One year on. It is a year to the day since the Prime Minister told us that we must stay at home. We still live under the same command. In the meantime the equivalent of the non-student population of Oxford has died of coronavirus in the UK. At noon the nation will fall silent to […]
Most of the blogs I’ve written this year have tried to be positive. Many in the last few weeks have been about how to cultivate an inner life of thanksgiving in the midst of the hardest times. But I fear I have been a touch unbalanced- there are times you have to acknowledge that this […]
Let me be honest- I am decidedely fed up of lockdown. The way to get me muttering under my breath (or sometimes out loud) at the moment is to get somebody on TV telling us how essential it is to prolong restrictions even beyond the time when the vulnerable have been vaccinated. Lockdown is dehumanizing […]
Over the weekend I was reading Iain Murray’s biography of the great 20th century preacher Martyn Lloyd-Jones. Now that wasn’t just because there wasn’t a great deal else to do! Rather I wanted to focus on this question- how did his church, Westminster Chapel in London, cope with the war? After all, there may be […]
A couple of weeks ago I was able to stay with my parents. Because I live on my own, the Government’s support bubble system kicked in and I was allowed to visit them. As I did so, I was very conscious of those who were not in the same position. At that point those living […]
I happened to be speaking on the subject of singleness exactly a month before lockdown was introduced. With hindsight I might have included some material on singleness in a pandemic but I wasn’t a sufficiently good prophet to foresee what would take place. However, the experience of being on my own in a flat for […]
Back in March Boris Johnson talked about turning the tide on the virus in twelve weeks. To be fair to him, he didn’t promise life would return to normal by the end of June- but I suspect many of us assumed that would be the case. So we began to have in our minds a […]
Robust Christianity in the face of a pandemic requires an ability to multi-think. You need to hold two things in your mind at once. The depressing news and speculation about the length of time that social distancing will be required can be all consuming such that we lose any sense of God. But, on the […]
“How deserted lies the city, once so full of people!” Such was my thought whilst recently taking my exercise in Oxford city centre looking at the historic sites, normally packed with tourists and students now lying empty. And such is the first verse of the Old Testament book of Lamentations. This reflection prompted me to […]
In a parallel universe somewhere I am currently in Heathrow Airport, about to fly out to Kenya to speak at a couple of conferences next week. It is one of a number of events that I was looking forward to this year that will no longer happen. And my own experience in this regard is […]