Dear Friends,
June is here again with Scarecrows, Open Gardens, Vicarage Fete and Patronal Festival, all the midsummer events that come round year on year. I had a fleeting thought that one year I would open my diary on June and find it empty, nothing to do but look forward to a month free of the worry and work of all those yearly rituals, time to relax and enjoy sitting out in the garden. Wow, sounds good in theory!!
In the real world we take comfort from the structures that surround our lives, our daily routines, the annual events, school timetables, holidays etc and get quite put out of our stride if changes are suddenly imposed. Being made redundant can put enormous strains on someone’s ability to cope with enforced change as can the imposition of retirement on those who use their working status as a life structure. The breaking up of a partnership or marriage imposes a new way of living, not only on those immediately involved but in a wider circle of family and friends as well.
All too often we are tempted to choose short term options that look exciting and challenging but do not have the stability of order and routine and as a consequence often fail after the first flush of excitement.
For all Christians one of the difficulties in living out our faith is that God, in His wisdom, gave us choice. He did not demand we live our lives by rigid structures but by choice. We can choose to go to Church to worship on a Sunday morning or go to the Supermarket to shop. We can choose to say our prayers daily or spend an extra ten minutes watching TV instead. We can choose to take our children to Junior Church or to cricket or football instead.
What we really have to choose is whether we can live a Christian life on our own without any structure to our faith or whether, like the other parts of our daily living, we need some sort of structure and routine to help us through day by day and week by week.
This month, the middle of the year, seems to be a good time for us to reflect on our lives and to see if we need to change the structure of our living at all. In all that we cram into our busy schedule should we make a little room for some formal worship of the God who most of us still believe in but choose to set to one side for now because we see more pressing things to do. A little bit of structure and routine to our faith would do wonders for how we cope with this frenetic world. Just don’t wait until some change to your life is forced upon you to find yourself shouting “help” to God.
Don’t forget the Scarecrows, the Vicarage Fete on Saturday the 21st June and our Patronal Festival on the 22nd. That would be a good weekend to try out a small change in routine!!
God bless
John Baxter
