Thought for the day – Sunday 24th May 2020
Shortly before moving to Ipswich I had to go to Leeds for a twenty-four-hour training session on being a new superintendent. I decided to travel by train, which was something I hadn’t done for years. It was by far the easiest option and involved a change at Peterborough. I was fine travelling up, but on the return journey as the Leeds to London train pulled into the station I got up and was the one person in our carriage getting off. I couldn’t find how to open the door and started to panic, I’d visions of the train setting off with me still on it and the next stop was London King Cross, the more frantic I became the less I could see a way out of my predicament. Just in the nick of time, a man came out of the toilet, slid the window down, put his hand through and opened the door from the outside, I done this many times in the past myself back in the 1970’s when I did a lot of train travelling and felt an idiot because I’d forgotten.
The incident reminds me that the change is often far more traumatic than the journey. Today is Wesley Day and for me it marks the thirty third anniversary of me becoming a fully accredited Local Preacher, in many ways a day that changed my life. The day also marks a significant day in the life of the Methodist Church, because this is the day that the Holy Spirit revealed to John Wesley new truths about his own calling and triggered the start of a huge evangelical movement in this country that would have an impact on the world Church at large. It is also a day when as the people of God regardless of tradition and denomination unite in the task of the waiting for God’s Spirit to refresh us anew.
In our current situation, I keep hearing people talking about “the new normal” and I think that maybe we all recognise the changes brought about by what we are experiencing, some are negative, I miss seeing my family, hugging my daughter and grandson, I miss seeing the wide circle of friends, I have come to love and visit the places I love to be and in all those things I see the cost of change. Yet, at the same time, I see the hand of God at work in the way that nature appears to have come to life, the vast reduction of the number of cars on the road, the time to follow social media, deal with the tasks that have lain dormant for so long and look afresh at my work of ministry.
If we read Luke 10: 1-12 & 17-20 we read of Jesus sending out the seventy with his instructions, pushing them right outside their comfort zones, this must have been hard for them, but verses 17-20 tell how they came back with joy, because they had seen Satan fall before them. Change is never easy, particularly when we are not prepared for it, yet as we change, God’s love for us remains constant.