Erica and I hosted our first Nineteen Day Feast last night at our home in Welwyn since we moved here in February.

The Nineteen Day Feast is the foundation of Baha’i community life, a time when we say prayers together, consult about the affairs of the community, and then have a wonderful social period. It’s a time to refresh ourselves spiritually, to strengthen the bonds of fellowship and friendship, and to think about where are going as a community.

One of the challenges we face is how to meet new people who might be interested to learn about the healing message of Baha’u'llah. We really want to increase our community of interest. To get the ideas flowing, we each took a bunch of Post-It notes and we all had to write down as many ways as we could dream up (making no judgement about whether they were good or bad ideas) of meeting new people - one idea per Post-It.

Then we went round and each of us read out one of our ideas and stuck the note to the piano. (We tried a cork board, but the notes wouldn’t stick. Actually they wouldn’t stick to the piano either.)

We had a flood of ideas. We thought the inter-faith boxing match might not have quite the desired effect, but Aref, our Local Assembly secretary, took all the Post-Its home and is going to type them up into a list that the Local Assembly can consult about at its next meeting.

It was a great pleasure to welcome our fellow Baha’is into our home. “It’s a lovely home,” they said. “So country,” Ellie, one of the Persian ladies, commented. Ellie is an interior designer. I think she meant that it has the feel of a country cottage.

Young Jacob was the focus of much of the attention, as always when he brings his mum to Feast. Even Emma the dog didn’t have to be banished from the sitting room.

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Monday 21 August, 2006 We’ve been waiting for the roofers to come and fix a leak since Saturday. It was too wet on Saturday, and they’ve just called to say it will be too wet this morning. The weather!