A lovely little  moment of peace and beauty in the Dock prayer garden yesterday – as American singer-songwriter/author Michael Card, in Belfast as part of his concert tour, led an informal blessing in the midst of the lunchtime bustle of the cafe:

But what I really love about the video (nice camerawork Joachim!) is the picture of Dock Chaplain Richard, surely the holiest chaplain of all, with his face beaming radiantly…

I always suspected those Nazarenes were more spiritual than the rest of us.  Moses on Mount Sinai, eat your heart out!

A warm welcome to Dock Cafe tonight at 8pm to hear about an exciting new possibility for the life of The Dock…

(Yes, another one)

You’ll get to hear Joachim from the Dock and Michael from GroundForce outline plans for some new green space amongst the concrete and steel of the Titanic Quarter; you can find out how to get involved if you fancy being a bit green-fingered, and you can find the answer to the question: what is a Meanwhile Garden?

Could it be anything like a Meanwhile Cafe?

Or could it be anything like this project in Berlin?  (see, this is the problem with allowing the Germans a foothold in The Dock – Joachim’s only started a few months and look what’s happening already!)

It’s amazing to look around The Dock Cafe and realise that pretty much everything has been donated.  We opened up two years ago with just a few Ikea folding chairs and a kettle to our name – look how bare and basic it all looked when we opened the doors to Eamonn:

Since then, sofas, armchairs, tables, dining chairs, photographs, sculpture, paintings, books, desks, and hundreds of other little home-away-from-home touches have been donated by our regulars.  One of our neighbours in the apartments upstairs just donated the trendy glass table and chairs you can see arriving here:

And it made me take a fresh look at all the other quirky, unique pieces of furniture dotted around the rest of the cafe – every one of them carrying the story of whoever donated them and why:

That’s why none of the mugs match – every one is unique because every one of them has been rescued and liberated from the back of someone’s kitchen cupboard!

And that’s just one of the reasons we love the place – nothing corporate – just a living room furnished and fitted out by the people who use it, relax in it and love it.