Various thoughts

Well, it's Friday 6pm and I'm all alone, Heather's not back from working at the church yet and Ben doesn't arrive for about another hour, so I have some free time and maybe even enough mental umph to write a blog entry which I haven't done in forever.

I've no idea what I'm going to write, one of those let's see what falls off my fingers blogs, and sorry if you make it to the end of this and find nothing worth reading, but then that won't be anything new for about 90% of pages on the Web :-)

So, what's been happening? Well, church life has been a mixture - we started lifegroups about two months ago and they have gone down really well. It's not a Bible study group but a life group - you do life together which may involve a bit of Bible study too. God has clearly spoken to us as a leadership team that as well as seeking His presence in all we do, our current focus needs to be building family within the church. This isn't to exclude other activity, but we realise that what we do needs to come out of who we are rather than our church simply be a 'doing' place. We've been at churches in the past where it's just about doing, but what do we have to invite people to? People can get 'busyness' from any old place, but what can we offer them that they can't get elsewhere? Jesus said the world would know that we are His disciples not by our intense activity, but by our love for each other. This is what we're building with lifegroups.
The main focus of a lifegroup is building family over a meal together each week and sharing your lives with each other. We are involved with two groups - we host and lead the young people's life group and then we are members of one of the regular lifegroups. They are quite different from each other but we're really enjoying both.

So lifegroups are going well, but we had to face one of the harder elements of church leadership when one of the ladies in the church died after a few weeks trying to recover from an operation to remove her bladder that was full of cancer. She was very up and down, with some good days and a number of bad days, but eventually she went downhill and then died a couple of weeks ago. Last week we held her funeral service which although a time of encouraging reflection of the life of a wonderful Godly lady, it was still hard emotionally and took a lot out of us all. We shall miss Jean but rejoice that she's with her Saviour in heaven and free from all sickness, weakness and pain.

So church life is good, if tough, and very rewarding, it's amazing to see how God has taken us forward when a year ago I was wondering if we would still have a church we could call home. We've had some very tough times over this last year, but God's presence is still very much with us and we look forward to where He leads us over the next year!

As for the more immediate future we're off to Canada before long, first stop Ottawa for Russ and Jenny's wedding and catching up with some very good friends then off to Lloydminster to see a whole pile more friends with a trip to Saskatoon thrown in for good measure. Finally we fly back to Hamilton where we spend a night in a hotel overlooking Niagara Falls and then return home. Phew!

It's funny, the first time I heard of Niagara Falls was from my Uncle Bob and Auntie Rose who went to Canada for a holiday and brought me back a banner with Niagara on it. I don't know whatever happened to it, it was on my wall for years but I never really thought anything of Canada - it was just another country. Then a few years ago it suddenly came alive to me and now it's like my second home. I know that God's called Heather and me to Morpeth for this season, but I'm convinced He has future plans for us that involve Canada - it still holds a large place in my heart.

Well, there are a few random thoughts and at long last a new blog entry.

God bless you,

Steve