My 10 most memorable moments of 2016

  1. Crossing the Minch for the first time.
  2. Watching a ship going through the Panama Canal.
  3. Shaking hands with Samuel Escobar in the queue for breakfast at a conference.
  4. Listening to a US man telling me about his legal marihuana-growing business, over lunch in my church in Colombia.
  5. Finding a young woman unconscious on the pavement on my way to work.
  6. Discovering Romans 5:17.
  7. Spotting a scorpion crawling out of my flatmate’s bedroom.
  8. Witnessing two American (I mean US) men brawling on a flight in Colombia. The Colombians booed and jeered and the woman beside me said, “Gringo go home”. One brave Colombian stood between them.
  9. Seeing the oldest evidence of Christianity in Scotland. (The Latinus Stone, from ca. 450AD).
  10. A frosty day out in Ulm, Germany, with an old friend.
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Moral dilemma

Yesterday, I saw a man loading shopping into his car and noticed that he had dropped a packet of cigarettes.

I wondered if I should:

a) point out that he had dropped them

OR

b) knowing they are harmful to him, not tell him.

In the event, he noticed himself and picked them up, solving the problem for me.

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A stream or a waterfall?

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On Sunday at church I found myself singing something like this in the worship time: I want to drink from your stream.

This is not an uncommon idea in Christian devotional language;

Jesus does, after all, promise to give us living water,

but when I shut my eyes to picture the scene,

the image that came to mind was not a gentle, civilized stream,

but a roaring, deafening, unceasing cataract, the Niagara or Victoria Falls.

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