The William Booth College at Denmark Hill, London is the training centre for SA Officers in the UK and has been so since 1929.

Each new training session has special features to identify it, such as a Sessional name and a Sessional Song. As you can imagine, trying to find a name that has meaning and is translate-able into the major languages is not easy and the single word ones are well used up. The music varies from Territory to Territory.

As I went into the College 54 years ago we didn’t quite have the problems names have today, and mine was simply – The Pioneer Session. The original music featured a soloist singing an opening phrase, calling us to ‘Prepare ye, the way of the Lord’  You know the other words associated with this Bible passage, making a road and rough places smooth etc.

Two things have reminded of this – hitting an unseen pothole coming through Harpenden which was as bad as some of our African ones, where you said if you saw a bird in the road, it was probably a goat down a pothole. (Another friend shredded his tyre in a similar experience recently – nasty)  And a request to borrow a recording of our Sessional Song to be played at one of my Sessional colleagues funeral, reminding all present that that was what they had attempted in their life and service for all those years.

Whilst the weather had caused those potholes, we have all experienced travelling through a rough patch caused, sometimes by our own actions and sometimes by others, and need to remember we have a duty, as do the pioneers, to make the rough places smooth and helping all along that road through the desert and not cause the potholes of life.