3 May 2026  - From My Diary 1996

We celebrated the Sacrament in the morning and afternoon. The Afternoon Service was held in the Kirk Hall. The last hymn followed the Benediction and was unannounced. This was unfortunate. The wrong hymn was listed. The words of both hymns were sung together. Fortunately, they both had four verses and  both were  common metre. The cacophony worked!

One of our children was asking questions about the communion. What did it mean? Could he come along? Why did Jesus die to show us that he loved us? Couldn’t he just keep on living? I explained as best I could and encouraged him to come along to the next celebration on Pentecost.

The Treasurer and the Worship Convener have made an excellent appeal to the congregation to raise money for the restoration of the kirk organ. It has been decided to return the organ to its original form with tracker action. We are half way there. Pipe organs in neighbouring churches are being sacrificed for electronic.

It isn’t the only new initiative in the parish. The Fellowship Committee organised an evening for our twelve new members together with their spouses and district elders. An elder decided to start a Coffee Morning on a Tuesday because the nearby café was closed then. The Coffee Morning still functions thirty years later.

A retired minister’s wife died. He wrote about the comfort he had received. ‘These expressions  of sympathy, I have discovered, are very worthwhile. Each one individually and the whole mass of them collectively have made me feel surrounded and supported by a great wave of warmth, sympathy and friendship.’

An older member who was widowed a year ago has very little sight. He had trouble with the toothpaste. ‘If I had a blue bristled brush, I couldn’t find white toothpaste and vice versa. Now I simply squirt the toothpaste into my mouth!’ I spent an afternoon in the garden reading Edward de Bono’s life-changing book on ‘Lateral Thinking’!