Musings

This edition of Team Times is published hard on the heels of “Back to Church Sunday” 2009. I do hope those who accepted invitations, or who just came under their own steam, enjoyed the Worship and meeting others, and that we shall see you again.

I have enjoyed my summer break, although sometimes it felt as if we were driving for longer than we actually stayed at our various destinations! We also spent a few days (not very successfully) hiding at home. It is so easy to be drawn into the study and start on the backlog of work. During the summer, my Aunt Greta died, five days short of 101. We had celebrated her 100th birthday last summer. It was a great privilege to officiate at her funeral service at York Crematorium and to get to know some of the younger Watson clan (my mother was a Watson) a little better afterwards. Greta was the eldest of five, and because of my grandmother’s ill-health, she was largely responsible for bringing up her younger siblings, including my mother, the second youngest. A creaking gate in her middle years, she outlived them all. Greta was a person of faith—but not of Christian Faith. She had a passion for all things living, and worked hard for the welfare of animals, but I shall always remember her as the kind, caring aunt, with an enormous sense of fun, who brought rays of sunshine into the life of a small Edward, a temporary refugee to the Yorkshire countryside from living ‘above the shop’ in a busy Liverpool dental practice.

I have met many people over the years who have lived fulfilled, happy and contented lives, lives lived caring for others, who are not habitually part of the Christian Church. And I have met a more than a few people who inhabit churches who are as miserable as sin and who wouldn’t know about self-giving if it hit them in the face. I hasten to add that I have also met and worshipped with many people who live happy, generous joyful lives as Christians, and I am grateful that I still do in the Blyth Valley today. The point I am making is that there are good, bad and indifferent in church and out of it—and most of us, in or out of the Church, are a rich mixture of all three. Sometimes we behave like saints. Sometimes we behave like sinners. Sometimes we’re lukewarm—maybe the worst of all!

However we see ourselves (and some of the nicest, most loving people I know lament their supposed inadequacies) only God sees us as we really are. One of the reasons God calls us to worship together is to help us discover our own wonderful, God-given selves in the company of others. I, for one, constantly realise anew that I am still growing up—to some sort of maturity. Saint Paul, at the end of I Corinthians 13, backs me up on this. One day I look forward to seeing clearly, face-to-face—knowing as truly as only God knows me.