When we catch the slipstream of God’s time we often discover that the way we are living is just scratching the surface of the deeper life that God is calling us to and that we are made for. If we trust ourselves to God’s pace we begin to stop rushing after diminishing time that is slipping away from us and allow God to centre us. As we turn our sights to Advent, where we prepare for that particular moment when God comes to us and sets the world in the dimension of eternity, it is a good time for us to find ways to get in synch with God’s pace.
How to do this? Connect to the changing of the season. Watch the leaves turning and falling, the shifting light and dark as the days continue to shorten. Dwell with a place in our world that needs your loving prayerful gaze that goes beyond the distracted reading of a scrolling newsfeed. Allow the conversation with your work colleague to not just be about getting the next task done. Seek the deeper experience, those few extra moments that turn an encounter from a transaction, into an opportunity for grace. It doesn’t take much.
Recently a visitor from the US joined the 30 minute lunchtime Eucharist in the chapel. At the end on his way out he introduced himself and said, ‘I am a priest on a sabbatical. The subject of my sabbatical is the meaning of the breaking of the bread in the life of the community. I just came across this service today and responded to a nudge to step inside for a few minutes. I have never felt the presence of Christ so strongly as I did with you all in this Eucharist today.’ He made me think again of the poem above us around the Lightwell:
Here home and elsewhere share one mystery. Here love and conscience sing the same refrain. Here time leaps up. And strikes eternity.
Revd Katherine Hedderly
