Tuesday 18 December 2012

All sewn up

Life is a rich tapestry, I have often heard said. It's a tapestry in the making of course, the picture in its full detail only making sense when it is finished and you can step back from it and take a look at the whole. Most of the time we see only the small section that is currently working itself out. We may have a small number of threads on the go: family, friends, work, leisure.
At the moment the work bit of my life seems to have a lot of threads on the go. A church closure and the resultant closure of two parishes and emergence of one larger one; a building project; a parish joining the benefice and finding its place within this bit of God's family; a parish that is emerging, bruised, from a time of losing members in a hurtful way; schools work; questions over what the emerging mission priorities in the benefice might be; the need to pull together a coherent programme for the coming year.    Then there are the pastoral threads: the funeral in preparation, the families that are struggling; the people who are simply lonely.
at my desk, in the car heading between visits and meetings, in churches, it is hard to see what all these threads might be about.
Refilling the jug, there is a brief glimpse of what this bit of the picture might be. Emerging from the threads is something bigger than my role, or that of the others involved. God with us, Emmanuel, is the constant, calling every one of us to come with Him and to be a part of the Kingdom of God. Those threads, one day, will be a part of a picture of the Kingdom.  They'll tie up with the other threads that people around me are shouting about: women bishops, gay marriage, climate change, and whatever else is today's fashionable concern. Important they all may be, but only as threads in the larger tapestry of the Kingdom. What really matters is the big picture, and as we work the threads that God asks us to deal with right here, right now, we need to keep the big picture in mind, so that our part of the tapestry does not become a part that has to be unpicked and sown again.

No comments:

Post a Comment