This morning Jane and I were back in our old haunts in South East London, where I was speaking at Hither Green Baptist Church. It was good to see old friends there, including the unexpected bonus of Matt being back there too. We also enjoyed a delicious lunch hosted by Prince and Joyce, which reminded my stomach of many church lunches we enjoyed when we used to be members of the church.

Being Remembrance Sunday, it would have been hard to avoid thinking about some themes around remembrance and I decided to tackle it head on by asking why, and what and how, we need to remember. I pondered for a while on remembering war and found myself unexpectedly choked up as I read Wilfred Owen’s Dulce et Decorum Est. I had a couple more poems to share, which gave me a chance to recover, and moved on happier memories of our time at the church. I also gave some pointers to what the Bible says on the topic. Being a collection of books written principally to help us remember, it is understandably quite biased towards the value of remembering things; the notable exception is that we do not need to dwell on what is bad in the past (see, for example, 1 Corinthians 13:4-7). Finally I ended with a couple of points of application.

I hadn’t managed to prepare as much as I would like so I didn’t have any pictures to throw up on the screen to reinforce the words. Nor did I get round to that important matter of making all the points start with the same letter! However, if you want to know more you check out the recording (just shy of 40 minutes!).