We started our Easter Holiday Club yesterday morning (Monday 2nd April) with nearly 90 children in attendance.

That’s what you call a busy church hall.

Anyway, there was one wee girl, just six years old, who was quite upset to begin with. She was feeling alone and somewhat overwhelmed by the noise and the business of it all. Tears started to fall and immediately I began to think of calling her mum and asking her to come and get her.

But one of our leaders had other ideas.

She gave the girl a big hug and took her over to the side to console her. Then, she discovered that there was another girl who was in the same class at school sitting at the next table. She took the now not-so-upset girl to that table and that seemed to do the trick. Anyway, I moved on to other things, knowing that that was in hand.

It was two hours later, at the end of the club, that I became aware of her again. Now, she had a huge smile on her face and couldn’t wait to see her mum – not to escape but to tell her how much fun she’d had! What a great turnaround!

I guess it’s just a small example but it’s what the Church is in the business of doing – making people feel welcome and putting smiles on their faces.

Friday night was spent stretched out on the couch watching the 2010 movie, ‘The Book of Eli‘, starring Denzel Washington. Loved it.

Eli’s life mission is to protect an old copy of the King James Bible, the only Bible known to have survived the nuclear war that has laid waste to the world. He grows to value it and to believe in it and, in the end, because he has read it daily for thirty years, to know it by heart. Even though it is taken from him before he reaches his destination, he is able to convey its contents from memory to the scribe who makes it his task to commit it to paper.

Yet despite his intimate knowledge of the words of scripture, Eli finds himself saying, “I got so caught up reading it every day I forgot to live by what I read.”

Reading and memorising verses from the Bible is one thing. Living by them – in obedience to an Almighty and Loving God – is an entirely different thing.

I had the privilege this week of visiting a lady whose name, together with a note of her circumstances, I had been given by a colleague from Dundee. He had asked me if I would visit the lady in question to offer her such support as we, as a congregation, might be able to offer her. Upon meeting her, it took no time at all to ‘diagnose’ the problem. Here was a lady who was, essentially, very lonely.

Tracey Chapman’s old song, ‘Why?’ asks the question; ‘Why when there’s so many of us are so many still alone?’ You would think that with nearly seven billion people on earth, the one thing we wouldn’t be short of would be company! And yet, possibly now more than ever before, given the much-changed living patterns that most of us are subject to, we find that many people are not connected, at least not in meaningful ways.

The good news is that this particular lady now has a friend from the church who will visit her regularly and who will bring her to the Friend’s Club, where she will have instant access to sixty or so folks similar to herself.

We can’t always meet someone’s needs but it’s great when we can!