Dear Prime Time member,

Well – talk about making life tricky for myself;  I seem to have set the bar very high with my email last week…!  Thank you to everyone who replied to me; I know that I haven’t managed to respond to everyone – please try not to take it personally if you haven’t received a response from me – I will endeavour to reply to everyone eventually but I just received so much feedback, that if I had replied to each email, I wouldn’t have achieved much else this week!  I can promise you though that I have most definitely read every email and have appreciated each one for the insights as to your own ‘little rays of sunshine’ and also for your wisdom and encouragement.  Thank you for responding in such a positive way – it means a lot and yes, reading through all your emails did bring me a great deal of ‘Joy’.

So have you been on tenterhooks, waiting to find out what the subject of this week’s email would be?  Would I pick ‘Peace’, ‘Love’ or ‘Hope’?  Well the wait is over and I can reveal that this week I am shining the spotlight on ‘Love’.  It might have perhaps seemed a more obvious choice to have held onto this one for another month and used it for the email ahead of Valentine’s Day weekend, but as happened last week, this week’s email has rather formed itself thanks to events that have occurred, items of interest that I’ve come across as well as contributions that I have received. ‘Love’ just seemed to tie all these things together.

On Monday, I wanted to write to my friend and fellow Prime Time Team member Jane whose mum had died a few days previously.  As I pondered over what to say and what words I might use to bring comfort to Jane, I began considering the relationship between love and loss and why grief can be such a painful experience.  I came to the conclusion that grief is our penalty for having the capacity to love and to be loved; we cannot have one without the other.  The author Francis Weller wrote ‘Grief and love are sisters, woven together from the beginning.  Their kinship reminds us that there is no love that does not contain loss and no loss that is not a reminder of the love we carry for what we once held close’.

Many of us are grieving at the moment.  I am aware that a number of Prime Time members have lost close friends or family members in recent months.  If you are reading this email and grieving the loss of a someone important in your life, I hope that the Francis Weller quote is of comfort to you.  I know I shall return to it again and again to help me through times of loss.  We are all to some extent experiencing loss at the moment.  It may not be the death of someone close to us, but the last phrase of Francis Weller’s quote could equally apply to a population who has lost, if only temporarily, their accustomed way of life, their freedom of movement, freedom of choice.  Our memories remind us daily of the aspects of our lives that ‘we once held close’ and we are experiencing a form of grief reaction when we acknowledge that these things are currently ‘lost’ to us.  When you consider a lost way of life, or a way of life that is no longer open to us in terms of being a grief reaction, it’s easy to see why it hurts.  If this is you, you may find comfort in the words of Psalm 34, verse 18; ‘The Lord is close to the broken-hearted and saves those who are crushed in sprit’.  I can definitely identify with those last three words.  I don’t know about you, but with each round of lock downs, I’ve found it just that little bit harder to stay motivated.  Things seem just that little bit more of a struggle and it’s harder to stay positive.  Yes, at times it feels as though my spirit is being crushed and at those times is comforting to know that ‘The Lord is close’ and those ‘little rays of sunshine’ that we talked about last week certainly do bring me joy and help to lift my spirits when they feel as though the pandemic has just trodden on them with a big boot.

The word ‘love’ is a commonly recurring word in the Bible; a quick Google search tells me that it appears 551 times in the New International Version which is the one we tend to use here at BHC.  We are probably all familiar with Jesus instruction to ‘Love one another’ which came in his final commandment to his apostles during the Last Supper.  ‘…love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. If you have love for one another, then everyone will know that you are my disciples’.  (John 13:34-35)

Integral to Christian teaching is the understanding of the need to show unconditional love to all.  I am in the extremely fortunate position in my role here at the church of being surrounded by colleagues and volunteers who completely embody this requirement and live it out in their daily lives and the volunteers who with me, form the Prime Time Team are a terrific example of this.  They are keeping in regular contact with people who we have identified could be particularly vulnerable at this time, especially those who are not on the internet and so do not receive this weekly email.  As the pandemic has gone on, however, I have also become aware that like myself they are continually on the alert for news items, articles poems and sometimes ‘funnies’ that might be of interest to our members and they send them onto me with a note saying ‘I thought this might be good for Prime Time’.  When Jesus instructed his followers to ‘Love one another’, he did not mean ‘just love your family and friends’, the implication is much wider.  In the Gospel of Mark, Jesus is recorded as giving the commandment; ‘Love your neighbour as yourself’ (Mark 12, verse 31) and no, he wasn’t just referring to the person you happen to live next door to, he is referring here to the requirement to show unconditional love to all, which is what we on the Prime Time team try to do.

