Had a couple of days away on retreat this week, depth was organised by our Diocesan youth & Children’s advisers. We were just 4 miles down the road from home which made it convenient, just 13 of us there (plus the two leaders) but this was really good as we had a chance to chat to everyone and felt you got to know everyone a bit, as well as having the opportunity to catch up with good friends. The two days were a good mix of input (which was optional) and space to think, reflect, chat, read & pray. It was fantastic and very thought provoking and challenging but in a really good helpful way. The time was spent reflecting upon how things around us, our culture, is changing and looking at how we as youth and children’s work practitioners respond to that in our lives and ministry. Of course there were some really deep questions that were raised like were there fish on the ark? And as for the prayer shack, we established that it is 15 miles down the road from a faded sign!

Thank you to Ian and Yvonne and doing all the work in putting the event on, the team at windmill Farm for their hospitality and fantastic food, the belt is now one hole looser!  And to everyone else who was there and part of it for being just that!

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written by Simo

Having started a sermon series at church toward the end of last year, we were looking at ways of making them available for people that missed the service or were out leading a group. We came to the conclusion that the easiest way to do this now was to record and put them online, thus was born www.allsaintsfaringdon.co.uk. As was inevitable with this situation eventually one of my sermons was going to appear and that has happened today (it’s taken me a while to get it sorted this week). So if your interested in hearing what I had to say on the subject of calling click here and download.

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written by Simo

Yesterday being the special day Jonah (my middelist) got his first card from a friend at school (and church) the card also promised a kiss during the day which was apparently delivered. I don’t mind this, the bit that worries me is I know of two other children who received the same from the young lady in question. Is my son being 3 timed? Or am I reading too much into the relationships of 4 year olds?

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written by Simo

I think so anyway, it now seams to display ok, there was a particular post where things went wrong and it seems that because I tend to type my posts in a word processor then copy and paste, I had done that post on a different computer and software, it had copied some code that it put at the beginning of the post and messed things up. I had also been having problems as mentioned before with the theme keep changing to the default, I hope that was part of the same problem but only the next few days/weeks will tell on that front!

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written by Simo

I seem to be having a few more technical difficulties at the moment, these only effect (as far as I know I would be keen to hear from anyone who can test on a mac)  Internet Explorer and Opera, in either of these browsers the right hand column seems to be missing and you only get a couple of posts (I don’t know what impact this post will have on that). If you switch to another page it works and you can then go to the archive, it is only the home page that has the problem, the other way to solve it and and even better idea would be to use Firefox! I will continue trying to fix this problem though.

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written by Simo