't, we will have many worse nights to come. The country deserves better and I will do everything in my power to rebuild but we need to listen to you - you have spoken very clearly." Well I’m not into politics, and possibly you aren’t either. And maybe sometimes apologies can feel a little hollow. But in politics, in personal life, in public and in private, it’s good when we get things wrong to say sorry. Beyoncé, Madonna, Madness, UB40, Guns and Roses, Justin Bieber, they’ve all got songs called “Sorry”. As Elton John sang “Sorry seems to be the hardest word”. You f...

  Click here for audio recording.  Well singer songwriter, Bruce Springsteen may have been “born in the USA”, but he has recently been over this side of the pond. “The Boss” as he’s affectionately known in the world of rock, played to some big crowds in Cardiff, Ireland and Sunderland, and while he was here he actually picked up the prestigious Ivor Novello fellowship award for his contribution towards the music industry, having sold more than 140 million records, and having won an Oscar, a Tony and 20 Grammy Awards. He received the award from fellow legend Paul McCartney who gently mocked him , saying that he couldn’t think of a more fitting recipient… “except  Bob Dylan, or Paul Simon or Billy Joel or Beyonce, the list goes on”. I remember in the 80s being shipped out to France as a 12-year old on a school trip to improve my French, and stayed with a young couple who played “Born in the USA” on repeat. It left quite an impression on me! Well I was quite struck by someth...

Click here for audio.   A member of our church ran the Milton Keynes marathon last week. She said that as she was running along, she overtook someone who was running the whole marathon backwards! Wow, that is seriously impressive. I mean it’s hard enough to run a marathon forwards. I do a little jogging from time to time, and I’ve done the parkrun and a 10k race, but 36 miles, that’s a long long way. But to do it running backwards…. I don’t think we were designed to run backwards, it’s probably a whole different set of muscles, and then of course, you can’t see where you are going. Apparently running backwards is a thing- it’s known as retro running [1] , and for some people it’s the only way they can run a marathon [2] . Well, when I heard about this, I thought, maybe there’s a bit of an analogy. How many of us are doing life running backwards? Rather than facing forwards into the future, we are going through life facing backwards. Perhaps it’s due to a sadness in the...

  Audio recording here .  Good morning. My name is CN, minister CCH. I wonder if you know much about your forebears? Perhaps you’ve done a DNA test, or you’ve got into ancestry.com . Perhaps you’ve got an old trinket or a piece of furniture from a distant relative. Well I had the privilege this week to go with my dad and my cousin and his son to the town where my great-grandfather lived for a special event in his honour. His dad (my great-great -grandfather) was the local postmaster, and he was an office lad who grow up to be an estate agent and a business man. Amazingly 100 years on, last Thursday a building was being named after him. Quite an honour for me and my family. It raises the question, what kind of legacy would you like to leave? How would you like to be remembered 100 years after your death? There will only be very few of us who are still talked about in 100 years’ time perhaps for some amazing invention or our involvement in some event of history. Perhaps ...

 Click here for audio Good morning. My name is Charlie Newcombe, I'm the minister at CCH.  Last month, a report was published analysing the countries of the world for how they are doing with their mental health. Those who instigated this report have found that in general after the Covid lockdowns there wasn’t a recovery in wellbeing as might have been expected, but that globally we have sunk to a new low. And specifically for those of us living in the UK, the UK came 2 nd from the bottom of the list for its mental health quotient, and bottom of the list for the percentage of people distressed or struggling with 35% of those interviewed saying that they were distressed or struggling. Why is that? Why are we statistically more unhappy even than those living in Ukraine? Those in Latin America and Africa are far happier than us. Well someone might claim that we are talking about mental health a lot more than before, and so the stats have gone up. And actually that’s a go...