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Finding our way

I know it’s a cliché about women not being able to read maps very well but in my case it is true. I’ll even hold my hand up to turning the map upside down to work out where I should be going. So satellite navigation systems have been a real blessing to me – and, recently, disaster when I managed to lose all my maps in the process of trying to update the package. Nightmare! Ok, I thought, I’ll read the instructions on how to recover everything. I’m quite technically aware so I wasn’t too bothered. Three times I tried; some of what was written I could understand but I soon realised I needed help. The guidelines I’d been given didn’t quite match my set-up. I needed someone more familiar than I was with the intricacies of the software and how it had been backed up. I needed their wisdom and expertise to get me back on the road.

It can be like that as well when we read the Bible, especially for insights on how to lead our lives. Some of the material we find in the Bible is quite straightforward; other parts can be unpacked with the aid of commentaries, often drawing on ancient wisdoms and understandings together with scholarship. There is much in the Biblical tradition to guide us, for example, in regard to the environment and our responsibilities as stewards of creation. Then we have other very 21st century social issues such as stem cell applications, the human genome project, or assisted suicide where finding the way forward can be more problematic. Here we need the reflections of a range of people and insights are best obtained by working together, by being together, learning, teaching, supporting each other – in short, by being church.

Christianity isn’t an individual religion; it is a corporate faith, a community faith where we are on a shared journey, our destination wonderfully summed up in those words attributed to Richard of Chichester and adapted for the song “Day by Day” in the musical Godspell:

May I know You more clearly,
Love You more dearly,
Follow You more nearly.
Day by Day

If those are the coordinates for the SatNav system for your life then why not plug them in and join us one day just to see what it’s like. You will be welcomed, not just by the church community but also by God.

With prayers for joyful summers for you all,

Lyn

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