Thought for the Week by Rev’d Vicci
Friends
This week (6th of June to 14th of June) we celebrate the Great Big Green Week, the UK’s biggest ever celebration of community action to tackle climate change and protect nature. Sadly, there is nothing planned for this important week across Maidenhead, Slough and Windsor. I’m not just talking about the Methodist Church you understand, but anything. I wonder if this is because for most people, like me, it has come as a surprise. I only know about it because I looked online to see if there was anything exciting that I could reflect on for the week. I wonder if we are now at a point where we are receiving so much information that it is drowning us? We must definitely do something about it the year after next (next year is going to be too full of excitement around our 150th anniversary). And therein lies another problem: there is just so much to do, so much choice. In fact, I sometimes walk out of supermarkets because I simply can’t cope with how many things there are to choose from.
Faced with all this choice and aware that we miss so much because it gets drowned out by the general noise, we may wonder what we can make of last week’s Gospel injunction to “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptising them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.” How do we share the Gospel when we are competing with so much else? The answer is I think, to get back to a level of stillness and quietness in ourselves. The old Gospel hymn “In the garden” begins:
I come to the garden alone, While the dew is still on the roses
And the voice I hear, falling on my ear, The Son of God discloses.
And he walks with me and he talks with me, And he tells me I am his own
And the joy we share as we tarry there, None other has ever known.
Perhaps you, like me, have been unaware of the Great Big Green Week, but in seeking to find God in the garden, real or imagined, we reconnect with our story, with our faith and with our prayer life and only then can we find we have something to share that will cut through the noise and speak to those who would listen.
God bless, Vicci