Earlier this week I received an email from Prime Time Team member Di Drudge reporting that scammers seem to be quite active again at the moment and asking me to consider making Prime Timers aware of a couple of email scams that she has become aware of in the hope that it will make it less likely that anyone would be taken in by them.  Prime Time isn’t all about tea and cake you see (although we would agree they are very important components of life) but we are called to love people in whatever way is needed – public service announcements included!

So please read the following carefully and if you receive any emails which seem to include similar content, please do double check and think carefully ‘Is this email genuine?’.  If you are in doubt, press ‘delete’ or ask someone you trust for advice before replying.

TV License Scam Email: Emails are being received purporting to be from the TV licencing authorities advising that a Direct Debit had been cancelled and please would the recipient create a new one by replying to the email and providing their bank account number and sort code.

Covid-19 Vaccination Scam: Emails are being received purporting to be from the NHS regarding an invitation to attend for a Covid vaccination.  The recipient is being asked to confirm their identity by replying to the email, giving their bank card details as the means of verifying their identity.  You will either get a letter through the post inviting you to attend for a Covid vaccination or you will receive a phone call or text message from your GP surgery –you would not receive an email such as this.  A genuine contact about the vaccination process would NEVER require you to give your bank details.  All NHS procedures are free of charge and the Covid vaccine is no exception.

Please be vigilant.  Fraudsters are trying to capitalise on a very topsy-turvy world and are catching people off guard when they are feeling low and perhaps pre-occupied with anxieties about the current situation.  If you fall victim to a fraud, you are not to blame – you are the victim of a crime.  Please confide in someone so that they can help you report it, and the more quickly the better as in some instances it can be possible for the money to be recovered.  It might be embarrassing to admit that you were taken in, but the person in the wrong is the fraudster, not you.  There are a number of organisations who can help support victims of fraud, so please do not keep it to yourself if you should fall victim to one of these scams.

I’m not going to end on such a sobering note and of course I’ve not yet mentioned Olwen, our fourth and final Team member.  Olwen provided me with the ‘Eureka’ moment this week – the point at which I knew I had something to offer you that might just rival Beethoven’s ‘Ode to Joy’ from last week.  Olwen had come across some illustrations from a book published last year entitled ‘The Boy, the Fox, the Mole and the Horse’ by Charlie Mackesy.  Have you come across it?  I had heard of it, but wasn’t really familiar with its content until Olwen emailed me about it on Thursday and I must say, I think I’m going to invest in a copy – so advance warning here,  you can expect a few more Charlie Mackesy illustrations cropping up in Prime Time emails in the future!  It’s essentially a picture book with reading of appeal for ages 4 to 104, as the illustrations explore the thoughts and feelings that unite us all.

So without further ado, I give to you your little treat for this week (courtesy of Olwen)…

For me, receiving this was another ‘little ray of sunshine’ moment that made me smile and brought me joy.  It also reminded me of a verse from Lamentations, ‘The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases’ (Lamentations Chapter 3, Verse 22).  I’ve attached the illustration to this email as well so that if you wish to, it is easy for you to print out and stick to your fridge (or wherever you like to have such things on prominent display).  This is from the four of us to all of you – and we hope that it helps you to know this week that you are loved.

‘So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love’ (Corinthians: Chapter 13, Verse 13)

With love from us all (how else could we end this email?!)

Your Prime Time Team; Jane, Di, Olwen and Penny xxxx (It’s been rather a Team effort this week!)