I posted on twitter about the relief for once of being planned for today well in advance - putting Sunday up the priority list so that it is the other "in between" jobs which get put to one side, and get away from the soul destroying routine of planning for Sunday on a Saturday evening...
...and then on Saturday evening I got an answerphone message that this morning's baptism was off due to family illness. (This wasn't just flu - it was M & S flu...) So I was left with a choice - spend Saturday evening planning for Sunday again...or giving a go with expanding the bit of material I had about families into the main bit of a Family Service.
We thought about things people do in families (great to play charades in Church), and then we drew up a list of all the things we long for in our families...
...and...
...which is a mighty fine list. Of course, not all families are anywhere near like this - but I think that's the point. Because we are designed to need families to give us these things then when it doesn't work properly then we feel it all the more sharply.
But is it a coincidence that this list could also be used to describe what an ideal Church might be like as well? Could anybody give me a single reason why we shouldn't expect our God-families to be like this?
We read Romans 8:15-17 and thought briefly about being in God's family...
...so what stops this happening.
We thought about the enormous step between being a couple and being parents, and the demands of a newborn child which shake us out of our comfortable complacency into people who are responsible and care for this new little one...isn't that what we need the Holy Spirit to be doing in each one of us in our God-family, the Church.
We finished by reading Ephesians 4:1-6.
It was fun to have readings read by people who just volunteered, and fun too to have the charades played out by the adults and teenagers for the children.
Now the teenagers are in Church rehearsing for our Evening Service, and then I'm cooking the biggest pot of popcorn you've ever seen and they're all coming round to watch Top Gear.
Does life get better than this?
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