If you walk down the main shopping street in Woodbridge, Suffolk, you’ll come across a chocolate shop. And like nearly every other chocolate shop at this time of year it’s got a themed St Valentine’s day display. The implication is if you want to show proper love, then you need to buy some premium chocolate and give it to that special person in your life. Failing that I hear Nurses, Doctors and the Clergy are grateful recipients!
If you then walk around the corner, you’ll come to church that has a large glass floor to ceiling doorway. It too has a display for St Valentine’s day. There’s a small table laid for tea for two with cakes, some red hearts, a tea set and chairs. But the difference is in a frame to the right. There are some verses from this Sundays Epistle reading from 1 Corinthians 13. They are such well known words but they bear repeating in a modern translation: “Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends.”
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St Mary's Church, Redbourn 