Today is Sunday – a day to slow down and recharge your batteries. Here is a wee video, entitled, This is the Place, that I hope will help you do just that. I wrote the meditation a few years ago and Rae, who works in the church studio put it together. I hope it brings you a sense of peace. The music is the soundtrack from “The Road to Perdition” Let’s hope it is the road to peace.

I can’t believe how quickly time flies. In a less than a week we’ll have Paul and Marty Clark with us all the way from Peru.

( Paul is the gentleman standing to the left of Willie, as Willie, makes an impassioned plea to Peruvian business people to support the project.)

I’m really looking forward to having Paul and his wife Marty with us here in St Andrew’s Bo’ness on Sunday 20th May, he will be with us for two services. We hope that the evening service will attract people from all over. Paul is the visionary that has worked so hard to bring about a ministry in Peru that not only feeds the souls of children but also feeds their bodies.

Talking about feeding things. I was having lunch with Paul Clark in a restaurant in Lima just last January, when believe it or not the following happened. A parrot from a tree swooped down and stole a piece of bread from the bread basket and then took it up the tree to eat.

This is the guy who has inspired so many Scots who have visited Peru to return to Scotland as ambassadors for the poor. It was meeting Paul Clark away back in the early 90s that first inspired Willie McPherson to do something about the needs of the street children.

When Willie came to live in Bo’ness around 1994 we struck up a friendship and before long he became a Director of the Vine Trust. Little did we think then that this work would grow to the stage it is at today. When I started the Trust in 1985 it was giving away a few hundred per year. Today I think we have nearly topped a million in turnover last year. Its not the money, that excites me, it is the changed lives in Peru and Scotland and indeed the whole of the UK and even America that thrills me. So from little acorn great trees grow let us pray that the Vine Trust continues grow in a way that is honouring to God, “Connecting Lives To Change People.” Now that’s not a bad motto, but connecting lives to the Vine to change people, that is just BRILLIANT!