Celebrations at Sarum College

With the notable exception of Mary, we were all up incredibly early this morning.  Tom had to complete his paper round before being driven by Susan with others to the New Forest to undertake his long hike/camping expedition for his Duke of Edinburgh Award.  This entailed Sara also having to rise to take him to the Central Stores and get him organised. I was also up packing for my overnight stay in Sarum College, Salisbury as part of my ministry training - a residential weekend to finish off the teaching aspect of my preaching and leading worship module, to have time and opportunity to get to know and bond with fellow students (five of whom will be licensed this October) and have an opportunity to discuss the course and our ministry with our tutors.  We started at 9.30 am today with our usual morning worship and then split into our tutorial groups - in my case we looked at leading worship in the morning and preaching in the afternoon.  The standard of student is really high and each person on the LLM course is going to be a highly trained and effective minister I am sure.  The discernment process seems to work well - I only hope that I can live up to such a high standard myself.  One of our students was wearing the colours of West Ham United and we were all delighted that we could celebrate West Ham's return to Premier League football this evening following that club's win over Blackpool in the Championship Play-Off final.  So now we have the complete three clubs who are going up - Reading, my own Southampton and West Ham.  I have to say that I am sorry Blackpool couldn't make it too but, in fairness, West Ham were only two points below Saints and it could easily have been Southampton in the play-offs.  They deserved it.  Much wine drunk in the bar tonight.  One thing about being an Anglican is that wine seems to be involved in so much of our lives - after all, what was Jesus's first miracle!