les Davey de France

We were invited to lunch yesterday with some church folk, so I collected Pat from the café where I found everything in disorder and clearing up after the kids' Easter workshop not even begun. Still we slowly got everything sorted. I seemed to take an age to lock the toilet and tidy everything up. Then off we went to find the apartment. I'd not been before. It was raining heavily. Just two tram stops, but it took us ages as we dithered our way along.  We got to the flat, and first had to inspect the living room. The dining room was being kept shut to keep in the naughty cats. The living room was very impressive. I passed the time looking out of the window at the park opposite as various aspects of the sofa were discussed. Then into the dining room. Surprise !  I was gobsmacked. Speechless.  I'd been duped, like the hapless dupe I am, and the church folk were all there for a birthday barbecue, complete with inextinguishable birthday cake candles and enough meat to march Nap...

I'm so very thankful for all the wonderful things God has given me over the years, and now he's given me the opportunity to serve him in a different way. Twenty years ago there was a conversation where we shared to whom we were responsible. My list was very long. I was accountable to the church and the people I worked for and with. I was responsible to denominational structures in France. I was also accountable to my home church which had sent me to France. There was also the mission who were there to support and take care of us. Then to the many people who were contributing generously to our support. It's good to have accountability and I rarely found any of this to be a problem. From now on, however, we'll be paid increasingly exclusively from our own resources, to which we have contributed over the years. Voices that once were determinative will now become consultative. We'll appreciate people's advice and counsel, but we will have much more freedom in what w...

The RER from Paris Charles de Gaulle takes you through Drancy, where those deported during the Second World War were collected from all over France to be transferred to the camps in Poland. I always shudder as I pass through and wonder what it is like to live somewhere with such a dreadful past. I changed at the chaotic and frantic Gare du Nord for the metro to Montparnasse and found a fold-down seat in the crowded carriage. An (even more) elderly man came and folded down the seat next to me and we began to chat. I don't think I asked his age, but I did ask him if he was from Paris.  "Oh, my story is a bit complicated." It turned out that he was born in the early forties to a couple of resistants. His father was captured and shot. His mother was deported. (This means she was sent to the camps, and almost nobody ever came back.) He grew up placed in a family. I talked about how different the UK experience of the war was, and how although my father served overseas, there is...

The annual prayer retreat of the international pastors was to be held in Brno. There are no direct flights from Bordeaux to Brno and the best way to get there is to fly to Vienna and take the short train ride to Brno. There are no direct flights from Bordeaux to Vienna at this time of year, and the best way to get there is to take the train from Bordeaux to Paris, then cross the city to CDG and fly on to Vienna. So the journeys were less straightforward than they could have been. For reasons I won't go into I ended up staying overnight in Vienna on the way to Brno. This gave me the opportunity to meet Froim's parents for a meal - they picked me up from the airport, reminding me of the book "Je voudrais que quelqu'un m'attende quelque part" by Anna Gavalda, which I have never read. I ate a pork Wiener schnitzel. The next day I had a few hours to run amok in Vienna and inspected the Stephansdome and the Peterskirche, where I met George from southern India who ha...