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Good morning. I am hopeless at ‘de-cluttering’, but I really enjoy sorting through stuff I’ve forgotten I had.

It was as part of my latest failed attempt to tidy up that I found a photo I hadn’t seen in 50 years.Ìý It was a tiny black and white snap of my dad’s uncle Joe.Ìý My dad was very fond of Joe and when, in the mid 1950’s we moved from Aberdeen to London he was keen that his uncle should visit.Ìý When he was with us, we thought that, as a man who’d gone to sea most of his life Joe would be interested in the Cutty Sark – the last of the tea clippers which had not long been preserved in dry-dock at Greenwich.Ìý He loved it.Ìý And as we walked around it my dad said something about the rigging looking complicated.Ìý Joe took his arm and led him the length of the ship naming every bit of rigging – it was a revelation.

We knew he’d been at sea, latterly as a trawler skipper - we didn’t know that he had started at sea on sailing ships.Ìý And but for pure chance we’d never have known.

Which got me thinking about how often we don’t know things about one another perhaps because we don’t make space in our relationships for that kind of sharing. I attend a good few funerals these days.Ìý And I never attend one without finding out something surprising about someone I thought I knew.ÌýÌý
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That we should love one another is one of the central messages of the New Testament.Ìý But surely one of the most powerful ways that we can show – and receive – love is by really getting to know and learn about one another.Ìý Fail to do that and we can miss so much that is precious.

Father, thank you that every one of us is unique.Ìý Give us wisdom to truly love, value and get to know one another in ways that will enrich us.Ìý Amen