St Mary’s Musings for June
  After 18 months away from our house, we have returned to a very overgrown vegetable garden and spent much time preparing the ground ready to receive the young vegetable plants we wanted to grow. Now all we can do is nurture and tend the plants as they grow in the hope and expectation that they will bear fruit. It strikes me, that June is a time of anticipation, hope and change. It is a time of exams as we approach the end of the academic year, of endings and new beginnings. In the church, we approach Petertide (29th June), when those training for ministry prepare to be ordained and start life as curates in a parish.
Perhaps as we tend the plants in our own gardens in the hope of flowers or ripe vegetables or fruit, June can be a time to reflect on our own spiritual or faith journey; to think about our calling and how we might use our gifts as instruments of God’s love in the world. A calling is not just for priests, but for everyone. Whether a call to faith, a calling to a role in community, the church or secular job or your personal calling to do or be that which gives meaning and purpose to your life. Something that God calls out from you to be a gift to others. Something felt like a prompting from within that has a sense of rightness about it.
Identifying our calling and acting on it involves anticipation, hope and change. My calling is to be a priest, and for my final year of curacy, I have joined St Mary’s for additional experiences to enable growth in inhabiting that priestly identity. For discernment and training are the seeds that are planted and watered, but God provides the growth. It is for us to listen to where God might be calling us, and trust in him for the growth, so that we might have the courage to respond: ‘Here I am, send me’.
                                                                                                                                                                                                                    

Reflection for the month - June

 

On May 29th Christians around the world celebrated the Ascension of Jesus. ‘He ascended into Heaven’ rejoining His Father, having completed His physical time with his disciples on earth, but with the promise that He would always be with them, ‘to the end of the world’.  His spiritual presence promised then is with us today, and we, as His followers, have the clear instruction, the Great Commission given to the apostles, to ‘make disciples of all nations and to teach them to observe everything I have commanded you’.  

That Commission with the guidance of the Holy Spirit has been, is and ever will be the mission of the Church, and we as members of Christ’s Church are charged to do all that we can to fulfil that mission in our own lives and by supporting others who stand for us in places around the world that we can never reach. Of course we are not all evangelists, at least not in the formal sense, but every one of us in some way has received gifts which, if we allow, God will use to help us play a part in fulfilling that Great Commission. We have the comfort and the confidence to know that Jesus is always with us.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         David Peacock