Spending a week on a canal boat is a choice to go slow. Not that it is easy –the locks are hard work –especially when there are twenty three in a row. But travelling this way, you can’t expect to get to where you are going with great speed. I suspect this is more the way of the church than we would like –hard work at times, and slow moving. Unexpected friends are made and people enter to help for a season. And as we keep moving, a rhythm develops and a beauty is discovered, that is so often missed in the fast lane. Each evening we have enjoyed sharing the discipline of Compline –a monastic form of evening prayer. Taking time to sit with beauty is a blessing, but it is also a discipline. It teaches us gratitude and space to listen and to be. The challenge of course is to find this way of being beyond the canal –in the midst of ordinary everyday life.