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I spent a very enjoyable day at the start of the week with Al Gordon and Tim Hughes on the Worship Central worship leaders' retreat at Malshanger House, the little place in the country that HTB keep for such events.

I arrived in time for supper on the first evening, followed by a music quiz. Al seemed pleased when he heard of my of my previous quiz exploits.

Now it may just be that there are one or two other people out there ignorant of those exploits...

So here we go. This is me with Anne Robinson on the Weakest Link about four years ago. I only entered cos another friend wanted to audition. He was never called up. Me? Well, you don't think I'd be telling this story if I came second, do you?

You do?

Shame on you!

You're right. That photo could be anyone. Let's do better.

Count the ticks next to my name. For the record, the answers "ZZ Top", "Swansea" and "France", preceded by copious amounts of looking straight into the camera for effect, won me the game.

And (back to Worship Central) Al Gordon seemed quite pleased with this. Strangely I ended up on his team for the evening's music quiz... and I have to say that with the amount of competetive spirit between us, we could have set up a brewery!!! Of course we won. Even Tim's attempts to level the playing field by setting us foreign language worship song charades couldn't stop us. (How would you mime "Agnes Dei"? How did I do it? Successfully!)

So it was with enormous good grace that the assembled throng of worship leaders from all over the globe listened to my talks the following morning.

And with great grace that I was able to deliver them. I am struggling through one of my periodic depressive patches. Monday was a hyper day. I've been suffering for it since. The good thing is that the patches of up and down are switching more frequently now, and as they do that, though life is a bit of a roller coaster, it normally means the depression is on its way to burning itself out. Through the night on Monday I was so hyper I couldn't sleep; still, that gave me lots of chance to pray, and that's what I mean about delivering the talks with grace - a sense of gifted answer to prayer.

Just being there in that amazing place was a gift; being there with such wonderful people was a gift; being able to share some of the Salvations Song stuff was a terrific gift of which I never tire. God is good; and these hard days are filled with moments of glory to remind me of his goodness.