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Our Gifted Shop is open before and after all masses this weekend, as usual on the first Sunday of the month.

Each month, we look ahead to the upcoming saint and holy days and try and stock some appropriate items. In September, for example, we have St Theresa of Calcutta (on Sept. 5), birth of Blessed Virgin Mary (Sept. 8), St Pio (Sept. 23), St Vincent de Paul (Sept. 27), and Saints Michael, Gabriel and Raphael (the guardian angels) on Sept. 29. In Gifted, you’ll find some lovely items such as rosary beads, candles and magnets associated with some of these saints.

The SVP team continues to be busy on a number of fronts and we would like to thank all of you for your prayers, as this is the fuel that energizes us.

On Friday evening, we held our B-Attitudes monthly meeting and plans are afoot to once again support World Homelessness Day in October – more to follow! Also, with the start of the school year approaching, we are looking forward to strengthening our links with our Mini-Vinnies in St Swithun Wells. With the guidance of the Holy Spirit, we trust that all three strands of the SVP (adults team, B-Attitudes and Mini-Vinnies) will be able to help the needy amongst us.

We recently held our regular SVP Team monthly meeting and the agenda was choc-a-bloc as normal! We started our meeting, as all SVP Conferences do, with an opening prayer and a spiritual reading and then we did a whistlestop tour of the various work streams, including the food bank, bereavement support, home, care home and detention centre visits, the B-Attitudes, the Mini-Vinnies and our Gifted shop.

Even though we are doing a range of activities we do not want to rest on our laurels while there might be some other need out there. Are you aware of any need that we are not addressing? When we are involved in the detail at the coalface it is very easy to miss the bigger picture, so we depend on you to tell us what we’re not seeing!

During the week we received a request from a person looking to rent a single or a double bedroom in South Ruislip. If you, or someone you know, is looking to take in a lodger then can you please get in touch with the SVP Team and we can then provide you contact details.

Secondly, we would like to thank you all for the continual support you give to our Gifted shop! It is lovely to have your support and to know that we are able to help you find those particular items that you were looking for, be it a special crucifix, a statue of a particular saint or even a pocket-sized rosary beads! We open on the weekend of the first Sunday of every month so looking forward to your support again after the masses of Sept. 2-3.

They say that every cloud has a silver lining, and we’re sure not short of clouds this summer! If the silver lining has meant that you have had a bumper crop in your allotment, then why not bring your surplus fresh fruit and veg to the food bank? The majority of the food that we distribute is non-perishable, bagged or tinned, so any variation to that in the form of freshly grown local crops would be a great addition to the diets of the families we help. You’ll see us setting up the food bank at 10:30 a.m. every Saturday in the hall, so that would be the best time to drop off your donations. Now that we’ve planted the seed, let’s pray that it’ll bear fruit!