Is your birthday coming up or have you had a birthday in the last week? If so, let us know and we can sing happy birthday to you!
It’s a tradition at our churches to sing happy birthday near the end of a church service to anyone celebrating around the time. Now that we can’t meet physically that doesn’t mean we have to stop!
Just let Alan know if it’s your birthday around now and enjoy the birthday wishes as part of the Sunday service.
We will be holding an online church service to say thanks for and pray for the NHS, carers and other frontline workers, on Thursday, April 30, from 7pm.
The service will include readings, music and prayers, including one read by local MP and former Cabinet minister Jeremy Hunt, and another read by Cllr Pat Evans, Mayor of Farnham, along with pictures of artwork, videos and pictures of key workers.
Lesley Crawley explained the thinking behind the service: “We are living in extraordinary times, like nothing any of us have experienced before. As we navigate our way through them we want to seek God’s guidance and strength, particularly for those who are suffering and those who are working on the frontline in hospitals and care settings, and other key workers who are keeping the country going. And we want to give thanks for everyone who is working so hard across the world and in our own community.
“If anyone would like to offer us some art – especially rainbows – or photos of keyworkers, or if there are children who would like to be videoed saying a prayer, please do get in touch. Send contributions to Alan as soon as you can and certainly by the end of Sunday, April 26th.
“And do join us here on the website on Thursday 30th, from 7pm, to pray and give thanks.” The service will be available on the website from that time here.
If you need guidance for sending in your contributions, click here.
We are joining in the national efforts to make scrubs for the NHS and we need your help!
Doctors and nurses at our hospitals are running short of scrubs – the plain clothes they wear when caring for patients – so volunteers are getting out their sewing machines and making them, while others are donating material, including old duvet covers, pillowcases, sheets and tablecloths. The scrubs are then being sent to Frimley Park Hospital by representatives of the group ‘Scrub Hub – Making Scrubs for Frimley Park Hospital’.
Anne Young from the parish has made her porch in Badshot Lea the collecting point for both donated material and completed scrubs. She is also emailing out instructions and patterns to anyone who would like them. A representative of the Scrub Hub group is then picking them up on an almost daily basis.
Anne said: “People can come and pick up material from my porch – or drop it off there – and when they have made the items they need to wash them at 60 degrees, dry them and put them in a bag with the date on them, then leave them in my porch. The person who picks them up then keeps them for at least three days to ensure that there is no risk of the virus being on them, then takes them to Frimley Park.
“They can be made of any material as long as it is suitable for washing at 60 degrees and nothing has to match. I’ve heard there are doctors wearing tops with pineapples on them and trousers with meerkats! Pillowcases are particularly good for making the bags. The only thing is please don’t use elastic as they are washed so often at a high temperature that they don’t last.”
Anne will send out instructions and details of where pick up and drop off the material and scrubs to anyone who can help. To offer help, or for further information, contact Stella Wiseman and she will put you in touch with Anne.
When we look back on 2020, what will we reflect? Will it have been a strange blip in time which will have caused some people untold grief and given some a new direction, but which most will have soon forgotten as they go back to the old ways, to the system which we knew as normal? Will we be caught up in the busyness of life and all its joys and its troubles and the pandemic be like some strange dream?
Or will something have changed?
Do we want it to change?
According to one survey, 91% of us want change.
In today’s sermon, Lesley speaks about the jolt which the disciple Thomas had when he met the risen Christ. She then quotes from speaker and author Charles Eisenstein who suggests that Covid-19 is “like a rehab intervention that breaks the addictive hold of normality”. He adds: “When the crisis subsides, we might have occasion to ask whether we want to return to normal, or whether there might be something we’ve seen during this break in the routines that we want to bring into the future”.
We have made huge changes in how we do things in this lockdown. But what do we want in the future? What do we want for society? For church? What hopes do we have which are true hopes, not just some wishful thinking?
Can we have a discussion about this?
Please do comment on this blog post and on Facebook and Twitter to let us know what you think.
If you are struggling with isolation you may find these two links helpful: https://www.alonetogether.org.uk/
The parish now has its own YouTube channel where we are posting services, sermons, music and other videos. Please sign up to it by clicking here and then clicking on ‘Subscribe’. Then you can browse our videos to your heart’s content.
We’d like to add videos of our church members doing things – singing, poetry, drama etc. If you have anything you would like to share, contact Alan, revd.alan@badshotleaandhale.org
Where is God in this coronavirus pandemic? Where is God in any suffering?
These are reasonable questions. Here are two people who have been thinking about this.
In an article for unherd.com, Giles Fraser doesn’t give an answer but says that Christianity allows us to sit with the question, to weep with the question. Church, he says, “remains one of the few spaces in our culture in which we are allowed to acknowledge the existence of futile suffering without someone feeling so uncomfortable about it that they need to reassure us all that everything is going to be OK”.
And yet, that reassurance is still there in “a story that speaks of love as being ultimately greater that death, and as a triumph over even the most purposeless of human pain”.
Read the whole piece here.
For Richard Rohr, suffering may be inevitable but it is also a time when God can be trusted. On Tuesday this week (April 14), in his daily meditation published on the Centre for Action and Contemplation website, he reflected that: “Our knowledge of God is participatory. God refuses to be intellectually ‘thought’, and is only known in the passion and pain of it all, when the issues become soul-sized and worthy of us.”
Read the whole piece here.
Coronavirus is causing massive challenges to many of us, including financial and those involving domestic abuse. Among those there to help is Citizens Advice Waverley.
Advisers can provide advice about a range of issues:
There is a team of more than 60 home-based advisers ready to give free, independent advice. The best ways to contact them are:
South West Surrey Domestic Abuse Outreach Team is continuing to help during this period. Domestic abuse is any incident or pattern of incidents of controlling, coercive, threatening behaviour, violence or abuse between those aged 16 or over who are, or have been, intimate partners or family members regardless of gender or sexuality.
The team includes qualified independent Domestic Violence Advisers who provide practical advice and emotional support. They will always listen, support and believe. Call them on 01483 898884 (Mon-Fri 9-4pm) or email swr@swsda.org.uk
There is also plenty of on-line self-help material:
Farnham Foodbank is still busy and is distributing food direct to clients, thanks to furloughed drivers from a local engineering firm. If you need help, see details below.
Donations are also needed, both food and money, and you can drop donations off at Church House (the Vineyard Centre), Union Road, Farnham (opposite Gostrey Meadow) between 10am and noon on Thursdays.
Particularly needed at the moment tinned tomatoes, tinned potatoes, individual sponge puddings, sachets of powdered desserts (like Angel Delight), instant mash, tinned rice puddings, laundry detergent tablets, tinned meat (ham, spam, corned beef etc.), and they would love sun cream.
If you need help and have a paper voucher, take a photo of the paper voucher and text it to the Foodbank on 079015 81539 or email it to info@farnham.foodbank.org.uk
They will deliver a food supply to your doorstep.
If you don’t yet have a voucher, contact a Referral Agency who will discuss your situation and supply you with a Foodbank voucher, or contact the Foodbank with the details directly.
Farnham Foodbank: https://farnham.foodbank.org.uk/
The Coronavirus has put a stop to a lot of things, among them the magazine which we usually distribute thanks to the hard work of a lot of people who deliver them through letterboxes across the area. Obviously that isn’t possible so we have experimented with an online magazine and you can find the results here.
If this goes well, when we are through the pandemic we may well produce a printed one and an online one, perhaps with a paywall and maybe even adverts.
Let us know what you think and if you want to write a piece, email editor@badshotleaandhale.org
The Parish of Badshot Lea and Hale 