For today’s all-age worship service at Thorpe Acre church, we were wrapping our “Sensing God” series. We’ve been following this theme since February, considering ideas of how we can engage with God (and how God engages with us) using our five senses. Yes – that did give us six services for five senses but we included a break for the Platinum Jubilee weekend since you don’t get one of those too often.

We wanted to include a chance for people to share some of their experiences of how they have sensed God since we started but didn’t want those to go on too long. That brought us back to the idea of using a burning match as a timer but that seemed just a touch too hazardous (I assume the carpet tiles are flame retardant but we didn’t want a dropped match leaving a scorch mark) and a match would be hard to see from the back of church on a sunny day.

The solution was for me to video a burning match earlier in the week. If you need a visual timer for something, do feel welcome to use it for non-commercial projects (I’ve published it under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA licence if you are interested). It gives about 45 seconds between when the lit match comes into frame until it goes out and there is a bar on the left of the screen that turns from yellow to black to give a further indication of time remaining:

Matchstick Timer