For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven Ecclesiastes 3.1

Dear Friends

In this part of the world we are surrounded by a magnificent tapestry of green of many shades. Before the high summer sun bakes everything yellow and brown, June follows on from May with fresh greens – other colours, resplendent as they are, seem hardly necessary.

The Church ‘changes colour’ at this time, too. For we are now in that seemingly never-ending sequence of Sundays after Trinity  – the full twenty-three to be precise!. The current calendar of the Church has restored the traditional way of describing this season, which in 2008 takes up nearly half the year. But the calendar had also imported the idea of calling it Ordinary Time, denoted by the colour green, by way of contrast to the great seasons such as Epiphany, Lent and Advent, with their own special colours for the altar frontals and vestments.

A few feast days punctuate the weeks until All Saints’, but otherwise it is time to ‘get on with the job’ of being Church and community through the long days of summer and, eventually, autumn.

Ordinary Time – time to be inactive or complacent? Certainly not: perhaps the clue lies in the word ‘time’ itself. Time is for many of us a precious commodity, and yet, as the famous passage from Ecclesiastes reminds us, there is a time for everything. If we are not quite so busy during the summer, and in particular can take a real holiday (not necessarily ‘going away’), we have a good opportunity to reflect on the direction of our lives and our faith.

Even living in the country can be frantic, and for many of us it is vital just to take more time over the important things in life, to stand back and look at the way we use time, energy and other resources. A huge number of self-help books boast a magic formula to get more out of life with minimum money and effort, but in the end we cannot go far wrong than to return to, or discover for the first time, the wisdom of Scripture. How about starting with Jesus’s words on anxiety (Matthew 6.25ff.), the wisdom literature of the Old Testament, or the Psalms, that immensely rich collection of spiritual poetry which searches out the depths of our soul? Your local ministers can give you some suggestions, if you’re not sure where to begin!

In the end, all time is special, and we always regret having wasted this tremendous gift. But whatever we have done – or not done – in the past, the gospel of Jesus Christ teaches that we can always make a new start, in confidence that God is with and for us, in good times and bad.

Yours in Christ