“See! The winter is past; the rains are over and gone. Flowers appear on the earth; the season of singing has come, the cooing of doves is heard in our land.” (Song of Songs‬ ‭2:11-12‬, ‭NIV‬‬)

I hope you are enjoying that it is starting to feel like Spring here in Delft. I heard some doves (read: pigeons) a couple of days ago cooing and I was reminded of the verse above, and thought: I am not sure that this is actually a nice noise. Anyway, I should get on with the information I wanted to share with you.

We have mentioned recently in our Sunday meetings we are going to be changing the time of our meetings to 11.00. Apart from the obvious advantages of this for those of us without small children (i.e. not me!), I think there are some genuine reasons to be optimistic about these changes.

The first is that OPEN is going to be closed from the 3 March on Sundays (apart from the last Sunday of the month). Up to now, we had been constrained by the opening time of the building and if you remember, we moved our time to 10.00 for this reason – in a sense we are going “back to normal”. There will be no rush at the end of the service to pack-down and get ready for the building to open.

Secondly, we have had reasonably consistent complaints about the noise from our meetings since our move to OPEN in the summer. It was never our desire to be a nuisance to our neighbours and OPEN have been working to find a solution to this problem with us. By moving the meeting later, the noise early in the morning is minimized and hopefully there will be less problems caused to the neighbourhood.

All in all, I think as we move into Spring, we move into a new season with this building. One that I hope can be a little bit freer and easier for us. As we said from the beginning it is our temporary home, but we will do our best to treat it well during our time here.