Special preparation sessions

As it was a bright and breezy day, I started yesterday morning by doing a load of washing. It dried in a few hours, even though it wasn't very warm.

Then, I had an email from Church Warden Jane in Montreux, giving me contact details for a couple who want a wedding blessing at St John's while I'm there on locum duty in the summer. Last year I was also in contact with a couple about their wedding blessing several months before I went out the Switzerland. This was far superior to a last minute rush, and I had time to give to this as co-incidentally I was here in Malaga at that time. 

After lunch, I drove out of the city along the east bank of the rio Guadalmedina, then took the A45 autovia towards Granada, for a rendezvous with Doreen the Chaplaincy's Curate, at a hotel restaurant just outside Casabermeja called El Corte, about 20km from Malaga. 

We have some adult candidates for Confirmation on Ascension Day and needed to talk through all aspects of the course. She'll be taking a session on her own when I'm far away at Salinas, we'll be sharing a couple of sessions and I'll be doing a couple on my own. The candidates so far at all Saint George based, and as the two of us have to move between the dispersed three church congregations, it's a challenge to make suitable arrangements. Also we have to adapt the course material to the candidates, and distribute it through five sessions. So, we discussed our priorities and approaches at great length while we planned, and worked over beer and tapas for three hours before parting with homework to do.

It will be a challenge to both of us, since the candidates are Nigerian migrant workers, based in the city but sometimes working elsewhere. Doreen already knows them, I don't. We're both going to find this challenging, but I think our varied set of past experiences in mission will hold us in good stead.

More preparation work to do today, for the Liturgy of Good Friday and in particular the Passion reading. I couldn't find an A4 leaflet file of the dialogue version of St John's Passion  in my web archive for use with a congregation, although I thought there was one somewhere which I created a long time ago. 

When I was at St John's, we still used an old fashioned Lent, Holy Week and Easter Church in Wales booklet containing this kind of material, dating back to the late sixties. It had been well conceived and was still good for use once a year. Perhaps the dialogue version I wanted is in my Geneva archive. That hasn't yet made it into the Cloud but is on one of my memory sticks. Ah well, never mind. I have done a new text now.

With this task complete, late afternoon I was able do go to Mercadona for my main week's grocery shopping, and then went at a pace for a circuit of the port and the Old Town in a chill wind, to be sure of getting some vigorous exercise after several hours hunched over a keyboard, editing.

Down on the quay, near the Pompidou Cultural centre, a cluster of white wooden hits is in the course of erection since yesterday. They suggest to me that there's going to be some sort of seasonal market in the coming weeks, as I know there will be around St John's in Cardiff city centre. I look forward to seeing this with great interest.