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Zetland Park Methodist Church Pastoral Letters
July 2012

A pilgrimage of discovery

We've been hearing about it for years, and in the last few months barely a day has gone by without it being mentioned in the news! What is it? The Olympics, of course! And I guess that for the rest of the summer we will not be able to escape from the coverage, either.

Back in the early "noughties" when my children were just beginning to enter local gymnastics competitions (and doing very well, if I am honest) the inevitable comments were made, "Will we see them in the Olympics in 2012?" Even then, I knew it was most unlikely because they had not started early enough in life - but that didn't stop us from encouraging and supporting them - transporting them four times a week to gym and round the country to competitions.

But we knew even that wouldn't be enough. I recently heard an interviewer ask "What do you need to do to become an F1 driver?" "Be driving karts at the age of three, do it every single week … and have very rich parents!" came back the answer. Many of the sporting "hopefuls" will be training every day, alongside school, exams, work etc for years. Some of parents of swimming "hopefuls" were up every morning at 4 am in Doncaster to take their kids to the pool, and this then became the regular pattern of life for years. In general, if you want to succeed to the highest levels in sport you need to be totally dedicated, singly focussed and work, work, work … oh, and work even more! And even then the luck factor has to be taken into account as well as vulnerability to injury - Emily broke her wrist at gym the night before her first competition and it was another six months before another opportunity to compete presented itself!

Succeeding in the Christian faith is so very different. There is no such punishing requirement to a life-long struggle to try to be good enough before we are accepted by God, or to try to attain a certain standard before we "pass", or even to beat off the competition! Rather, in John's Gospel we are reminded that "Those who believe in me (God) will live" and in Ephesians that "We are saved by grace through faith". In other words, God so loves us that he wants to give us eternal life, or the "crown of glory" as 1 Peter puts it, as a free gift. We just have to have faith in his love for us. I am constantly amazed by how many people still tell me they are not good enough to go to church or to consider themselves as Christians. Our Faith is not a competition or race where only some win!

Rather it is a pilgrimage of discovery where all who set out are credited for doing so. Where reaching an imagined finishing line is not the goal, but rather the "crown of glory" is what we discover on the way and how is enriches and changes our lives and our understanding of God. It is not even what we do - the boxes we can tick off - but rather what we become on the way! You don't become a pilgrim at the end of the journey, you become one when you set out!

And the further we go on this journey, the more we want to do - the further we want to go into a discovery of the live of Faith - not because we must but because we want to respond to God's love for us and because we realise that there are blessings in this life, not just in the next. The reward is then to live this life to the full in the confidence of the life hereafter, and to have become what God wanted us to be, to know as much about him as we can, before we finish this pilgrimage on earth. And the greatest blessing here on earth is the freedom not to live in fear of what we will find in the next world. So why not pursue this pilgrimage - it is life changing, life-fulfilling - and the prize is received on the way not just at the end?

All blessings
Arthur

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