Hopefully as you sit with your cuppa taking time to read this, I will be in sunny Cornwall, not far from the coast three hundred and seventy miles away in Cornwall. Hopefully, I will be sitting out in the sun, but knowing my luck with holidays, it will be pouring with rain! I love holiday, always have done and I can remember sitting in the classroom at school looking at the clock. I learned in those days that no matter how you concentrate, you never see the minute hand move, believe me, I have stared at the clock for five whole minutes while I should have been listening! Maybe that is the reason why I was fifty-two when I eventually graduated with a degree and was one of the oldest people at my graduation ceremony.
The Ipswich circuit is looking forward to welcoming two new ministers to work among us this summer, one is moving here from London to work in the Churches in and around the seaside town of Felixstowe, the second will be working in the northern part of our Circuit in places like Woodbridge, Framlingham and four more rural villages, he is coming to us from Zimbabwe, where he is currently living and working. Welcoming a minister from overseas is a complex and sometimes stressful experience and I will only truly relax when my colleague is safely ensconced in his home in Suffolk. I was in a Zoom conference a weeks ago with people from churches around the country, to share our hopes and concerns . One minister apparently told his UK Churches that he and his family were looking forward to coming to Britain so much that “they were throwing rocks at the sun to make it move faster” I confess, I have never heard this saying before, but think that it is a beautiful concept.
Time is a strange aspect of human life, I love the idea of a family throwing rocks at the sun to make it move faster, is that any different to me at school in my early years willing the clock to move faster. Even though I am now old and grey, I have never quite got my head around why it took so long for my eagerly awaited holidays to arrive and the last week at school before the beginning of the six week holidays always seemed to take an eternity to pass. The strange thing was that as soon as my summer holiday started, those six weeks galloped by and before I knew what was happening I was in my last week and counting down to returning to work.
There is a familiar passage in the Bible from the book of Ecclesiastes chapter 3: verses 1-8, made famous in the late fifties by the band The Byrds in their song turn, turn, turn https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xVOJla2vYx8 the passage and the subsequent song tell us that everything in life has its season, it doesn’t matter what our age is, our wealth, our academic ability, our status, our possessions, our nationality, the colour of our skin, the language we speak, or anything else that might be deemed to mark us out as being “different” we all sixty seconds in every minute, sixty minutes in every hour, twenty four hours in every day and three hundred and sixty five days in a year with a free gift of a day every fourth year. We have in our lives an allotted number of years to live, and what is our challenge? To make the most of the gift of time God has given us, and whilst we might fritter away most other things, we should never fritter away time.