Ow

I am inspecting my fingers to count the number of needle-holes in them. Lots. No, I haven't been letting some mad doctor near me: I've been crafty, kind of!

It happened like this. After church this morning, one of our priests bailed me up and said she needed to grovel - the second monthly contemplative service is next Sunday and the person who was going to be leading it has found out that she can't, and could I pretty please do it?

Slight problem: I'm in Picton training this week and have an assignment that I must finish this week. And it usually takes me a while for inspiration to come. But this time, I put my hand into my pocket and found my Anglican prayer beads, which I usually carry most places. I've been using the Roman Catholic rosary for some time, but when I was at Synod I got an Anglican rosary and have been finding that very useful for contemplation. I suggested to our priest, "What about we make and pray with Anglican prayer beads?"

She liked the idea, so we went to Spotlight after church and got a lot of beads, cord, crosses, medallions etc and started to figure out how to make them, using my set as a model. At the cost of a number of pricked fingers and some frustration, we have now made 13 sets (the first one was a "trial piece" for our daughter while we were figuring out how to rig them). We decided, after doing our daughter's set, that getting people to make them at the service was not going to work as it was very fiddly, took quite a while, and at times was very frustrating and not at all conducive to contemplation (like when I was about to tie both ends together and let go of one end, with all the beads cheerfully sliding off onto the floor...)!

However, praying them together in a group should be pretty neat. Terrified of leading something like that, but hey, let's give it a go!