During my holiday this year I went to a tea plantation nearby in Ashburton, part of Dartmoor here in Devon. It isn’t a place you would normally consider a tea growing area, but somehow it works. After the tour our small group made Japanese sweets to go with the different teas we were going to sample. The inspiration for those sweets was to be taken from the surrounding wildlife. You can see what I chose. We all wondered what the collective noun for ladybirds was, and to our delight, when we checked online, it turned out to be ‘a loveliness’.

It made me wonder about collective nouns for other things, and what a collective noun for ‘God’s children’ might be? Well, God isn’t a group, we know that, but children turned out to be ‘an ingratitude of children’. It made me laugh, and I wondered who thought that up. A grumpy parent by the sounds of it!

Because the day had been so harmonious with everyone showing their kindness and care, their creativity and their appreciation, it filled me with joy to know that, in the world that seems incredibly difficult at the moment, everywhere there are pockets of people living in harmony. There are people praying and being uplifted. There are people not being taken in by the picture being presented to us, living with hearts of hope and faith. We know that the we all express qualities of God (truth, love, life etc) – every man, woman and child. So where is the greater power? Right there in every one of us. We don’t need to be fooled by fear or instability, but we do need to stand our spiritual ground for what is the underlying truth for all Mankind. We are the loved of God. Our birthright is peace. Our home is heaven. Right now.