Well its been a very busy few weeks, to be honest my feet don’t seem to have touched the ground!
As I so often say ‘being busy is a good thing, I’d much rather be busy than bored!’ However, we do need to be careful – we need to make sure that we don’t over stretch ourselves and we need to make sure that we are making enough time for rest and relaxation.
You see, as we look in the bible we often see Jesus, who knew more than anyone what it was to be busy, take time out. He would frequently take himself to a quiet place where he would find time to pray. Not surprisingly a lot of these moments follow after a particularly busy spell in Jesus’ ministry. We can’t begin to imagine the pressure that he must have felt, we need to remember that although Jesus was fully God, he was also fully man! That means he experienced all the same pressures we experience. He would have felt tired, he would have felt exhausted, he would have had times of feeling stretched with the amount of work that he needed to accomplish. And to top it off, he would have had his mission objective permanently hanging over him. He knew what he ultimately would have to go through, yet he carried on towards Calvary.
I take heart from this, you see during those moments in life when we feel under pressure, its good to know that Jesus has been there, he completely understands every emotion that we experience. This has been one of the major teaching points that has come through our recent sermon series ‘Who is Jesus?’ during the last 6 weeks, we have explored different aspects of Jesus life and these have helped us to relate to him in ways perhaps we hadn’t done before. If you’ve not heard the sermons, why not listen to them via the website.
And now we move on into our Lent series, ‘Meekness and Majesty’, throughout Lent we will be reflecting on the themes of ‘adulation, servanthood, betrayal and denial’ again all human emotions and we will use these to help us look at Jesus’ passion from a different perspective. I do hope you will be able to join us at our Sunday services throughout Lent.
In the meantime, if you find yourself feeling busy or stretched, can I advise you to follow Jesus’ example and take time out to be with God. It might be that you can take yourself off for a day or two, or maybe you’re able to snatch a few quiet minutes. During that time invite the Lord to draw near and to give you his peace, that you might be refreshed and renewed by his Holy Spirit working within you. One thing I like to do in these times is listen to worship music, I find it really helps me to draw close to God and enter that place of peace. If you don’t have any worship CD’s why not turn to Youtube- some excellent worship leaders to look for are; Matt Redman, Tim Hughes, Chris Tomlin, or Hillsong – there are plenty to choose from!! My favourite worship song currently is ‘O Praise the name’ by Hillsong – its fantastic!
On another note, April is coming and that means the Annual parochial Church Meeting. This is a particularly important meeting where we will be launching the Church re-development project, sharing plans and drawings and feeding back on the last year, as well as appointing new Deanery Synod representatives and PCC members. Do come along on Sunday 2nd April at 11am.