Rev Simon Bowkett 💙🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿🇺🇦

Nigel Farage has called Welsh people “Foreign speakers” in a Cameo video. I hate to break it to you Mr Farage, but if you read a history book you would realise English is more foreign in the UK than Welsh. He said: “Gutted I couldn’t attend the wedding. I wanted to come, but I heard that half the guests were Welsh, and I don’t know. Who knows what would have happened with all those foreign speakers there. I don’t know.” This is at a time that his party are trying to convince people in Wales that they should elect them to the Welsh Parliament. Big credit to the Guardian for breaking this story: theguardian.com/uk-news/ng-int…

Most of us avoid confrontation. At work. At home. With friends. It’s easier to keep the peace than say the hard thing. But what if staying silent actually costs more than speaking up? Welcome to today's Super Short Thought!

Cameras on lampposts. Online tracking. Data everywhere. We live in a world where for most people, our privacy really matters to us. It's understandable. But what if the bigger question is this: What are we actually trying to hide … and why? Here's today's Super Short Thought.

JUST IN: The most irreversible consequence of this war is not happening in Tehran. It is happening in a barn in Iowa. A farmer is standing over a kitchen table looking at two seed catalogues. One is corn. One is soybeans. Corn needs 180 pounds of nitrogen per acre. Nitrogen costs $610 per ton on the CBOT March futures settlement as of yesterday, up 35 percent in a month. Soybeans fix their own nitrogen from the atmosphere through root bacteria called rhizobia. They need nothing from the Strait of Hormuz. The farmer is choosing soybeans. Millions of acres are choosing soybeans. And once the planter rolls into the field, the choice cannot be reversed until next year. USDA projected corn at roughly 94 million acres for 2026, down from 98.8 million. Soybeans at 85 million, up from 81.2 million. Those projections were published February 19, before urea surged past $683 at New Orleans. The actual shift will be larger. USDA Prospective Plantings reports March 31. By then the seeds will be in the ground. This is the transmission channel the world is not watching. A 21-mile strait enforced by provincial commanders with sealed radio orders just rewrote the planting economics of 90 million acres of the most productive farmland on Earth. Not through sanctions. Not through diplomacy. Through the price of a single molecule that corn cannot grow without and soybeans do not need. Now follow the cascade. The Renewable Fuel Standard mandates 15 billion gallons of corn ethanol annually. That consumes roughly 43 percent of the entire US corn crop. The mandate is set by the EPA. It does not flex when corn acres shrink. It is inelastic demand consuming a fixed share of a declining supply. When supply tightens against a fixed mandate, the remaining corn reprices upward. Corn above $5 per bushel compresses every margin downstream. The US cattle herd stands at 86.2 million head, a 75-year low per USDA NASS. Poultry and pork operations face compression from higher corn prices. Feed is the single largest cost in livestock production. When feed reprices, protein reprices. When protein reprices, every grocery shelf in America absorbs the increase. This is the protein cascade. Corn to feed to meat to eggs to dairy to the checkout counter. Each link tightens because the link before it tightened. The originating cause is a urea molecule that cannot transit a strait because a provincial commander’s sealed orders say it cannot. The farmer did not start this war. The farmer cannot end it. The farmer responds to the price on the screen and the biology of the two crops in front of him. Corn needs the molecule. Soybeans do not. At $610 the arithmetic is settled. The planter rolls. The season is locked. Israel just authorised the assassination of every Iranian official on sight. The US has spent $16.5 billion. South Pars is burning. The Fed is holding rates because oil inflation will not break. Gold touched $5,000. Bitcoin is bleeding. China is running exercises near Taiwan. Sri Lanka shut down on Wednesdays. And underneath all of it, a man in a barn is making the decision that determines whether four billion people pay more for food this year. He has never heard of the Mosaic Doctrine. He does not know what a sealed contingency packet is. He knows what nitrogen costs. And he is planting soybeans. Full analysis - open.substack.com/pub/shanakaans…

Verse for the Day God is for much more than Sundays, and REALLY singing is good for the soul.

The Pergamum church faced enormous pressure to fit in, compromise, and quietly go along with the culture around them. The real danger wasn’t persecution. It was slow cultural assimilation and personal compromise. The Word for the Week tackles that issue. youtu.be/GwYJMKqwy74?si…

@cerelin Good to hear about your TB test Linda. Fert. is another matter ... everybody having this problem and its all because of war in the Gulf!

good news, clear TB test. Bad news fertiliser has come but at a massive £564 a tonne for 25-5-5 😡. With milk price still 16ppl unaffordable.

Here's today's Super Short Thought: 'Free Food: Hidden Manna'. "If you feel spiritually unsatisfied ... hungry ... maybe you're looking for your food in the wrong place." (Check this out!)

Verse for the Day There are lots of people out there in Wales tonight who've been nailing lambing but feeling the weight of it ... late nights, early mornings, let-downs and losses. (PLEASE look after yourselves!) But none of that looks quite like what got done for us here 👇

Every preacher, Minister and Ministerial trainee should, in my view take time to listen carefully to this and develop their own liberty in delivery of affective speech. Affective speech contains cognitive content, inspires the emotions which motivate the will and produce action.

Super Short Thought Many feel pressure to go with things they know aren’t right. Society says: fit in, don’t rock the boat. But what if deep down you know you’re heading in the wrong direction? Christian faith begins not with a ritual, but with an honest pivot. Check it out 👇

I SERIOUSLY hope, in an age when the @RoyalNavy can't project force near Cyprus nor in the Gulf, the @BritishArmy vehicles make you sick and the @RoyalAirForce has got F35s it can't deploy without US permission, the @DefenceHQ are TOTALLY across and 100% invested in this stuff 👇

@cerelin Yes. It starts to feel like you can breathe a bit again once you've established a clear run of tests doesn't it? Until that few days every test period comes around again! I really hope it goes well for you at the end of the week.

@WelshRev Been 5 years clear now and what a difference it makes to being able to farm as we want. No overstocking as we can sell what we want. As a closed herd we should again be clear but we all know it's a lottery with TB

Miserable day out there for our full herd TB test. Hope the results are good on Friday 🤞

Verse for the Day on a wet Tuesday in Wales ... great news for folks who follow Christ in fearful times.

Christianity isn’t about isolation or strange behaviour - but it is about distinctiveness. Real faith changes how we live, not just what we believe internally This SuShT explores what Balaam teaches about cultural pressure, integrity, and following Christ youtu.be/GkbzIzUwsCs?si…

„So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.” 2 Corinthians 4:18 Have a blessed week everybody!

Today's Word for the Week is 'Blood in the Arena - Life in the Church' ... part of our series of enquiries into the reasons churches close. This WftW comes from the Amphitheatre in Carmarthen. Give it a look! youtu.be/oJYdqoXMo08?si…

Super Short Thought: 'Not Denying my Name' Faithfulness. Loyalty under pressure which shapes the person that you will become. 125 seconds - check it out!

@RoryStewartUK Sorry ... really wasn't meant to be a dig! Please see it as confidence that this will be a really good read and merely a temporary 'deferral'? (Birthday coming soon!) :-)

@WelshRev Ouch

Thank you to everyone who has been reading Politics On the Edge - if you missed it - Kindle has a 99p deal on it today - hope you enjoy it…🤞