Getting Caught Up in Beautiful Moments

One of the things I love to do on Mondays when I’m off is collect the children from school.

I quite often drop them in, but don’t often get the chance to collect them and to hear from them, or their teachers or classroom assistants, how the day has gone.

I got caught up in a beautiful moment earlier this week when I was collecting Lucy from Torbank. I’m not always so punctual, but had arrived a couple of minutes early and, as the day was nice and sunny, I was waiting outside the door chatting with some other parents, when something very special happened.

As the mechanism of the door opened, one of Lucy’s lovely friends, called Indy, came through the door on a walking frame. I had never seen Indy walking before, as she has always been in her wheelchair when I have been in her company. She’s really good at propelling herself, but here she was coming through the door with her physio and her mum behind her. It was an epic moment.  She was concentrating really hard and doing such an incredible job and, as we all watched and cheered and clapped, she gave us all one of her cheeky, beautiful smiles, and it was as if the whole day got sprinkled with magic dust.

As a parent of a child with complex needs, we know how incredibly hard the staff, the classroom assistants and the physios and occupational therapists work with all our children, and seeing the incredible concentration and effort this young lady was putting into taking these steps was joyful to behold.

At the weekend, we took Lucy to an event in a nearby church where they were preparing for a special baptismal service where 11 people were going to be baptised. What a very special event to see 11 people taking their tentative first steps of faith in a public gathering and declare their desire and intention to be Jesus followers in their daily lives.

Earlier today, I was at an area deanery meeting where all the churches in our local area meet once every 2 or 3 months to encourage and pray for one another and share information that might be useful to each other. Our host, the rector of St. Columba’s, Knock, offered us coffee and cake, and we discussed new initiatives in some of our churches, compliance with regulations we all have to be aware of, and a forthcoming gathering for all our churches on 20th May, when we hope to pray for a new movement of God in our land and in the world, to bring encouragement and hope and blessing and new spiritual life to individuals and communities. There was a recognition that, as we gathered, we might have different personalities and different styles of worship in our churches, but we were about the same thing. We wanted people to have opportunities to encounter the risen Lord Jesus and to know His peace in their lives.

It’s incredibly special how simple things like coffee and cake and prayer enable people to come together to share wonderful and profound moments. We were able to pray for those who couldn’t make it, and pray for stuff coming up in one another’s churches, and be on our way in under an hour and a quarter!

One of the things many of us are conscious of is how busy we get. Life puts plenty of demands on people, whether it’s work or school, some have caring responsibilities, others, by virtue of being good at what they do, get asked to do more and more.

I’m a great fan of the App Lectio 365, which encourages us to pause for short periods up to 3 times a day and enjoy a short structured Biblical meditation and prayer. I usually only manage one of them, but I like having books and resources that I can pause with for a minute or two and ground me in God’s presence.

Very often it’s the simple things that offer us beautiful moments – a school pick up, where we were all captivated by the joy of a young woman starting to navigate the world on her walker. It might be gathering for a catch up with some colleagues or friends. It might be hearing about something encouraging or beautiful happening in the world or in our community, or slowing down sufficiently to see God’s hand in all of it.

Are there moments you can think of that brought joy and transformation to your day in recent times? Why don’t you share them with someone you know? Who knows, but it just might be the good news they need to hear today.

Look forward to speaking again soon.

Much love to everyone,

Jono.

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