BEREAVEMENT VISITING invariably leaves me humbled …  and enormously glad that here in Bramhall we’ve an excellent team of willing visitors whose chief purpose in our shared life is to offer the gifts of friendship. There’s a silence and a shouting in the lives of all the broken-hearted. Would that the costly gifts of time and space be made available for the sharing of both.

A dear friend of mine, reeling from the death of his beloved wife, told me:

the trouble is, Simon, I’ve dozens of people to do something with, but no-one to do nothing with.

There’s an all-important treading lightly required here: but I pray that some of us may offer gifts of friendship and encouragement to do nothing with alongside the more usual to do something with. God bless the new friends I’ve been privileged to bring together this afternoon. I don’t doubt that each will bring untold blessing to the other. A kind of nothing that is an unimaginably important something !