Morning light

Taken on the way to the bus stop this morning looking over Queens Park. Being a lazy git it will be a while before you see any sunrise shots from me!

Backblipped yesterday - was too tired to post. Am very much looking forward to a long lie tomorrow, which is pretty much guaranteed to mean I will wake up about 6am!

I am being struck by a big wave of nostalgia and very much missing Russia right now, friends posted a link on Facebook of a friend of mine telling his story of how he became a Christian (through watching Jesus Christ Superstar in English, and wanting to understand what it was all about, so he read a Gospel, and then read it again, and again). It's not subtitled, or I'd post the link here, just because it's Sergei Polikin and he's great. I wake up each morning to one of the worship songs he and his band (The King's Jesters) wrote called 'In the light of a burning star'. Sergei has an wonderful talent of writing beautiful songs with incredibly poetic images, a particular favourite of mine is about being struck by wonder at God's grace, and he's one of the best worship leaders I know too. Almost 3 years ago I went to a Eurasian training conference for an organisation I used to work with in Ukraine. Polikin is on the Board of the Russian member organisation and he was leading the worship at the conference, I arrived a bit late and came in when the initial time of worship had started, and just stood at the side and cried tears of joy it was so good to be back after 4 years away from Russia, back among those wonderful friends, seeing Polikin leading a worship team of folk from across the former Soviet Union and worshipping alongside them, like at so many conferences and events before. As well as those times, I miss evenings sitting at his kitchen table with him, his wife and kids and various friends, setting the world to rights in the way Russian do. Conversations can often seem very empty here. But I should state that he loves Marmite, which is a big mark against him! I have been often been his supplier, which shows how much I love the Polikins, and a few other Russian friends with weird taste, to actually put the horrible stuff in my suitcase! Ah, the things we do for our friends!