It has been a beautiful late fall day, sunny and much warmer than yesterday and I happily biked to church without having to battle a biting wind!
We were a small group this morning and since only little Olivia arrived for Children’s Ministry I put a snack on a tray for her along with a jar of marker pens, some white a paper and some small wooden puzzles and she settled happily next to her mother. Since her dad (our People’s Warden, Fred) was preaching and leading worship music she was doubly happy and even took her little chair over to sit next to him as he played the final song, so sweet!
Fred was preaching on “The Forgiveness of Sins” sentence from our ongoing series on the Apostles’ Creed and since he is a professor of religious studies and a Pauline scholar, his sermon was very interesting, especially as he had chosen to intersperse his talk with congregational singing.
Biking home I reflected on the arresting thought that there are just five more Sundays before Christmas, which will be my last week at St. Stephen’s.
All of this has come so suddenly. I realise now that even though all the signs have been there for quite some time, it always seemed as if the possibility of closure was still much farther away and it is hard to get one’s head around it. Maybe it is good that I still have a lot more raking and garden-closing sessions ahead of me, these are spaces in which, while doing manual labour, it is possible to give thought and prayer to really big subjects.
This evening some former neighbours are coming for dinner. They are good friends who were a tremendous support to me during my father’s last years and it will be good to have company so that I do not find myself slipping into the “slough of despond”!