FREE HUGS IN CHELTENHAM

Sam (far left) and Tin (second from right) with beautiful French students

Today, my son Sam and Jan Akkerman's nemesis, our most dear friend Tin, went to Cheltenham to offer some free hugs!


As Secretary of our village's Parochial Church Council, I felt it was my duty to report this activity (done on behalf of God, who couldn't be there in person, and who asked us to represent him by proxy), at our meeting tonight.  I am uncertain as to whether it will be minuted or not.  


In fact, the reason I told the Council was that I had been extremely moved by our vicar's monthly letter in our parish magazine.


In concluding his letter, Reverend Woodger wrote:


"... if we want to find God, we do not have to look far; he is all around us, in everything, but never closer than in the people he has given us to love."


Gorgeous, huh?

See the slideshow, set to Michael Jackson's beautiful "Heal the World", that Sam made this evening.  

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ALdKai797E0

We hope you enjoy it, and that it might inspire you to do the same!

Free Hugs

Hugs, dispensed free to the crowds milling and wandering in Trafalgar Square on a busy Saturday in May!  I still cannot stop smiling.  Intimacy and trust, free!  Full body embrace from a total stranger, free!  Just gorgeous.   Bearing in mind that physical touch, and the very act of smiling, produce 'feel-good' chemicals in our bodies (endorphins, I think), I do believe those beautiful men were administering really good medicine!   I am still humming and I am overjoyed that I had my camera with me.  What a sublime message for a humanity searching for meaning.  One really does not have to embrace any particular creed or dogma to see that the message of unity can come in the simplest ways.   

                  

                  

                                            
                                               

                  

And here are some pictures to prove that love is contagious.

Never under-estimate the power of love!  It is not an emotion - it's power, and as Teilhard de Chardin said, 

"Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love, and then, for a second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire."