Dear friends,
By the time you read this, one of our
major village events will have come and gone.
Bonfire Night on the village green is
one of my highlights of the year.
Why?
Well, there’s the fireworks, of
course, there’s the fun of being out at night in the dark, when
everything, and everybody looks different, and there’s something
thrilling about a whacking great blaze that’s hot enough to singe
your eyebrows off.
The church is making a small
contribution to this event each year now, by providing the insurance
for something that is almost always trouble free, but where there is
potential for disaster.
Sometimes, it seems to me that the
church is quite good at offering insurance. We are there in case of
trouble. If trouble never happens, people don’t need the church, or
think about it much.
But when the sky falls in, we represent
a way to get in touch with the one who can help us even in
catastrophes of that magnitude.
Who better to speak to than the one who
made the sky?
In the week that I’m writing this,
three people who were on my most recent discussion course in the Goat
pub took a step of faith and stood up in public to get confirmed.
They had the courage of their convictions to stand before the Bishop
and declare that they believed in the God who made heaven and earth.
And the Bishop told them in his sermon that they had come to someone
who could rescue them from any disaster, and whether they were
troubled by disaster or danger, God would set them free.
He also told them not to think that God
was only there for when their lives crashed. God is there to help
life to be lived to the full.
God is there to light a blaze in our
hearts that will rival even the village bonfire.
Love,
Nick
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