do as you like!

There was another service of thanksgiving held today.

The lady who'd died was 93 and the crowd that gathered was really impressively large. I mean, when you get to that age, your peers usually are either unfit or .. well, no longer there. In the main.

The size of the congregation was tribute itself to the calibre of this lady. And it's always a very real privilege to lead such a service and use such a person's long life as the platform for speaking God's word.

The message was simple. Jesus' answer, when questioned about what was the greatest commandment of all.

Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.

Which is pretty much what I think this lady had sought to do through her life.

It's good to be able to stop like that, and pause for a bit of reflection. Quite challenging, too. Is this how I'm living my life?

I forget who it was that first said it, but I remember it being said - Love God and do what you like!

That's going a long way back, mind - my first hearing that. I was still, I think, in the flush of youth, my early twenties sort of thing, and I remember being really quite struck by these words.

They seemed to me quite liberating. No rules and regulations. No laws at all. Just love the Lord and do what you like!

Except, of course, when you start to love the Lord, you cease to be all that concerned with what you'd like to do, and more and more concerned with what he'd like.

But as I say, that radical perspective's always been a really liberating thing for me. And hugely challenging, too. In the end of the day that's all that really matters - that I love the Lord, with all of my mind and all of my strength and all of my spirit as well.

I've an idea it was maybe a guy called Augustine who 'coined' the phrase. It's certainly the sort of thing that he'd have said.

So the service spoke to me as well - even if no one else was really touched!

I didn't have time to go on with the family for the after-service 'do'. There was another service here. The midweek lunch-time service.

A little bit more on the story of Joseph McJacob. A bright young man who ends ujp abroad and finds himself acting as a kind of economic czar for the powerful king of Egypt.

We've been thinking and praying a lot about our own young folk. Joseph was hitting his thirties when all this came about. And we recognise the huge sort of role our own young folk may play when they start getting into their thirties and on beyond.

Joseph displayed remarkable leaderfship gifts. It's these that we were looking at again.

We were praying them for the leaders in our own land here today: because that's the sort of leadership a country always needs.

And we were seeng just how important it still is for us in all the ongoing nurture of our young folk growing up - how important it is to instill in their minds and their hearts this outlook and perspective on all life.

The sort of thing that Joseph learned. And which made him such an influence for good.

I've been thinking a lot these past few weeks about those who were 17 or so when I first came here. Because I'm seeing them now, some twenty years down the line, at the age that Joseph was when the economic crisis began to kick in in Egypt.

And I'm aware of the roles that some of these folk now play - and the whole big sphere of influence that they have. At a time when a similar sort of economic 'downturn' hits our shores.

And I'm thinking, too, of the way in which the nurture and instruction and example that we give throughout those first long years of life before they leave their homes (as Joseph did, aged 17), are hugely instrumental in the shaping of the people they become.

And how it's often only twenty years on down the line before that prayerful Christian nurture maybe really starts to come into its own.

So we're praying hard for our young folk and for those that are up in their thirties now as well. And those beyond as well, of course!

We had our usual time of prayer at night. And that encompasses a whole great range of need

Including the needs of older folk, with whom the bulk of my afternoon was spent. Their day is maybe done in terms of all the influence they have out in the workplace and the market place of life. But they're still quite able to pray.

And still as able, well on in years, whatever their needs and condition - they're still as able to love the Lord, with all their heart and soul and mind and strength.

And then, I suppose, do as they like!