Frome Christian Mens Group meeting
As you may know I have featured hundreds of posters since I started this diary. Some are on the mark and some are not. The above gives a very powerful visual message about what correct advice can do. I saw it in the church hall in which we had our men’s breakfast this morning
Up early this morning to attend the Christian men’s breakfast in Frome. It is always a pleasure to meet articulated successful men, not without problems it must be said, who have something to give and our genuinely interested in other people in the fellowship. We met at eight am in a local church and found the cook already busy preparing what was a very lovingly cooked and thoughtfully served break-fast. I don’t know what counts as a fast but it was 12 hours since I last ate so in western terms I suppose that counts as abstinence.
The breakfast consisted of magical little squares of fried bread cooked – not in cheap fried fat – but something akin to coconut oil, small bits of lean bacon, carefully grilled small mushrooms, tomatoes, good old baked beans, fried egg and some very fine sausages which he got from Lidl. I know the chap is very caring and the whole meal went down like magic. I am convinced over the years that if something is cooked with love it tastes better and is accepted by the human body more readily. I may be deluding myself but that’s what I found.
We started with prayers and announcements and then Mike spoke, a man who against all odds is trying to install local broadcasting stations in Gaza. There were 16 but they have all been either disabled or destroyed. He is a person who never takes no for an answer. The Israelis will not allow in any equipment that could be dual use in other words could be used by insurgents and fighters. Their whole transmitting kit including microphone weight about 20 kilograms and has a radius of five miles which means it can cover the Gaza strip which is 10 miles wide.
Mike met someone through serendipity who is in a position of authority with the United Nations who may give him the authority to bring through the transmitter. I wanted to engage him on political matters by asking about Hamas and finding out if they were as bad as they had been made out to be. He replied that he was not interested in politics and just concerned with food, shelter, medical attention, safety. I shall engage him on the phone and find out whether he has met members of Hamas and if so what they are like.
After the talk I gave a testimony about the meeting I had last Wednesday, please see my diary, and said that I agreed with him that we should not overthink and if we get an impulse to say something or meet someone we should do so trusting that it is from a higher source. The meeting I had with my friend recently mentioned about matters in such a small country as Lesotho and that two successive people 100 miles apart would have the interest of a person 4000 miles away in common blows my mind.
I remember asking myself why I was telling someone who did not know Steve, the first contact, about something in such a small South African country, to find that they immediately jumped on it with the right contact. The odds against this are millions to one. As I said, you could not make it up.
A member of the group was trying to register as a charity, a board of trustees that included someone from Kenya. They have not found a bank that is willing to take on this mixed heritage although the Kenyan trustee would be giving thousands of pounds to charity. The meeting ended at 9:30 a.m. with prayers asking that God bless and look after the suffering connected with what’s happening in Israel and the Gaza strip.
As I have said before with this type of meeting, there is no feeling better than being understood and accepted and I certainly felt that this morning so yes it was getting up early and driving to Frome. Unfortunately, the meetings are less than once a month but I suppose that makes it more valued. I’ve offered my services to the committee to beef up the newsletter and enhance the communication potential that exists between each of the members currently about 30 in number.
So, we had planned to set off Monday morning for Dartmoor and from there travel to Plymouth where we would stay two nights. However on Sunday morning I woke up feeling that these arrangements could be improved on. As there was nothing much holding us on the Sunday I decided we will go off during the afternoon. I booked a hotel straight away, The weather forecast was not brilliant but I thought if we stuck to the main roads we would be all right. I was wrong.
Our hotel was definitely old world. Paddy the manager definitely knows his stuff and if you remain in the bar area you will notice a close-knit community where everybody knows everybody else. He told me that they have large numbers of Dutch people who for some reason are attracted to the moor. Paddy has lived in the area all his life; he went to Plymouth to get a degree but now finds it ‘too far away’. Some reviews said that the hotel could do with a deep clean. I suppose it could but I don’t really care because all the features were present, the feeling of history, a pleasant bar, and most of all an atmosphere.
Oh and by the way, darkness at night really is dark. There was a slightly surreal telephone box lit from within that was now a defibrillator. I did not photograph it but here is a reminder. I did not have the best night in the world. I am sensitive to EMF; it feels as if my whole body is being scratched and there is no escape. I even stood outside the hotel on a grass verge at half past one in the morning in the rain in bare feet to try and ground the energies. In case you laugh, it is a science, the process is called Grounding where the energies of your feet link to the energies of the Earth.