Letter from Rose - October & November 2012

Letter from Rose

October/November 2012

Dear Friends,

While out driving recently, I noticed that the leaves on the trees were beginning to change – the sign that autumn was approaching – the time for summer was almost over. I began to think about change, how sometimes it creeps up on us almost without us knowing then on other occasions it can hit us with a suddenness that makes us reel back as we experience it.

I recently led my first service at St John the Baptist Church, in Wolverley where I referred to the change that we are all at this moment beginning to feel as we negotiate our way through the retirement of a much loved Vicar and colleague Geoffrey Shilvock from both Wolverley and St Peter’s Cookley, and the changes that are beginning to experience within the Kidderminster Parish Church Team as we all move towards the formation of the new Kidderminster Ismere Team that will include seven churches and the areas we serve.

At the service I quoted from a book written by The Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, a powerful writer and broadcaster for many years.

The book is ‘Celebrating Life – finding happiness in unexpected places’ and in it there is a passage on ‘turning strangers into friends.’

In it he says –

‘In one of the synagogues where I used to worship there were several millionaires. Sitting alongside them was the man who sold newspapers in Piccadilly Circus, and another who lived alone and always turned up with holes in his shoes and patches on his clothes………

There was always a fair sprinkling of lively people in their eighties and nineties……..

They would come each week, and often each day, to give thanks for being alive and as often as not to exchange the latest gossip of who had fallen out with whom……’

Then he asked – ‘What brought us together? Not power or exchange.
Just the need regularly to remind ourselves of who we are, what we belong to, the faith we share, the story of which our lives are part………’

All of us, no matter who we are or where we are, are part of the community of faith, part of the family of God’.

Yes, we are all living through a time of change –
a time of change in our world –

a time of change in our country –

a time of change in our churches too.

The change within our churches, some may feel has been forced on us, but it is happening and it is up to us as ‘the community of faith, part of the family of God’ to work through this change together for the benefit of all the people in the seven areas we belong to and care for - seven areas that are coming together in the service of the one God.

St Teresa of Avila wrote this prayer:

‘Christ has no body now on earth but ours,

no hands but ours, no feet but ours.

Ours are the eyes through which must look our Christ’s compassion on the world.
Ours are the feet with which he is to go about doing good.

Ours are the hands with which he is to bless us now.

Jesus never promised that things would be easy if we follow Him, but he did promise that he would always be there for us and sent us the Spirit to help us.

With God’s blessings as we journey through change together.

Revd. Rose Lawley

 

From the Parish Registers

Christenings

Max William Turvey; 2^nd September at St. Peter’s, Cookley

Oliver William Slym; 9^th September at St. Peter’s, Cookley

Eva-Mai Pocierznicki; 23^rd September at St. Peter’s, Cookley

Connor John Price; 30^th September at St. Peter’s, Cookley

Kimberley Elsie Williams-Young; 30^th September at St. John’s, Wolverley

Weddings

Andrew Baker and Laura Oliver; 1^st September at St. John’s, Wolverley

Lee Davies and Kelly Taylor; 8^th September at St. Peter’s, Cookley

Neal Addison and Nicola Jones; 15^th September at St. John’s, Wolverley

Christopher Tibbetts and Gemma Powell; 15^th September at St. Peter’s, Cookley

Funerals

Robin Humble of Cookley; 29^th August at Stourbridge Crematorium

Maureen Addison of Wolverley; 11^th September at Stourbridge Crematorium

Audrey Peace of Cookley; 14^th September at Stourbridge Crematorium

Steven Michael Jones; 27^th September at St. Peter’s, Cookley