Snow in California

I've been at a couple of meetings recently where everyone was turning their thoughts to the things that lie ahead for us in 2011. On Sunday morning, I was the speaker at the morning service of my home church in Falkirk. That's beginning to be kind of a regular fixture;  since coming back to Europe, I've been the preacher on the first Sunday of every new year and have had the privilege of helping people evaluate how they might grow closer to God and be ready for His working in and through their lives in the year ahead.


Then, yesterday, someone from church invited me to go with them to a ladies' meeting in California. (No, not the California on the west coast of the USA. This California is a little village about four miles south of Falkirk - "up the braes" as the locals would say. In fact, it's the village where my grandmother was born, but I think this was the first time I had been there since the 1960s or 1970s. A signpost at the entrance to the town welcomes you to the "sunshine village," but in fact it was snowing while we were there!) 


It was fun to go to this lunch and worship meeting which brought together women from different parts of Scotland, as it was held in the home of a couple I had known nearly twenty years ago when they and their two children were part of a King's Kids Christmas outreach that I was leading in the east of Scotland. To this day, I still share testimonies from that team if I'm speaking about how children and teenagers can hear God's voice. This family lived in Glasgow at the time, so it was quite a surprise to reconnect with them and discover that they'd moved to California.