Bishop's New Year Message
Worship isn’t only for Christmas!
As usual this year, and rightly, we have been reminded that pets are not only for Christmas. And we have tragically seen some of the ways in which animals have not been cared for in people’s homes. It all comes from a sentimental attachment to the idea of having pets, without a commitment to make them part of our ordinary everyday lives.
Worship can be like that too. Churches all over this province have been full to capacity at carol services, nativity plays, midnight communions and Christmas day services, as we celebrate what is the profoundly meaningful, but also sentimentalized, event of the birth of the Christ-child in a manger in Bethlehem. And for most of those who attended such services, the feel-good factor will have been high. We will go back next year –indeed, it is a vital part of our Christmas!
My challenge this New Year is to realize that spirituality, worship, faith, are not just to be ‘cared for’ in our lives in a kind of ‘Christmas slot’. They, like the pets we were thinking about, need to be fed, nurtured and warmed all year round if we are to be healthy human beings, with lives fulfilled as God intended them to be.
If I might dare to suggest a New Year’s resolution, it would be this: Decide to take time for your spiritual welfare this coming year on a regular basis. It may be to pray more often, to return to weekly worship, to go to a discipleship course like Alpha. If you do, I can promise you, you will not be sorry. Because, in the end of the day everything else, like the old year, is passing and eventually gone, but spiritual things are lasting and eternal.