So 2009!!!

What will we make of this?

Thirty years ago I was in my final year of initial training to become a minister and seriously ill in hospital. Some will remember those long off days and maybe like me pinch themselves for much water has passed under the bridge. Some of that water has been calm and refreshing. I particularly have been glad of Iona and a retreat house in the Highlands and a welcome in the Spey valley at a home in Laggan, and Launde Abbey in Leicetershire, where the quiet of the soul has been helped. At other times it has had to be very carefully navigated and negotiated; give and take, changes of direction, learning and developing new skills, learning the value of working in a team, watching others develop skills and learning to rely on them, in church contexts and in the community, in industrial and rural villages and market and industrial towns and in this great city of Birmingham at the heart of our Methodist District by the same name, stretching from the Welsh borders to east of Coventry from North of Lichfield down to the Gloucester borders. I guess I want to acknowledge particularly those times when in helping other to learn I have learned much. Then there would be those places outside the formal church, Walsingham(the charity which walks with people who have learning difficulties), Action for Children, the Down’s Syndrome Association. Sometimes the waters have been deep and difficult and I  have had to learn a different sort of measure to live by.

And you, how do you reflect back on what ahs been in order to take courage to step out into the unknown.

Dawna Markova offers this reflection.

     I will die the unlived life,

     I will not go in fear

     Of falling or catching fire.

     I choose to inhabit my days,

     To allow my living to open to mee,

     To make me less afraid, 

     More accessible,

     To loosen my heart

     Until it becomes a wing,

     A torch, a promise.

     I choose to risk my significance:

     To live.

     So that which come to me as seed,

     Goes to the next as blossom,

     And that which comes to me as blossom,

     Goes on as fruit.

I am not very good at resolutions, but I’ll put this thought in my log book, and I will chose to walk with it hopefully. I trust that you too will find some encouragement for the days ahead, that we can together make the best of the New Year.

Bill Anderson.