Happy New Year church!
As we kick off a new year it is a great chance for us to pause and reflect on our aspirations for the year ahead, under God. How might Jesus shape your priorities and plans? What practical steps will you take to seek his kingdom and righteousness? How should we pray in light of all of this?
Two great events to put in your diary are Bush Church Aid Connect and Church Missionary Society Summer Conference on Friday January 17th and Saturday January 18th respectively. As a combined Friday evening and Saturday they are an outstanding way to frame the year ahead in light of God’s mercy and kindness and his wonderful plans to make Jesus known in his world. There aren’t too many things that will lift your vision and fuel your passion better than these two events. And the Saturday conference has an outstanding youth and kids program that helps the kids kick off the year with great gospel truth – as well as having heaps of fun.
But alongside plans and action, we want to be people to who wait upon the Lord. Julie Wright shares this lovely reflection below, which helps us pivot from Christmas to the New Year with a sense of prayerful dependence. I hope you find it as encouraging as I have.
See you on Sunday
Simon
(PS – for those with kids and Youth: Trinity Kids is back up and running this Sunday, and Youth gets underway on Friday February 7. It’s a great time to welcome new new children and young people, so encourage your kids and youth to invite their friends to come and learn about Jesus with them.)
Waiting – a prose poem by Julie Wright
Most lives are made up of waiting. Like the play, life feels like an endless waiting for Godot. As we wait, we carry out our daily routines like automatons. We barely acknowledge the endless littlenesses, as we peer around the bare theatre that sets the scene of our lives, waiting for a magician to call us to centre stage for some preordained part of great import. A part that will overturn our spurned reality, resurrecting the wonder that we have lost. We yearn to be the powerful protagonist, not the unknown understudy. We wait for transformation into a star that stands out from the rest of the constellations. We wait for the ordinary to become the extraordinary. Ambition swelling. Distorting our vision. Making something noteworthy out of our nothingness.
Mary waited. She waited humbly. Not for her own star to shine.
She waited for something that all women wait for. Though she is all women, she is crowned with a qlory that only one woman will ever experience. Though she is all mothers, she is the only mother who bore the salvation of all in her sanctified womb.
As we wait, we offer up our growing self-knowledge. Our failures. Our frailties. Our brokenness. Our ordinariness. Our nothingness. Our willingness to accept God’s grand gesture.
Then, like Mary, we allow a new life to grow in us and see the world anew with eyes of wonder. We see that greatness is granted, not conjured. Gifted not deserved. Or demanded. Now we know what we were waiting for. We were waiting for God. Oh, yes! It was not something magical we were waiting for. We were waiting for someone. For God. Oh, yes. For mercy and majesty. For meaning in the thousand littlenesses of life. The meaning bestowed by mercy and majesty. Nothing staged. No sleight of hand, but the sweat and suffering of the self-sacrifice of Christ. We were waiting for God. Only he would suffice to melt our hardened hearts of ice.