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When it comes to making cards, scrap booking and other crafts - I'm not the person to speak to. All that sort of thing is best left to others, including my wife. So when it comes to planning craft activities for our Holiday Club I am often a sceptical on looker - wondering how these ideas are going to come together, within the time scale of each morning, and within our overall budget.

But one thing we have seen over the few years we have been running our holiday club is that all of the children enjoy the craft. Both the boys and girls really get in to it, whether they are at the bottom or top end of the age range.

This year one of the bright ideas was to make a banner, that would eventually be hung permanently within the church. The children would be given a felt square and letter, and various other bits such as small felt shapes and buttons which they would use to decorate their square.

We weren't really sure how well it would turn out - but the children loved it, and as you can see the result is amazing.

Now all that needs to be done is for all the squares to be sewn onto the backing material.

Wordle

A wordle is an image made up of words taken from a passage, speech, book etc. where the size of the word is related to the number of times it is used. Common words (such as 'the' or 'and' are usually not included for obvious reasons). I created the following wordle on wordle.net using my notes for tomorrow's sermon.

Any ideas on the topic?

Remember Remember

Today is the second and final day of the 'UK Open International Memory Championships' in London. [As I had to check back to their website three times just to get the competition title correct there is probably no point in me entering for next year's competition!]

Competitors will have to complete a number of memory challenges over the two days, and the one with the most points at the end wins. These challenges include things like having 30 minutes to remember a list of 1s and 0s (e.g. 0111010011001...). The winner of that particular task correctly remembered a list of 3620 1s and 0s. Other tasks include remembering names and faces, and quickest time to memorise a pack of playing cards.

Whilst we may struggle to remember what we did yesterday, or what we're supposed to be doing today, memory is important. Again and again the Bible encourages us to remember the things that God has done in the past - as that will shape our present and our future. Someone has said that Christianity is very simple, all you need is bread, wine, a memory and a vision. The bread and the wine remind us of Jesus' sacrificial death and the love and forgiveness of God. Jesus said to his disciples 'love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another'.

Some things are more important to remember than others. It is quite important to remember certain dates. It is quite important to remember names and faces. It is not so important to remember lists of 1s and 0s.

It is important to remember how much God loves us, and that he wants us to love others too.

Back Again

It's almost a month since my last blog - anyone would have thought that I was away on holiday...but now I'm back. Over the next week or so there will be pictures of the banner we made in Holiday Bible Club - for those of you who are waiting for that. There will be some thoughts on the last in our Sunday morning series looking at Hebrews. And there will be a few pictures from our summer holiday. And by the middle of September I will hopefully be able to update you on all R's test results from Great Ormond Street.