Dear Friends
Many people will now have discovered that their new year’s resolutions have started to falter. All the best intentions can fail after a little time and ordinary life. We start out so well, but then time and circumstances take their toll, and we lose sight of what we had hoped for.
In the Church year, at the beginning of February we change over from finishing the Christmas season with Candlemas (2nd February’25 – services at Guarlford & Powick) into starting to prepare for Easter. The idea is that we move from one celebration to another through seasons which prepare us appropriately. Lent will soon start but this year (Ash Wednesday is on 5th March’25). There will not be a Lent course as such in our parishes, but I will be promoting other opportunities across the deanery where our presence will no doubt add flavour to the discussions and learning. I hope both church councils can agree on a charity collection opportunity for the coming Lenten journey.
There are so many things unstated in our lives that it is good to sometimes have a chance to think about how things are going and how we might improve. Our society now considers many things acceptable which used to cause terrible guilt, divorce is one; and conversely, we now look down on things which used to be perfectly acceptable, smoking is one. There is an intellectual idea that if we can remove the restrictive ideas of the past, then we shall no longer feel guilt. Guilt is an internal feeling imposed on ourselves by memories of the past. Shame is when that guilt is imposed from other people. The Church looking down on divorced people where it wanted to promote marriage caused huge guilt and shame in those who were divorced. In society, those who were divorced were excluded from certain social events. Nowadays we feel rightly differently – many people had this trauma of marriage breakdown in their lives and there should be no need to keep heaping guilt upon them. With our parishes’ wedding preparation happening soon at Valentine’s, I will be welcoming couples who have found love again and it will be a privilege to marry them in their local church this year.
And the Church is not immune. With Safeguarding rightly at the forefront our all of our ministries, I know how hurt and saddened people have been by the way the Church has not learned lessons from countless safeguarding reports and so many people have been harmed. We should all take safeguarding very seriously and there are routes to report concerns should you need to. As the Church of England wrestles with the challenges it is facing, we all need to be reminded again and again that we have a Saviour. We celebrated His arrival at Christmas, and we celebrate His victory over sin and guilt at Easter. What we need to do is accept our part in the failures of the past (whatever they may be) and then bring them to our Saviour and ask for his forgiveness and mercy. Then we need to receive that forgiveness and start to move into a newly forgiven part of our lives.
I have found the Serenity prayer, which guides us to seek God’s help, to be really useful in my life and I commend it to you.
God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference
Every blessing
Rev Gary