God is with us

that is certainly how I felt on Saturday!
I went with a group from my churches to a United Reformed Church event in Birmingham which was to celebrate being Multicultural. We went in a minibus. Did you know that there is no parking in central Brum for minibuses? Phil (my hero and our intrepid driver) eventually parked it on a street right the other side of the inner ring road. By that time he had thanked me for having the foresight to print off a map of central Birmingham as the minibus obviously didn't have any juice flowing to the cigarette lighter as the Satnav died just on hitting the centre. Hmmmm. More on this in a minute

We were there not just because it is good to celebrate being multicultural but because my small church had won a special award for telling our story in an interesting way. You can see how I used my scrapping skills to finish the project off here (scroll down to 22 April) And our prize was a rather fancy pulpit fall that also has "We are a multicultural church" on the bottom pf it. We don't actually have a pulpit and we'll have to adapt our lecturn (the thing you stand behind to give a lecture or read from the Bible) but we will display it as we are mighty proud of it. Here I am with Esther who had only arrived back in the country from Africa the day before and our Moderator of General Assembly (not a very interesting name for an important short term job in our church) John Marsh who I first met when I was doing youth work for the URC on the Ginger Group 22 years ago

Then all we needed to do was leave Birmingham. Phil reckoned that the van was too far away for us all to walk there. He was right. So the two of us went to get the van while the others waited ready for a phone call to say we were outside. There is a lovely German market through the centre of Brum at the moment. It was heaving. People were allowed alcohol. It was raining. It was dark. It took us 30 mins to get to the van. And remember that inner ring road. We had to find our way round it to pick the others up. Birmingham centre also doesn't have roundabouts. It has circuses which are roundabouts with big buildings on them so you can't see your exits. Let me say that I know God was with us as we would never have found our way to the church to find the others any other way. He was certainly with Phil who ignored my suggestion, on seeing the motorway signs that we could just go without them. I was kidding. Almost.

And God with us is the Salt theme today. Pauline has written a wonderful reflection on it here.
I wanted to emphasize the fact that God coming as one of us meant entering into the whole human thing. It was also a great excuse to scrap this photo of my sister in law holding her grandson for the first time (eek how can my sister in law be a granny. We are not that old!)
The papers are all K and Co from the Urban Rhapsody scrap pad and I used an old Pencil Lines sketch to kick start the process. I liked the bird (would have been better facing the other way round) and the fact it said "blessed" on it so I highlighted it with glossy accents, a grungeboard star and a stick on pearl the two bits of grungeboard were inked with brown and yellow distress inks and then spritzed with pearl glimmer mist. the title is all Doodlebug letters

that's it for now must go and focus on how God will be with us again - Advent scrapbook journal tonight is on the Second Coming. Not something URC folk think about that much really. Maybe we should...