Since spending more time at home I seem to have got into the pattern of stopping for coffee and cake at 3 o'clock every afternoon and yesterday...shock, horror... I ate the last of my Christmas cake. I like to bake but don't get round to it very often. But one thing I always do leading up to Christmas and that is to bake a Christmas cake. Like many of us when we bake, we have to go out and buy the right ingredients. Inevitably, there is always more in the packets than what we actually need and the left overs get put into our baking cupboard with the full intention of making something else with it before the 'use by' date. I wonder if your cupboard is like mine? Do you, periodically go through your baking cupboard to check the dates, only to find that it is months (perhaps even years) out of date? After eating my cake yesterday, it suddenly struck me that I might have enough leftover ingredients to make another Christmas cake. And sure enough, I only needed eggs and butter and I was good to go. Thankfully I had just enough flour (which is just as well because the chances of buying flour in the shops at the moment is practically non-existent). Anyway, I'm pleased to say that I'm now well supplied with Christmas cake to go with my aftenoon coffee. It will be rationed though, to just one slice a day and hopefully it will see me throught this period of lockdown.
The whole cake saga, the 'baking cupboard' and making the most of what was there has got me thinking about how much I must have wasted in the past and I hang my head in shame! I have been really impressed at how well our supermarkets have managed the whole covid crisis and how they have managed to staff their shops and stores and keep the shelves as full as possible. There is no denying the gaps on the shelves though (flour being just one example) and it is a stark reminder of all those things that we have taken for granted in the past.
I first came to faith when my son was baptised. That means that church has been a part of my life now nearly 36 years. Unlike here in Settle, Giggleswick and Rathmell, my home church in Leeds was only open for services. But regardless of the daily opening times, the church building has always been there...a place of worship...of fellowship...of sanctuary. Even during war times, the church was a constant. A beacon of hope in the community and a witness to the resources of faith in times of stress. The times that we are living through are different and the threat of Coronavirus has meant that our church doors have had to be locked. The good news is that the Church is very much alive because the Church is not the building... but the people. That is all of us. We are finding new ways of worshipping. Our fellowship is Zooming and we are finding sanctuary with God in our own homes or finding new places that connect us with God. We can learn from all of this and we need to take it and use it to develop our faith in God and in our church membership (whatever that looks like) in the future. Church may well look different and we may look back on these times as a time when our prayer life was rejuninated, a time when we realised that actually 'the use by date' of our faith no longer counted and it once again became an essential ingredient of our life.
The whole cake saga, the 'baking cupboard' and making the most of what was there has got me thinking about how much I must have wasted in the past and I hang my head in shame! I have been really impressed at how well our supermarkets have managed the whole covid crisis and how they have managed to staff their shops and stores and keep the shelves as full as possible. There is no denying the gaps on the shelves though (flour being just one example) and it is a stark reminder of all those things that we have taken for granted in the past.
I first came to faith when my son was baptised. That means that church has been a part of my life now nearly 36 years. Unlike here in Settle, Giggleswick and Rathmell, my home church in Leeds was only open for services. But regardless of the daily opening times, the church building has always been there...a place of worship...of fellowship...of sanctuary. Even during war times, the church was a constant. A beacon of hope in the community and a witness to the resources of faith in times of stress. The times that we are living through are different and the threat of Coronavirus has meant that our church doors have had to be locked. The good news is that the Church is very much alive because the Church is not the building... but the people. That is all of us. We are finding new ways of worshipping. Our fellowship is Zooming and we are finding sanctuary with God in our own homes or finding new places that connect us with God. We can learn from all of this and we need to take it and use it to develop our faith in God and in our church membership (whatever that looks like) in the future. Church may well look different and we may look back on these times as a time when our prayer life was rejuninated, a time when we realised that actually 'the use by date' of our faith no longer counted and it once again became an essential ingredient of our life.
'The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases,
his mercies never come to an end;
they are new every morning;
great is your faithfulness.'
his mercies never come to an end;
they are new every morning;
great is your faithfulness.'
Lamentations 3:22-23
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